The Millfield Foundry Belfast

These are the makers' words embossed on
the bars of the cast-iron storm grating -- three paces
across the footpath from my front gate --
into whose unfathomable depths the gutter flows.

Windblown, fallen leaves are tossed on
this minor Styx like so many drunken bateaux;
paper tenders, crisp-packets, a sudden spate
of dead matches and cigarette-butts: everything races

Niagarously over the black lip
into the dark below until the barred
mouth is choked, and its name becomes obliterate.

Yet that iron Roman capital script
will be read long after I'm gone, obdurate
as the words on a gate to a crypt or a graveyard.
 
 
 
 
 

One Exchange Place

These are the premises of Sam Murray's workshop:
linseed oil, boxwood, turpentine, waxed thread,
gravers, gouges, pincers, pliers, chisels, planes,
rosewood, ivory, silver wire, blow-torch, fluxes,

not to mention the litter of items on a table top,
nor to attempt to enumerate their A to Z,
nor the way that everything is linked in labyrinthine chains
of major or minor crises or cruxes,

for making what has to be made is sometimes a game of roulette,
since a man can't be expected to be an automaton,
nor to be always looking for the perfect rhyme--

I pause, strike a match, and light up a cigarette,
as Sam picks up a flute he's worked on off and on
for weeks, and blows a note from it for the first time.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Tru-Fit Exhausts

I had to leave the car in there yesterday
because when I turned the ignition off
her engine would refuse to die competely
and a red light flickered in the dashboard

until she conked out, shuddering, with a strangled neigh.
Like a doctor diagnosing a cough
the mechanic listened very intently
before lifting her bonnet like the lid of a harpsichord

with his long oil-blackened piano-player's fingers
which began twisting off the thingamajig
thatís connected to the plumbing of the whatsit.

He peered at the heart of the problem.  Time lingered.
A blackbird began singing, balanced on a nearby twig,
as the pitch of the engine was tuned by Tru-fit.