sean

FRANKS CASKET

Opatow

(for Dennis O'Driscoll)

i

We travelled there by homely charabanc
Two hundred K from Lodz in freezing fog

Through swampy woods and shuttered towns
All Cs and Zs like Wehrmacht newsreel.

The country house-cum-hunting lodge,
Was neither now: a place old teachers went

To die and watch tv - the Petrochemie match,
Beamed from an alkali tip by the Baltic,

The ball a viridian dayglo blur.
So we conferred around them: Heaney's

Magnanimity and Mahon's revisions;
Medbh McGuckian done in Polish,

Carson the Metonymist and Longley's
Lovesongs down the microscope.

The ceasefire was declared that week.
Smiling but shamingly serious,

Our hosts could only give us
Vodka and the benefit of the doubt.

With fur coats flung over their nighties,
In candle-lit corridors, stamping their boots,

The beautiful women would sit until dawn
And copy out lectures by hand -

Exclamatory, girlish and laughing, as if
This was not servitude again

But the fleeting and side-splitting form
Enlightenment quite naturally took

When starved of reprographics.

ii

Meanwhile down at the foot of the garden,

Where birches came crowding the fencewire
As if to escape from a folktale,

A roofed-over terrace for ping-pong
Was somewhere to go during breaks

(In the shattering months of debriefing
By Oskar Homolka and Vladek Sheybal,

I dreamed in the afternoon sessions)
But nobody had any balls and besides

We were fainting with nothing to eat
But the elephant grass in Zybrowka

And having to hide in the cupboard
To dodge the translator who needed to do

The complete works of Reznikoff now
As if language might suddenly vanish

Like bread or a loyal Opposition.
I mean: I was worried then, Dennis,

That history might come and get us
(Vodka exacerbates liberal vanity),

And by the echoing door-slam of dusk,
By the army of sorrowing birches,

The telephone locked in the office,
The fact we'd arrived in mid-silence

Where no afterwards exists
But only the eternal in-between, and that

Of all the things we might have talked about
They'd chosen poetry, God help us.

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