Derek Coyle – Just Off the Old N7

I guess you wanted to know

where I started from

when you asked me to share

photographs from my childhood.

I have none.

At least not here in Carlow.

I cried when you shared yours,

to a soundtrack

of Kate Bush, Hounds of Love

on freshly pressed vinyl.

You at about six or seven,

coming in on the phone

in a series of messages.

Your fair hair, a mousey blonde,

before you became

the mild ginger I know.

Sometime in the nineties.

You with your bowl haircut

I thought they’d banned
after the seventies.

A happy boy, that cheery smile,
in your Mickey Mouse belt,

your arms above your head, wide open,
the measure of those dumbbell piers

in that medieval church arcade,
a monk of sorts, the meditative type,

tonsured for sure. But that boy is gone,
like your recently lost Nanny,

the reason the attic is being cleared
up there in Castlepollard, this treasure trove found.

I’ll give you a portrait in words,
what I was then, me

dressing up in old cast-offs
from Grandad Willie, he

of the Allenwood side,
my mother’s people.

A charcoal-grey dress-jacket
and, perhaps, a daft zippy tie

borrowed from my father,
pink paisley, the type of tie

you might wear with an Hawaiian shirt,
if you can imagine that. When harmony

was all out of kilter
with the times, and zany

was in. Some class of Paddy Cap,
the type this granddad always wore.

What Scottish friends call a bunnet
and the Welsh a Dai cap.

And then there’s this one.
Me hiding out in the trees

with my sister, lithe
and lean, clambering

through this tangled copse
that bordered the road

leading up to our estate,
long lost now

to brick walls, mortar
and concrete.

Sure they grant privacy to the houses,
the type we enjoyed up in the branches,

looking out at the world
going by, spies,

like those on TV.
MI5 on the trail

of some deadly Russian killer
armed with poison and plans

to take down the West
in a nuclear haze.

And later,
Ben Higgins and me

in those battered World War I helmets
his folks picked up in a sale.

He wanted the Tommy helmet,
and, I have to admit,

I liked the style and shape
of the German helmet I was given

to wear. Something about
its abstract contour and design

had its appeal even then.
We are storming ‘Muck Hill’,

a heap of builder’s clay
and rubble in the still

unfinished section of ‘The Gables’.
Dublin was spilling out

into North Kildare even then.
But, how can I capture

in a picture what it was I felt
lying beside

that smooth-skinned, silky-haired
English lad I was friendly with?

That time we lay down
between the gorse bushes

up on Kill Hill.
I wanted to see him naked,

terrified of all that that meant,
and yet, some new thing pulsed inside,

some insatiable fire, a flame.
We never touched. Zilch.

I don’t know what he felt
as we talked and talked,

the endless chat we were capable of then.
All this lay before my blue eyes,

that photo I remember
of me with my bowl cut,

in chocolate brown dungarees
(the height of children’s fashion

in the seventies), my canary yellow jumper,
this photo I remember

from my parents’ albums.
I guess I won’t see it again

until I have to climb up
into their attic someday soon.

But here, in this poem,
I put my photo beside yours.

Two boys, wide-eyed innocents,
indubitably so,

with our bowl hair cuts
and no idea

of all that lies before us.

---

© Derek Coyle

Derek Coyle’s Reading John Ashbery in Costa Coffee Carlow (2019) was shortlisted for the Shine Strong 2020 award for best first collection. Sipping Martinis under Mount Leinster (2024) is published in a dual language edition in Tranas, Sweden.  His poems have appeared in The Irish Times, Irish Pages, The Stinging Fly, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Texas Literary Review, The Honest Ulsterman, Orbis, Skylight 47, Assaracus, The High Window and The Stony Thursday Book. He reviews books regularly, and he has written literary essays on the poetry of Seamus Heaney, John Montague, James Schuyler and Paula Meehan. He lectures in Carlow College/St Patrick’s, Ireland.