Peter McDonald

Three rivers

for Louisa

Isis

When you were born, the night sky broke to let fall
its rainwater for hours, and then for days,
then for a week at last, a week of rain,
so that I drove you home over a causeway
with fields submerged on either side of us
where the river spilled across and kept spilling,
the same river that twenty years before
I walked beside on a late October morning,
homesick, crash-landed, watching the slick water
and hearing over and over the words, How like,
How like, How like an angel came I down,
straining my eyes in case they broke with tears;
the river that seemed once to swell in sunlight
when it ran like an illuminated margin
beside me later, and the step-by-step
inevitable love, which started here
and brought us here, held safe and moving fast
on a road over acres of floodwater,
sending us home through rain and daylight fall.

Lagan

Down, step by step, and along the bumpy path
he used to follow here, day in, day out,
I took by the arm at last, slow and unsteady
in the blank sunlight of the seventieth spring
since he had lived here in a river cottage
now gone for ever, like that spring itself,
your grandfather, who leaned on me, and looked
through me towards the place at another time -
his run and walk and run all the way to town
along the river, or the soldiers training
across that field, who had to run until
their feet bled; or some other time entirely,
when it is you who take me by the arm
to bring me slowly past Shaw's Bridge, and past
Minnowburn, to the spot where the cottage was,
an old man who moves gently and with pain
talking to you in silences and sounds:
as afternoon lets in the sound of the river,
you help him down the worn and bumpy towpath.

Jordan

We saw the big grey fish deep in the river
as shadows and reflections from above
where we sat on the bankside steps at last,
letting the water slip into our hands
and watching colours come to near the surface
of creatures so small they were hardly fish
but green and gold half-lights, dissolved there
glittering at angles in the straight-down sun
- How bright, How bright - that searched the shallow bed
until the sky was shining underneath us;
the quickened surface and deep calm below
were imaged in each other, we in them,
two bodies made of frail and heavy earth,
one bending up to scoop the busy water
into a bottle held firm in the light -
your mother, who moves with you, step by step,
across the sky from one bank to the other
on a well-worn, inevitable path
that goes waist-high and waist-deep in the river.

from The House of Clay (Carcanet, forthcoming 2007)