Tree Diving

The Dirty River was our starkly unimaginative name for the stream that guttered between high banks across from where I grew up, in Stillorgan Grove, south Dublin. It used to smell of sewage occasionally, but probably wasn't particularly foul. Little fish could be seen flicking below the surface. It was overshadowed by tall old ivy-draped trees, including some gigantic chestnuts opposite our house.

I revisited the place this afternoon, thinking I might take a photograph. It's less than a mile from where we moved in 1990, up the road. I had to collect the wean from school so I hadn't much time. I parked outside the house I used to live in and when I stepped out found myself face to face with one of the owners, whom I'd never met. He was working in the front garden, sawing a piece of wood. We exchanged hellos and when I told him I'd lived there he invited me into the garden. Eventually I had to rush to get to the school in time. Then it occurred to me to drop back again on the way home, to bring my child into my old hood, briefly.

So I brought him to that river, which was my adventure playground when I was his age. I wanted to step across to take a photo of a rope-swing someone had installed, a hurly-stick dangling at the end of a long blue nylon rope. I managed not to fall in and he insisted on following me across, onto the steep muddy bank. He seemed to enjoy the place and kept wanting to venture further into the undergrowth, having found a path along the edge. No smells of sewage but people had dumped crap in certain places, desultory signs of vandalism. It could have been one of those withering, soured experiences but somehow it wasn't. The river looked much the same as I remembered. It hadn't shrunk. If anything I felt slightly enlarged and enhanced, if not, as Frost put it 'made whole beyond confusion.' And he really did seem to enjoy this little dip into my past, as in the picture above. I've written a poem about this place, particularly a tree I used to climb on the bank. It was published in my first collection, Airborne, and the cover photo is one I took of the ancient chestnuts nearby. Here's the poem:

Tree-Diving

We wanted to take off like sparrows
or the superheroes we aped,
careening about on our tricycles,
bathtowels pinned to our shoulders.

But those games left me wanting.
On a road clouded with trees
the only way to get leverage
on the real thing, was by climbing.

I could have attempted those massive,
other-worldly horse chestnuts
but a fir tree half as tall took me
into its many-runged heart;

screened in, tented, at home
in a tight-spun dream-nest, resin
gumming my fingers, a stain
archival and aromatic,

I'd shout sometimes to see
boys on the road below
stop in bewilderment and stare
through me, as if I was air.

Near the top you could hear it creak,
sensitive to the least
whiffle of wind, a masthead
fully rigged and at sea,

taking me out on its tide
above front gardens and roofpeaks,
the sleepy curl of the road,
my whole nodding neighbourhood

set back like a stage prop
that I had pushed away
till I took my absolute fill
of the world, and came to a pinnacle.

Primed for diving, I'd drop
face-first through the splayed
ends of the springing branches,
an Icarus learning the fringed

limits of his aloofness,
whose flight was a fully-fledged
catching and letting go,
falling upwards to earth.