Jim

Who was this man
always swimming up the waterfall?

Remember the furore he got going
when a black graduate student was excluded
from the law school.  Meetings, investigations,
Ireland's top anti-apartheider roped in,
then the student turned out to lack
the qualifications needed to sharpen a pencil.

And Colm's bedsit, as small as you can get 
while still taking up all three dimensions,
where Jim and his girlfriend stayed overnight for months.

I still have his tape of bawdy ballads.

Erudite confetti:  A friend is a second self.
Which was perhaps why he had so many,
all with fingers well-burnt,
ending with the woman with paralysed doctorate,
heroin addict and pregnant by him.

Leader of losers, glutton, dreamer,
bubbling with the selves of muscle, gut and brain,
the sparklers are all used up,
the frogs are full of worms.

The hill is composed of Cambrian rocks,
massive quartzite, breccia, well-cleaned slate.
Due to faulting, grey limestones abut the shore.
Lying within an area of exceptionally low rainfall,
it is one of the most charming of residential quarters
of Dublin's business and professional men.

Soon after the baby was born, he pushed off,
falling at over fifty miles per hour,
an empty bottle of Paddy at the top.