RETURN OF THE EARL

For Denyse Woods

I saw it happening in Bantry. Sometime during the July night

An atmospheric trigger went and Earth and everything caught

Out on it instantaneously froze to an immeasurable cold.

All pipes congealed. All signals died. All instruments ceased.

All ways became immediately impassable. No missile could launch,

No drone take off. All orders were suddenly meaningless.

All networks of power dissolved. Caoinkeen, Knockboy

And all the Shehy range were gleaming crystal peaks

Again, kaleidoscopes of splintered moon, candle-luminous

In misty drifts beneath the planet light – planets which like

Everything had lost their name, their post, their role in the plot,

Yet continued namelessly and plotlessly to revolve.

Bantry Bay was Bantry Berg with frozen waves and foam.

Frozen melancholic swans of glass – Oh Tchaikovskian apocalypse!

The swimming pool was an eerie opaque cube, a chlorinated rink; St Fin Barres’ fractured spike an icy dagger in the gale;

The bins in rows in the square a fleeing tribe that turned to salt.

The only colour to look back upon was white. White on

White on snowblind white. The market house of white.

The whitened Millwheel at the library of white. Four Star Hotel White. The white lounge,

The playground white, the trawlers white, the Big White House.

Then it blizzarded a glacier down, it snowed a flood of snow.

Inch by inch, then foot by foot, the figures of St Brendan, Wolfe

Tone and The Spirit of Love were buried by the fall and disappeared.

It hailed – stones the size of satellites, stones the size of Neptune’s

Little moons, for days, for weeks, for months, although there were

No clocks, there were no days, there were no months.

Bantry preserved – until the next epochal gyre - Hyberborean Pompeii.

But Humankind is hard as guilt or history to kill. One man overcame;

A diving instructor with an oxygen store and a butane supply,

Donning wool and furs over deep-sea diving gear, he cooked his nearest

Deep-freeze neighbours first, then his cats, and then his wife;

Used a gas-torch of his own design to tunnel a well-in-reverse,

Climbing and hacking and hauling and puffing until finally he burst

The seal, sucked the flowing tap of air and, propelled by a perpetual desire,

Struck out across the permafrost to uncover who still moves and talks

And hunts in County Cork, who’s in charge now, what instructions are.