i.m. Ciaran Carson

Those were the travelling times when
we toured like fireflies across the North

a set of pipes tuned to the whine
of a late-night Hoover in Portadown,

a few years later on down the road
a walk through the Tenderloin,

a mirror in a Paris bar, the lines ‘Il pleure… '
and you complained to the five poets

you led across Paris to toast Verlaine
with ‘only the finest Calva’

that no Irish poet had written such a line
with all our superior knowledge of rain.

Mary O’Malley’s most recent collection is The Shark Nursery (Carcanet), which is shortlisted for the Walcott Prize.