The Ice Cream Man

on taxonomies and singular violence

I’ve been thinking on taxonomies and writing practice. Some of my current students are very apprehensive about writing place, so we’ve been going back to forensics.

Looking. Listing. Sounding. Connecting. Rooting. Playing.

And - as we’re listing and rooting - I’m constantly back with the thoughts of those forcefully evicted, moved, fenced in, targeted and killed in a place becoming so distinctly unknown.

One of my favourite poems is Michael Longley’s ‘The Ice Cream Man’. Quoted in its forensic entirety, it goes like this:

Rum and raisin, vanilla, butter-scotch, walnut, peach:
You would rhyme off the flavours. That was before
They murdered the ice-cream man on the Lisburn Road
And you bought carnations to lay outside his shop.
I named for you all the wild flowers of the Burren
I had seen in one day: thyme, valerian, loosestrife,
Meadowsweet, tway blade, crowfoot, ling, angelica,
Herb robert, marjoram, cow parsley, sundew, vetch,
Mountain avens, wood sage, ragged robin, stitchwort,
Yarrow, lady’s bedstraw, bindweed, bog pimpernel.

I first read this poem at university and - truly - no other poem has impacted my life and practice in the way it has. It is poetic distillation at its finest, I think.

Opening - in what I have always read as a child’s voice - with the singular brutality of violence, it moves to the universal. The ecological. The intense power of simply knowing a place.

Longley made no secret of the influence the war poet Edward Thomas had on his poetry. He and Edna Longley became Thomas’s posthumous protectors, cheerleaders and literary custodians. This poem is in many ways a homage to Thomas’s ‘Old Man’:

Old Man, or Lad's-love,---in the name there's nothing
To one that knows not Lad's-love, or Old Man,
The hoar-green feathery herb, almost a tree,
Growing with rosemary and lavender.
Even to one that knows it well, the names
Half decorate, half perplex, the thing it is:
At least, what that is clings not to the names
In spite of time. And yet I like the names.

In Longley’s transposition, the knowing of the thing that it is in 'The Ice Cream Man’ rails against acts of brutality with the collective ecology of connection. The speaker does not distract or detract from the violence - they condemn it. They dare it to break the bond of our collective knowing.

We are so damned lucky to have a place to know. We should see, note, list, know it as loud as we can.

We are not singular.

We are multitudes.

We are marjoram, cow parsley, sundew, vetch.

Ceasefire now.