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      each procedure enacted:

      Stop-bath, tongs, developer,

      fixer, enlarger, timer,

      thermometer, trays, squeegee – Check!

      With your inverted-subverted images,

      you conjured the lifeless,

      summoning visions,

      bent on renewal.

      As the news was breaking

      out there,

      the water broke in here,

      like amniotic fluid

      gushing around the sink,

      making it difficult

      to think.

      Like a tilt-shifted

      Niagara Falls,

      it swished, sputtered,

      ebbed and flowed.

      You’d let me tip away

      at the developing-tray

      as we’d impatiently watch

      the edges burn grey,

      one sorrowful flowering

      after another,

      secrets wrung from

      tragedy, unwriting white,

      developing and fixing the night.

      Surfacing through

      the fog-salt,

      negatively positive

      stills are born,

      light-insensitive,

      so peaceful and mute,

      rendered, not sundered,

      after the storm.

      As you pull on your fag

      the end flits freely,

      firefly-like.

      My da:

      a memory-making middleman,

      assessor from The Ministry of Lost Causes,

      taking sides under cover of darkness,

      an aftermathematician,

      reducing a formula,

      a variable bidder

      with oblivion,

      a framer and custodian

      of unsolicited closures.

      You print contact-sheets

      that electrify the eye;

      You deliver stills that are

      memorial-machines

      which incubate

      as the world outside

      contemplates.

      When I spy with my child’s eye,

      I’m conspiring in

      your world of creation.

      You’re there with the look of

      a hunted light-gatherer.

      Your camera obscura

      captures history in utero

      and performs a routine-delivery.

      Yours is a mid-wife’s elation,

      quiet and jaded,

      clutching the slippery spoils of a war

      that is long-past born

      but labouring still.

      Your magical contraption:

      full to the brim

      with the defaced lore

      of places and faces,

      times and crimes,

      an antiquary of intrigue,

      housing a poor man’s chiaroscuro.

      A moment stretched

      for partners-in-time,

      we’re the aproned saints

      of impossible causes –

      late developers.

      Behind the Lens

      and

      Between the Lines

      Late Developer

      When I was in America touring Look Behind You! and Nuclear Family, a lady approached me one night and asked if the photograph of the father holding the boy’s hand was me and my Da, and when I said it wasn’t, she – without missing a beat – replied: ‘Well honey, you’re in America now, so from now on, that’s you and your father!’

      The man and child in the photograph are walking through the notorious Divis Flats complex in Belfast. In this instance, the poem was written first and the photograph curated as an accompaniment. I like the symmetry of the subjects’ stride, and how their intimacy contrasts with the implacable, modernist facade of the flats and the dark concrete walls. That splash made by the child also appeals to me, as no matter what’s going on around you in the adult world, puddles are still for splashing. I also like how the boy – like all kids holding a parent’s hand – seems to be lagging behind, scurrying, caught between the need to keep up and the need to do childish things.

      The poem was inspired by nights spent watching my father work under the red light, particularly when we lived in Irish Street, Downpatrick, where I spent the first nine years of my life. I can still smell the strangely comforting yet pungent combination of cigarette smoke and chemicals. These days, he develops mostly in Lightroom, the photo-developing software. Darkroom during The Troubles, Lightroom in times of peace. Fitting.

All Key-Holders Attend … (The Devil’s in the Retail)

      No sound needed to hear this one:

      Hugh J. O’Boyle’s hardware store is roaring

      like a Titanic furnace, going up,

      just like t’other went down.

      Both would only shine bright the once,

      and the very thing that did for the ship

      was exactly what these firemen could have done with

      on this night to remember.

      It’s Downpatrick, 1975, and this evening’s

      devil-cast is coming to us live from up there

      where Irish Street meets its false summit,

      the Folly Lane, just in there on the right,

      before giving way to Stream Street.

      Before us stands a business on its last legs:

      Mid-encore, whipping up a storm,

      it’s an all-singeing,

      all-dancing flames performance,

      awash with pyrotechnics

      and musical accompaniment courtesy of

      The Ulster Cacophonic Orchestra,

      Conductor:

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