A Falling Out Poem by Michael Hartnett

for Pat Boran

That kind of summer's day when music comes
down from the hills and sings in small back-rooms
and half-sets from a century before
batter their complex hobnails on the floor
and long laments in overcoats and caps
draw tears, reluctant from the porter-taps —
that was the kind of day it was, that day
when I forsook the world of earn and pay.
There, on the cobbles of the market square,
where toothless penny ballads rasped the air,
there among spanners, scollops, hones, and pikes,
limp Greyhound cabbage, mending-kits for bikes,
velvet calves in creels, women's overalls,
she shook my hand beside the market stalls.
And there before the coulter of a plough,
aware of all the gifts she could endow,
aware, as women are, of all her powers,
as startling as a bunch of winter flowers,
she tricked from me my childish, sacred vow.

I got to know her lovers one by one:
some saw her in an eclipse of the sun,
some saw her practise magic with strange herbs
and made her opaque alchemies of verbs —
some, for her sake, thought blood her favourite wine,
and some thought spirits helped them to divine
her arcane instincts and, as holy fools,
would chant her words not known to any schools.
Some thought that secret nurture made her grow
and more believed she thrived in public show;
some scattered syntax like the blackthorn snow
in flashy spangles on the mud below
and some, like me, immersed themselves in laws,
for what good are the sparks without the straws?
But none of these sufficed. All through the land
I see the poets in their mad distress —
all favoured rivals? No, but victims, yes.
A creature driven by a savage gland,
she takes, and then dismisses, out of hand,
the men and women that she most does bless.
She does not rest, she does not detumesce.

I leave her by a river on a bed,
a silken landscape underneath her head,
and spread her in her finest courting gown
on a spectacular eiderdown
with painted eyes and rings to catch the light
by the oblivious water overnight.
Only the poets can make her come to life,
the stricken catalyst, who call her wife —
at dawn I give her bed a gentle shove
and amputate the antennae of love
and watch the river carry her away
into the silence of a senseless bay
where light ignores the facets of her rings
and where names are not the names of things.