Intruder on Station Island
(supposed to be spoken by Seamus Heaney) I was hoping the next ghost to shake hands would equal in fame my previous advisers. Yeats? Swift? No, they were Protestants.
Imagine my chagrin feeling leather on bone, a boot up my arse from a former rugby player, shade of a Catholic policeman I had known.
'Hello, Seamus, oul son, I was reading your book in the shop. Still whingin! Your father's false returns and your imitations get hardly a look in.
And weemin! Ye must have had many a frolic with hot wee things in Harvard and the West Coast. But never a mention, or if there is it's symbolic.'
I explained about my aunt's old leather trowel, its handle an egret's head, a furled sail, the rounded hanging lip an Irish vowel; but he interrupted and had the impudence to advise me: 'Relax oul hand. Enjoy your luck; but give us a rest from the weather and farm implements.'
From a cattle-dealing line that would stretch from the Boyne to Lough Neagh, crookedly, a prefect of St Columbs, I knew how to knee a nuisance in the groin; but signed pamphlets are more effective than dunts. I keep them about me. This one argued fiercely that Faber should pay its Irish poets in punts.
But how to escape without giving offence was my pain! To aid me the air stirred my blow-dried hair, as a helicopter whose pilot was Craig Raine descended. The nonentity melted in whipped air.
James Simmons
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