From the north of France to Mayo’s a stretch,

but in the way that often one thing leads

to another I got there reading Proust –

or, if I’m honest, by failing again

to read him beyond his hero’s bedtime.

 

Buttoned up, fretful, a delicate child,

he had never dammed a stream with sods

or pulled up a ladder into the hay

where he had his lair and listened to rain

clattering down onto a hayshed roof.

 

Accumulating his endless pages

– an invalid and a scribbler, cooped up

in his cork-lined room –  it wasn’t the smell

of bread, baked in a pot in the embers,

that took Proust back to his earliest years

 

but a madeleine soaking in a cup

of weak tea. Free-falling into the past,

he never mentions creamery butter,

eggs with shells streaked in dirt, or the sizzle

and spit of sausages seasoned in smoke.

 

Lights out plunged him into creaks and shadows

and, on the nights he missed his mother’s kiss,

an agony of sleeplessness. Voices

climbed the stairwell. In a three room cottage

I awakened when the craic was mighty.