Risen Moon

Well, a strange day, and the conclusion of a certain minor obsession. The granite globe in the picture came into my life by means of a weird serendipity. One day, when we lived in the old house in Stillorgan Grove, I walked out the gate and found this. I brought it into the garden and, over a decade later, wrote a poem about it, which was eventually published in my last collection, Fade Street. Here's the poem:

Eclipse

A weather-darkened ball of granite, wide
as a hooped embrace. Broken off
some ivied pillar. Some passers by had seen it –
drunks most likely – rolled it till the novelty
wore off. Outside our gates,

abandoned or delivered, it carried a world
of purpose. So I rolled it
over our gravel drive, around the house,
onto the patio in the back garden
where it rested, below the rockery –

something else entirely, more and more
familiarly strange. Its mottled greyness gave
a blurred corona, burning out the lawn
and garden wall, gathering waves of silence –
a moon, a fallen moon

making space in a back garden.

When we moved house in 1990 I neglected to bring the stone (though I'm not sure how we'd have moved it: perhaps the furniture movers might have obliged, or maybe not). Anyway, I came to regret my omission, and I wondered if the new owners would mind me asking for it. Eventually, a few weeks ago, when visiting the area (and my childhood past) with my son, I happened to meet the man himself, Ed, and he said he'd be happy to let me take it. However, the ball is solid granite, not easy to move. I came back a couple of weeks later with a cousin and after shifting it a little (out of the rockery where it had been embedded) with Ed's help and a couple of planks, we decided to leave it there till we had some means of transport.

The means arrived when Sam's brother Alan (who does forestry work) was up in Dublin with his Unimog, which has a large grabber capable of lifting a couple of tons of tree. As Ed said, the perfect kit for the job. So we managed to tip the stone into Ed's wheelbarrow and Ed insisted on wheeling it himself around to the front of the house and out to the gate. Thus it was lifted from almost the very spot where I initially found it some 30 years ago.

Strange to stand in that front garden, utterly changed and tidied (mum's opulent, overgrown roses long gone, along with the bumpy old lawn impaled with grandfather's plastic numerals for 'clock golf'). The old hedge, now with a large gap in it, might be the only remaining shrub. Not only that but the view across the road has altered, though it's still much the same overall: a ridge of tall old trees, especially the skyscraping chestnuts. I asked Ed if one of the chestnut trees was missing and he confirmed my suspicion. He had actually seen it topple in a recent storm (sideways luckily, or it would have wrecked his garden). It did block the road for a bit; again, luckily no cars were passing. It was here, standing at the front door (now replaced) of the old house, on the day we moved out, that I took a picture of the trees, which I put on the cover of my first collection, Airborne, a decade later.

Alan was able, not only to transport the stone a mile down the road to where I live, but lift it over the hedge and place it precisely in the garden, as if it were a chess piece, or an egg. So a memory (and a sometime muse) comes home to roost, after a fashion.