Bodhrán and Ghost 

Bodhrán and Ghost
Found you by the brook, mate. Watched you druid through the trees. I’ve been here all summer: most evenings, in lambent dusk. I’d carry on, but an academic’s year ends when the summer does, begins again with Michaelmas term: spires and scarves, train tickets stamped September; students dressed in tweed coats one day, trackie tops the next.
There’s a drummer on the bridge, bodhrán lodged between his body and his left arm. Dull thunder rolls from his knuckles, his fingernails. Makes me want to give up my home, work, studies, commitments. The sound of it throws reason and science asunder. I can’t say why: the promise of the river, the drum-flat sea, adventure.
I don’t know if you’re a ghost, mate, but it’s inconceivable to me that you’re real. I can’t just tap you on the shoulder, ask if you’ll accept a pint of whatever: dry stout with a creamy skull. I want to know if you’re supernatural, preternatural, if the glass would slip through your fingers.
I’d ease you in with questions about the bodhrán. What is it made of exactly? Goatskin? Sheepskin? Is the frame of wood or willow-branch? What about its origins? Adapted from a vessel used for dying wool? A farmers’ instrument for winnowing? A tambourine that doesn’t jingle but rumbles? Is it an outdoor instrument? A war drum across the foggy glen?
The drummer cups his palm to the river, wets the skin of the instrument with his right hand, dampens the sound of it with his left.
Were you here in winter, mate? Did you watch me wellie across the frosted brook, preoccupied with prospects of a New Year that came to naught? Even the woods grew sick of me eventually. Wind shook the reeds, groaned, Soz, mate, pack your Fair Isle and fingerless gloves and come back in summer…
Once, a trysting tree stood on the edge of these woods. I traced names of couples dead and gone, etched in its bark. It fell in the storm: its trunk lies coffined in shallow water. Rubber soles squelch along carved initials and fletched hearts.
I follow the arrows through golden hours and ghoulish hours.
The drummer ghosts downstream, where luminous things haunt English summers. I try to catch the impossible rhythm, the dropped beat. Overgrown roots spider the earth. Minutes turn to mist: a grazed cheekbone and a river-logged head.
If I could catch up to him now, I’d explain, tell him I’ve always seen Ariel things in reedy riverbanks, heard flintlocks in seaside foam, inhaled entire eras of vanilla and tobacco in leaves of antiquarian tomes. I keep the secrets of the Birch Church close. I’ve walked bridleways with glimmering shinbones, conch-shelled ear canals to ripples in the river, chased echoes.
But lately, all I’ve seen is you. Are you going to sea without me? Maybe you’ll travel south, follow the swallows, to Africa, come back with them in the springtime. There’s always next summer. I’m not going to change my mind in a year. I’ll still have my weird visions, of Shakespeare at Stonehenge, etc. I’ll spend the autumn biding my time, fishing sunken trollies from riverbeds, untangling plastic bags from wintry branches.
The river widens, waxes and wanes, waves flags of unknown places.
I’ve neglected my own home. Conkers wither in late-summer sun on the windowsill. Do you know what that reminds me of? The Fool’s final words in King Lear, about going to bed at noon. Then, he just vanishes, in Act III-not before making a strange prophecy about Albion coming to great confusion. He speaks of Merlin; yet, he lives before Merlin. It doesn’t make much sense. Everything’s upside down. That’s why I like it, I suppose.
It’s quieter now. No animal hide, wood or willow; just twilight ramblers, final birdsong. The shadow sets with the sunlight: I can’t follow it out of summer. I’ll come back in May; sing drowned harmonies with Lycidas and Ophelia; try to coax you back. We’ll make ripples with those summer conkers, joke about how a horse chestnut tree might Excalibur up from the riverbed. I’m having crazy visions now. Imagine the Lady of the Lake with a small child, a descendent of Boudica. “Why won’t the tall man swim,” the child asks, ginger hair in tempest, “with all that river there in front of him?”