Irish Pages LTD

ELEGIESAuthor(s): Gary AllenSource: Irish Pages, Vol. 5, No. 1, Language and Languages (2008), pp. 47-50Published by: Irish Pages LTDStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20788512 .

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ELEGIES

Gary Allen

MARY IN THE ROUND

Them were the days, the water frozen in the pump the moon

heavy as lead, cold in the ice-fogged window

sit closer, I don't see so well, one eye all but dead

traces of snow under the hedgerows, on the bare stone

and bog grass higher up, we brought in wood and sticks

looked to the chookies, milked the cow, before a breakfast

of stale bread and last night's tea, barefoot to school, to the mills, the long walk back down mud lanes already

half-dark, a father cutting scrap iron in the yard, orange

sparks lepping in the air ? sit closer to the fire, things become vague, faces come and go, mixed up with time,

after the first death there is no other, I watched them all

getting carried out, and then you are old: the farmer

wanted the place down but I wouldn't go, not for love

of these old damp walls, holed roof, no plumbing

?

so he puts rats in through the back door, scuttling everywhere,

they bit my legs and hands, but I'm still here, all he needed

to buy was a coffin ? everything becomes confused, they want

me to go to a care home now, but it's not for me, all those fussy

people washing at you: once, I sneaked out at night, in the winter

time, the house quiet, everyone sleeping like the dead ? why,

I don't know, but I went up to the bit of pine forest at the

Vanishing Lough, and sat shivering as I looked at the sliver

of bright moon on the water, one

gleaming star, the air

so sharp it would cut the lungs from your body, and the world

seemed so big

to a child back then ? I don't know why I remember this, why it's in my head at all, but there you are.

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IRISH PAGES

DOWN TO THE RIVER

In this field cows stand

passive ?

hide-covered furniture:

think of iron into flesh

saw-teeth slicing bone

beetled skin

pounded hoof and horn ?

nothing cannot be changed.

White mist covers the water, stars sliding in the sky

are already dead,

We are alone, my father said, in all the universe.

The dust of hoarfrost

making the tangled washing wires sing

grass break beneath our feet

the cows fade away from us

like ghosts

like stiffened shapes of work shirts

hanging from the lines:

I held my father's hand when he died

although I wasn't there

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ELEGIES

the fishing-rods we never owned

the fish we never caught

the universe we never sailed through ?

I think it's time, he said, to shine.

AD INFINITUM

He is below ground

asleep in a cardboard suitcase

tied down with knotted string.

I saw him go under

the meaningless words we scatter

to no one, in the name of nothing.

It will take many months

to pay out the funeral director

many years to settle ?

earth, bones, confusion

as though something has come and gone:

it is morning almost before anything will happen

so still, so still

the early sun a rim of silver reflection

rising and illuminating

the gor se, burns, boggy cover

on these low mountain tops

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IRISH PAGES

no footprints father

another place we will never walk

nothing to discuss

only the shadow of a plane

skimming across bare rock ?

a crooked sideways cross.

Gary Allen was born in Ballymena, Co Antrim in 1959. He worked and travelled widely in

continental Europe, settling for a

period in Holland. He is the author of four collections of poetry,

Languages (Flambard, 2002), Exile (Black Mountain Press, 2004), North of Nowhere

(Lagan Press, 2006) and The Bone House (Lagan Press, 2008). He continues to live in

Ballymena, where he writes full-time.

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