On The Reek

To climb Croagh Patrick (the Pagan Cruachán Aigle
where Crom Dúbh hung out) was not my idea.
My cousin wanted to try it, bring a camera,
keeping in mind Koudelka's black and white
three sweaty men in dark suits kneeling, bent
over their sticks in the 1970s, backdropped
a century or two, the grey and white
misted-over islands in Clew Bay
pooling like a robe.

**

So we drove through Saturday and arrived
at the evening car park: artic lorries, shops
for fast food, ice cream, the great white elephantantry
of shiny statues, rosaries, scapulars, all
the luggage you'd ever need for what rose up
beyond: deeply blue-green vertical slopes
decapitated by cloud, the most ominous
path I ever dreamed of setting foot on,
and there already there, above the burger stand,
the variously coloured trickle is in place
people marking a zigzag route, a bright
sprinkle of hundreds and thousands.

**

Meant to be there by 7 a.m. Made it by 9.
Apocalypse weather. An army helicopter swirls
overhead, towards the party-coloured trail
that has thickened since yesterday, its two streams,
upwards and downwards, looking from here
like a convergence, aftermath of survivors
fleeing from or to.

**

A selection of ashplants looks so beautiful,
lined like bars against a dry stone wall.
Instead I buy a litre bottle of water,
then follow the flow, past the man with the megaphone
holding up a picture of Padre Pio,
the first of a gauntlet of leaflets, placards, stalls
of trinketsand (less welcome) the holy hustlers
of burnished Truths, Pro-Lifers, Born Agains?
washed out by a stream's low chuckling
under bramble: a lift.

**

The starting point: white Adze-Head on a plinth
in Popish robes, holding a shamrock: below him,
eddying around his feet a stream of walkers
circling clockwise.

**

First or last timers, and ones like us,
almost certainly once in a lifetimers,
each must carry something, a belief,
a camera, grievance or grief, a curiosity
or some (like me) are unsure exactly why
we are here, or anywhere:

**

Among the backpacked and weather-proofed, here comes
a lanky man in a white linen suit and hat,
quite clean apart from his shoes and trouser cuffs,
working his ashplant, striding up ahead,
and here is one of the barefoot, rolled-up jeans,
white feet, black-soled, mud squelching through toes.
How does that feel? Good. Another I saw,
more slowly working his way down, off the track,
over soothing bracken and grass. A woman passes
singing quietly, another couple are saying
the rosary, a teenager talking to herself,
no, it's her phone. Now the ground is rocky
and I feel it in my Achilles tendons: scree,
a lovely word, like shale, delicious crunch
of heels on quartzite gravel, and the gold seam
farther inside, the one the Mayo council
declared 'fine where it was'.

**

Are you keeping faith with Mohammed or the mountain?

**

Steepening more and more, till it's an effort
to raise the head higher than rising ground,
the Order of Malta in high-vis yellow jackets
at their dome tent, watching us pass.

**

Near the first stall (nothing but bottled water)
off to the left the mountain dips and rolls
maybe fifty feet to a dark blue tarn
in a hammock of grass: encircled by stones, words:
INDIA BILBAO, RUSSIA... a nesting place
for mapless geography, lines melted away:
countries, cities, continents replanted and laid
lovingly as wreathes.

**

Steepening again, the air is dense
with mountain-breath. I come to the first station,
a cairn broad as a hay stack, and again
that eddy of people circling clockwise. I start
to step in line, then don't. That rote rotation
summons Van Gogh's tight grey circle of men
in their prison exercise yard.

**

Nothing but wet scree now, going up and up,
and the others coming down, half toppling
onto us. Here's what the sticks are for,
to be leaned on, dug like oars into the stones
as we stumble up or down, scrabbling, Sisyphean
movement of rubble on conveyor belts,
and then and then

**

we are becoming there, becoming solid
as the blocky mirage of huts, their canvas roofs
weighed down by ballast-rocks: dealing out Mars Bars,
Club Orange, crisps... around them muddy stones
laced by a plastic rubble of empty bottles,
a hoarse Ave Maria scratching on mist,
people standing, walking in circles, kneeling,
bent over their sticks (as in Koudelka),
a lank-haired old man prostate, doing the stations,
hanging inside the grave-rails of the bed,
gorgeous traveler girls with great hooped earrings
and birds of Paradise latex, children, dogs,
people milling before the cloud-pale chapel,
the priest in his glassed-in pulpit intoning mass
over a tannoy, a little apart, a lad
with his arm draped on a smiling girl, on a rock
(a seat in a park, a bus, a snug, a bed)
no view today, patrolling the blind limits
as if to test how narrow Heaven is,
till singly or in groups, we shuffle off
like precipitation and let Grandmother Gravity
take our hands.