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Michael Donaghy

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The Hunter's Purse

                       is the last unshattered 78
by ‘Patrolman Jack O’Ryan, violin’,
a Sligo fiddler in dry America.

A legend, he played Manhattan’s ceilidhs,
fell asleep drunk one snowy Christmas
on a Central Park bench and froze solid.
They shipped his corpse home, like his records.

This record’s record is its lunar surface.
I wouldn’t risk my stylus to this gouge,
or this crater left by a flick of ash -

When Ann Quin got hold of it back in Kilrush,
she took her fiddle to her shoulder
and cranked the new Horn of Plenty
Victrola over and over and over,
and scratched along until she had it right
or until her father shouted

‘We’ll have no more
Of that tune
In this house tonight.’

She slipped out back and strapped the contraption
to the parcel rack and rode her bike
to a far field by moonlight.

It skips. The penny I use for ballast slips.
O’Ryan’s fiddle pops, and hiccoughs
back to this, back to this, back to this:
a napping snowman with a fiddlecase;
a flask of bootleg under his belt;
three stars; a gramophone on a pushbike;
a cigarette’s glow from a far field;
over and over, three bars in common time.

 

This poem is published in Errata (OUP 1993)

Page(s) 38

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