Lewd as linen,
the women from the laundry

linked arms on the West Bridge.
Mothers smoothed the paths of daughters.

The river blushed,
ran red before the usual sky.

The town’s first taxis
were big private cars

you called at the door to book,
Kelly’s of Eden Street,

Joe Flanagan at the West Bridge.
It was so much a mile.

We’re on our way to the hospital,
visiting friends.  In the back

all you can hear is my mother
talking away, Peter Kelly going

yes Ma’am, yes Ma’am.

The carol singers
have made it the length

of Richardsons’ window,
bare but for a tea set or two,

odd bits of Belleek.
On the Courthouse steps,

the lintels of the bank,
the year’s first snow’s

begun to lie.  They’re all there,
the Morrises, the Fitzpatricks,

Tommy Kelly and the wife,
the youngest of the Smiths

of Eden Street.
They huddle in the porch

of the Royal Hotel.
At Carl Kerrigan’s,

sharing an umbrella’s
no match for the entry,

they launch into
Once in Royal David’s City,

a favourite.  Overhead
the coloured lights

catch the swirling,
thickening snow.

They stop for tea
at The Melvin,

where they’re expected.
Radio Rentals,

the whole shop’s showing
the half times, the racing.

They stand in, take shelter
at the Munster and Leinster,

make a start on
Away in a manger,

looking a picture.
Felix Hackett’s is packed,

long queues for cardigans.
On the Church Brae

they retune for
In the Bleak Midwinter,

a near whisper.
They’re breaking up.

The pipes at the back of the chapel
are hot to the touch,

confessions dragging on
up the men’s aisle

as they stand chatting,
drying out.

They make a run for it
straight across Hall’s Lane.

The bikes outside McNulty’s
all lean the one way.

Taken in at night,
they nose the glass,

beckon, in Japanese,
to boys beyond the town

few know by name
who before the summer’s out

will go head to head
with the County’s roads,

a simple arithmetic
it can be fatal to get wrong.

Grasses obscure the road signs
at the Four Corners,

out by the Five Points.

Tell me this.
Do girls round ‘Skea,

parts of Roslea,
the night of a dance,

in lieu of lipstick,
still press to their mouths

the crimson masthead
of The Sacred Heart Messenger,

hoping some of it will rub off,
before heading out –

six to a car
it’s a jungle out there –

on missions of their own,
God knows where it will end.

SPAIN I

One of the Mackles
came back from Spain

with a bracelet of bullets
and a whole new lingo.

He had the whole town at it.
Venceremos! Madre mia! Viva Franco!

II

Who that was there could forget
the morning quiet Father Daly

announced, from the altar,
he was off to Spain

to serve God and Franco?
They had a night for him.

They saw his pale hands darken
under a southern sun.

He took a hit at Zaragoza
ricocheted round the chapel

at May devotions.
He was never the same.

Invalided home,
he lay for years

in the priests’ house,
a ghost at a window,

coming to the door
with medals, masscards,

in his tiny tanned hands

That side of High Street
gets the sun early

and the threadbare awning’s
no help to the shop girl

reaching blind into
Mercers’ window

past brooches, bracelets,
Belleek, to reach,

right at the back,
in its velveteen pouch,

the new slimline Parker,
its chevronned top

a promise of fluency, ease
has beckoned all summer

to scholarship boys
will be leaving soon

for lodgings, digs,
whose addresses

they rehearse, repeat,
on the fly-leaves of

textbooks, primers.
The ink dries to an uncertain blue

on the tall leafless avenues,
Wellesley, Fitzroy, Dunluce.

The town had little to add
to the evening editions.

Hearsay makes poor copy
and anyway flooding

on the Coa* Road’s seasonal,
regular as Christmas,

is news to no one that matters.
There’s a story though breaking

in Larry Hall’s shop,
among the Heralds and Reporters,

Darling Street will struggle
to contain and by nightfall

be the whole talk,
trumping even that low sun’s

caught the recessed porch
of the chapel, an archangel,

no less, rampant,
casually spearing a dragon,

the church’s patron –
the angel that is,

not the dragon –
a pair of painters,

up from Dublin
in their painters’ smocks,

worked on all winter,
sheet after sheet

of gold leaf,
well into the evening,

often by torchlight,
standing well back,

just to get the thing finished.

* pronounced Co

A crowd would gather
where the tramp-painter

set to work
stepping out a mural

for Richardsons’ gable,
retouching Irvine the butcher’s

shop front idyll,
cattle in a meadow,

he’d touch up yearly,
redoing rushes,

the brushwork on clouds
and as suddenly as he’d come

he was gone,
the stool folded,

the ladder shouldered,
two huge lilies,

his calling card,
leaning unseasonably

out onto East Bridge Street
children cupped their hands

to catch the drops from.

With double summer time
north of the border,

one of Maurice Cassidy’s buses,
or so his pale posters advised,

could have you in Bundoran an hour
before you’d even left the house.

The unlooked-for hour we spent
adjusting to an ocean, an horizon,

willing the waves whiter,
the sand finer, all the while

gawkily undressing
over by some rocks.

Be careful, be careful,
my mother’s words

were wasted on the wind
while we ran ourselves ragged,

poor, pallid Picassos,
on the harder sand.

Mr. Lemass and Princess Grace
held their smiles on the front pages.

My father fought down the paper.
We ran into neighbours,

saw another side to them.
The amusements were bumper to bumper.

Over tea, bread and butter
in the West End Café,

one eye out for the bus,
sand getting everywhere,

as my father went on with the paper,
my mother asked after

the wife of the owner,
a woman she’d worked with,

knew from home
who’d never, she told us,

standing, pouring out tea,
settled, gotten used to the sea,

the racket it made at night.
Hedgerows, lane ends, big red barns.

She missed the simple things.
If she had it to do again,

she said, turning for the stairs,
she’d stay at home

and never venture further
than you could hurl a stick.

And don’t even think of going ashore,
feeling your way among stones.

Thorn and briar’ll lash your face.
You’ll trip over trees no one heard fall

though it was broad day
and the lough looked on.

That heap of bricks was a gable,
the broken tiles a floor

brushed clean with a swan’s wing.
Fishermen still working

recall a curl of smoke,
a single cow raising its head.

The fickleness of passing trade.
The last family left here

in a borrowed row boat
loaded with grievance,

a few sticks of furniture,
a milking stool the youngest

wouldn’t part with
stowed under her seat,

leaving behind them
not a trace, except it be

the blowsy dog rose
unfurls without fail

like a flag, blush-pale
every summer round the door.

Molloy the signwriter’s
funeral’s taken the long way round.

Shop fronts line the route,
stooped alphabets –

the care he took –
gothic, roman, sans serif

and, everywhere you look,
the butcher’s, the baker’s,

his signature gold leaf.

You had an eye for cutlery.
All week the good set lay

on its side in the well of the table.
We made do with oddments,

one offs, whatever came to hand.
Forks like father and son,

silver cheek by jowl with bone
and, unheralded mornings,

coming down to grapefruit,
the palest of yellow moons,

the tapering curve of the knife
the furrowed bowl of the spoon.

The war was a giggle.
Air raid warnings,

ration books
and smuggling

Haw Haw upstairs
in the laundry, a frisson

of treason, Germany
calling, Germany calling

through heavy linen sheets.
It was no laughing matter,

though, the night he enquired,
out of the blue, whether

the Town Hall clock
was still running five minutes late

and how the Town Hall was looking
in its new coat of paint.

Have a good long look.
It mightn’t get another.

Nightly now Messerschmitts
banked over Cuilcagh,

strafing Main Street
with the hardest rain.

Jackboots goose-stepped
The Broadmeadow,

Swastikas swathed the Fort Hill.
It took the longer evenings

to put paid to your phoney war,
send you back to your laundry,

your girlfriends,
the getting ready,

the nightly adventure
of the blacked out streets.

Hosiery’s another word
kept the town on its toes,

tall girls in work
from their teens

to their pencilled prime.
I envied their sheer cheek,

the seamless chat.
I hung around the gate,

inspecting hem lines,
felt the spring in their step

at quitting time.

I was nine that febrile summer
but still took some convincing

the cylinders outside Head Street clinic
weren’t primed and pointing at Cuba

or that young Donnelly, who’d scaled the wall
of the Crumlin Road and was clearly now

our only hope, wouldn’t be caught
in the beam of light crossing,

recrossing the kitchen ceiling –
the wireless dial’s reflection,

a searchlight on now night and day –
as he made his halting way westwards,

safe house by safe house,
every back door on the snib.

The ear it is first registers
the loss, their leaving.

The town’s an accent less.
The East Bridge eddies a lament,

the Brothers’ Yard’s bereft.
They are missed from the Broadmeadow.

With a swish of soutane
a whole nomenclature thins

and is gone. A century
of standing at blackboards,

Algeo thin as El Greco,
Falconer’s Alsatians

scaling the school wall,
Damian, whist nights,

cradling a Powers,
Aloysius with his breviary,

a visored Hilary
running urgent with his bees.

Sundays I had a single 
broken tile to thank –

white fleur de lys
on a sky-blue background,

pure Pugin –
for sparing my blushes,

keeping me right,
as I scanned, eyes down,

half the town for my place
a third way down 

the men’s side aisle.

Exam weather
and the day girls

up the Fort Hill
are shielding their eyes

from irregular verbs,
Count Metternich,

the lesser odes of Keats.
They’re fully stretched

and not sleeping.
It could still go either way

at the Congress of Vienna.

Term time,
on chair backs

in the kitchen,
pressed, ironed,

my sisters’ uniforms,
two of everything,

blazers, blouses,
pleated skirts,

and to complete the look,
on a hook in the hall,

twin tasseled berets
were swapped, come May,

for panamas
orbited the town

till tea time,
the first shops shutting

and everywhere,
up The Brook,

down Wellington,
out by The Aluminiums,

it’s time to go in.