Bogland Morning

The bog keeps everything. A shoe. A psalter. Butter in a firkin, sweet as the day it went down.

It keeps the weather too — a wet July from before the famine pressed flat between the layers like a flower in a book.

My grandfather cut turf here with a slean worn thin at the shoulder, and I have his hands, and none of his knowledge.

The whole brown patient country holds its breath beneath me. I walk out over the centuries in borrowed boots

and the ground gives just slightly, everywhere, the way a thing does that is still deciding about you.