AN IRISH GEORGIC

1 3 R A N I R I S H G E O R G I C E A V A N B O L A N D They flooded the Li√ey valley years ago to make a dam, water pouring into fields, into sloped inclines, into a floor of wildflowers before I was born. During the years of greed, of taking and dissembling, that was the story that came back, the one I remembered: Listen, who reads the classics? And who cares whether a georgic works or what Virgil said, or whether its meaning now remains good? Join in my work and to my numbers bring your needful succor for your gifts I sing. Listen, if you had seen what happened, heard the details, knew what lay ahead of us, you would. . If there is an ethic to a georgic let it be the down to earth and literal sifting, critical and absolute devotion to a way of life. Let dirt roads rise to the horizon on winter evenings in the Wicklow Gap. Let the redbreasted merganser ford the same waters the Vikings used to raid monasteries. 1 4 Y And now imagine a valley: a tea-time clock, a silhouette of sycamores a blue saucer beside its cup. . When everything failed When ghost estates wandered the Irish countryside, their windows looking blindly out at rain I thought of this again. Someone said sluice. Someone said dam. Someone said progress and the blue saucer drowned. . Surely the hope is a story can stay open with its anthem of small details singing, its cup still on the dresser and all of it unfinished in this form that needs little enough to become a hymn to the durable and daily implement, the stored possibility of another day. And nothing more. ...