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Peter Carpenter

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Concealed Entrance

Steady progress north from the city.
Larchfield, Kirkmoyle are names you clarify,
these, your old childhood haunts,
where they still dig for bog oak.

Highlights from Verdi and Puccini
till the front seats with Maria Callas;
we run past the castle at Dunluce
on from Portrush in a constant mizzle

and there's a pause, after whitewashed
outhouses, holiday homes in Bushmills,
concealed entrances to lounge bars,
a marking of time in the wipers

or our talk or the end of the human
settlements along the coast, that we use
to study the breakers, the drag,
vegetation mottled and uprooted

even as we eye the waves,
contemplate what it is to live
on such an island with, all the time,
this power, waiting at our leisure,

marking out its territory in foam,
tearing back into itself before
occupying the sand, again drawn
into it, again giving us pause.

 

Page(s) 42

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