THE AGE OF STEAM
Last night in the box where you name the person
to inform in the event of death I wrote ‘Mother’ –
my mother who lives on most nights in my dreams
where I’m young again, alone, home for holidays
or about to fly to Canada – running this time
for the plane (the airport’s in the farm next to ours)
while carrying a shorn Xmas tree and worried
will I be allowed to board, when I wake…then drift
to a house I’ve lived in years it seems, spacious,
but with a leaking roof and timber walls so frail
the rickety bedroom’s on the point of caving in.
It isn’t Surrey Road, and then it is but has
an added room, which somehow all that decade
– the children growing up – I never knew was there,
an old-style parlour with sideboard, knick-knacks,
gramophone and cuckoo clock, and a Sacred Heart
offering its coal of glowing flesh, which coils and swells,
yet is solid in the Virgin’s hands, its geometry
elusive, or rather as I wake in the full coherence
of the dream, at the first thought the image slips
beyond perception – as once in Victoria Station
heading for home, for Lisgoold, and about to find
the train to take me there, I stood in bliss under
the departure boards, the mechanical wooden ones,
when with the noise of skittles they flipped to Sanskrit.
But now I’m back in Hickey’s passage (the next-door farm)
in a damp, strip-lit tunnel from which I climb into
the yard, a stop on the old Cork-to-Youghal line,
where it’s the Age of Steam with limestone walls,
an Avery scales, wrought-iron gates and grilles.
The sky is vast with pinnacled slowly tumbling
cloud palaces, marble-white and interspaced by
lapis blue – an active spring day of wind with the view
across the Weald, the orchards dense with butterflies,
finches, cuckoos – and I am loath to turn for home,
our dark boreen, the leafless privet, vacant dwelling,
when I see it’s light outside the curtain, a dawn
of dampened sun, pigeons, trucks on Linden Grove,
the trickle of the water feature, and in my chest
the hissing thumping piston – 14 years on – of grief.