national poetry month day 15

[extemporally]

The Group Scheme

You carry these things. I knew the cottage
in question was the home of a lad drowned
in the Moy, in the sixties, and that his
mother had not eaten fish since that day;
they never found a body, the divers, and
I knew she lived alone, though I couldn't
think of her name. But you carry these things.
'I'm two days without water,' Mrs Burke
told me. Burke, that's it. I apologized.
I said pipes elsewhere were giving hassle
and that I'd have a look, tide her over
for the weekend, whatever the problem.
She was firm but chatty, and intrigued
that Callow Lake fed this village and more.
'A farty enough source, for the whole district
to be washing and drinking and the rest,
cattle and cars and windows and what have you.'
'And is it filtered?' she wanted to know.
'There'll be a brand new system going in.'
Her quick reply was cool: 'Ours is not
modern so. Is it even good to drink?'
'It's grand for tea,' I said, invoking tea
as blesser of our nerves, and to eclipse
with wryness the two days she'd been without.
But then I spoke of the purifying sand
and stone system that we had at the point
of extraction for years, sliding here
to terms that might downplay the blackness,
the volume of the lake. And now the hole
I'd dug at her door was like my own mind's eye.
It needed work. I strove for greater tact
and less discomfort welling in my brain.
She watched me strike the pipes. I thought the son
was beneath us then, sinking or waiting,
disturbed and now dislodged. 'Do I know your
people?' she asked. 'Aren't you Doherty?'
'I am,' I said, fiercer then with the hammer.
'Your father did the search and recovery
for years,' she said. 'He did,' I said. 'God bless
him,' she said. And I couldn't get over
her warmth, because the gut is like a house
where strange half-enmities we carry thrive.

- Martin Dyar