Human Chain Read online

  SEAMUS HEANEY

  Human Chain

  for

  Des and Mary

  Peter and Jean

  Acknowledgements

  Some of these poems appeared for the first time in slightly different form in the following magazines: Agenda, Archipelago, Irish Pages, Irish Times, Little Star, Magenta, New Yorker, Parnassus, Poetry Review, The SHOp, Times Literary Supplement.

  ‘The Conway Stewart’ and ‘Lick the Pencil’ were first published in Many Mansions, Stoney Road Press, 2009; ‘Human Chain’ in That Island Never Found: Essays and Poems for Terence Brown, Four Courts Press, 2007; ‘Slack’ appeared as a poem card and poster poem from Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts, 2009; ‘A Herbal’ is a version of ‘Herbier de Bretagne’ from Guillevic’s Étier, Gallimard, 1979, and appeared in Franco–Irish Connections: Essays, Memoirs and Poems in Honour of Pierre Joannon, Four Courts Press, 2009; ‘The Riverbank Field’ and ‘Route 110’ in The Riverbank Field, Gallery Press, 2007; ‘Wraiths’ in From the Small Back Room: A Festschrift for Ciaran Carson, Netherlea, 2008; ‘Parking Lot’ appeared under the title ‘Wraiths’ in Captivating Brightness: Ballynahinch, Ballynahinch Castle Hotel/Occasional Press, 2008; ‘Hermit Songs’ in Something Understood: Essays and Poetry for Helen Vendler, University of Virginia Press, 2009; ‘A Kite for Aibhín’ is adapted from ‘The Kites’, first published in Auguri: To Mary Kelleher, Royal Dublin Society, 2009.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  ‘Had I not been awake’

  Album

  The Conway Stewart

  Uncoupled

  The Butts

  Chanson d’Aventure

  Miracle

  Human Chain

  A Mite-Box

  An Old Refrain

  The Wood Road

  The Baler

  Derry Derry Down

  Eelworks

  Slack

  A Herbal

  Canopy

  The Riverbank Field

  Route 110

  Death of a Painter

  Loughanure

  Wraiths

  I Sidhe

  II Parking Lot

  III White Nights

  Sweeney Out-Takes

  I Otterboy

  II He Remembers Lynchechaun

  III The Pattern

  Colum Cille Cecinit

  I Is scíth mo chrob ón scríbainn

  II Is aire charaim Doire

  III Fil súil nglais

  Hermit Songs

  ‘Lick the Pencil’

  ‘The door was open and the house was dark’

  In the Attic

  A Kite for Aibhín

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  HUMAN CHAIN

  ‘Had I not been awake’

  Had I not been awake I would have missed it,

  A wind that rose and whirled until the roof

  Pattered with quick leaves off the sycamore

  And got me up, the whole of me a-patter,

  Alive and ticking like an electric fence:

  Had I not been awake I would have missed it,

  It came and went so unexpectedly

  And almost it seemed dangerously,

  Returning like an animal to the house,

  A courier blast that there and then

  Lapsed ordinary. But not ever

  After. And not now.

  Album

  I

  Now the oil-fired heating boiler comes to life

  Abruptly, drowsily, like the timed collapse

  Of a sawn down tree, I imagine them

  In summer season, as it must have been,

  And the place, it dawns on me,

  Could have been Grove Hill before the oaks were cut,

  Where I’d often stand with them on airy Sundays

  Shin-deep in hilltop bluebells, looking out

  At Magherafelt’s four spires in the distance.

  Too late, alas, now for the apt quotation

  About a love that’s proved by steady gazing

  Not at each other but in the same direction.

  II

  Quercus, the oak. And Quaerite, Seek ye.

  Among green leaves and acorns in mosaic

  (Our college arms surmounted by columba,

  Dove of the church, of Derry’s sainted grove)

  The footworn motto stayed indelible:

  Seek ye first the Kingdom … Fair and square

  I stood on in the Junior House hallway

  A grey eye will look back

  Seeing them as a couple, I now see,

  For the first time, all the more together

  For having had to turn and walk away, as close

  In the leaving (or closer) as in the getting.

  III

  It’s winter at the seaside where they’ve gone

  For the wedding meal. And I am at the table,

  Uninvited, ineluctable.

  A skirl of gulls. A smell of cooking fish.

  Plump dormant silver. Stranded silence. Tears.

  Their bibbed waitress unlids a clinking dish

  And leaves them to it, under chandeliers.

  And to all the anniversaries of this

  They are not ever going to observe

  Or mention even in the years to come.

  And now the man who drove them here will drive

  Them back, and by evening we’ll be home.

  IV

  Were I to have embraced him anywhere

  It would have been on the riverbank

  That summer before college, him in his prime,

  Me at the time not thinking how he must

  Keep coming with me because I’d soon be leaving.

  That should have been the first, but it didn’t happen.

  The second did, at New Ferry one night

  When he was very drunk and needed help

  To do up trouser buttons. And the third

  Was on the landing during his last week,

  Helping him to the bathroom, my right arm

  Taking the webby weight of his underarm.

  V

  It took a grandson to do it properly,

  To rush him in the armchair

  With a snatch raid on his neck,

  Proving him thus vulnerable to delight,

  Coming as great proofs often come

  Of a sudden, one-off, then the steady dawning

  Of whatever erat demonstrandum.

  Just as a moment back a son’s three tries

  At an embrace in Elysium

  Swam up into my very arms, and in and out

  Of the Latin stem itself, the phantom

  Verus that has slipped from ‘very’.

  The Conway Stewart

  ‘Medium’, 14-carat nib,

  Three gold bands in the clip-on screw-top,

  In the mottled barrel a spatulate, thin

  Pump-action lever

  The shopkeeper

  Demonstrated,

  The nib uncapped,

  Treating it to its first deep snorkel

  In a newly opened ink-bottle,

  Guttery, snottery,

  Letting it rest then at an angle

  To ingest,

  Giving us time

  To look together and away

  From our parting, due that evening,

  To my longhand

  ‘Dear’

  To them, next day.

  Uncoupled

  I

  Who is this coming to the ash-pit

  Walking tall, as if in a procession,

  Bearing in front of her a slender pan

  Withdrawn just now from underneath

  T
he firebox, weighty, full to the brim

  With whitish dust and flakes still sparking hot

  That the wind is blowing into her apron bib,

  Into her mouth and eyes while she proceeds

  Unwavering, keeping her burden horizontal still,

  Hands in a tight, sore grip round the metal knob,

  Proceeds until we have lost sight of her

  Where the worn path turns behind the henhouse.

  II

  Who is this, not much higher than the cattle,

  Working his way towards me through the pen,

  His ashplant in one hand

  Lifted and pointing, a stick of keel

  In the other, calling to where I’m perched

  On top of a shaky gate,

  Waving and calling something I cannot hear

  With all the lowing and roaring, lorries revving

  At the far end of the yard, the dealers

  Shouting among themselves, and now to him

  So that his eyes leave mine and I know

  The pain of loss before I know the term.

  The Butts

  His suits hung in the wardrobe, broad

  And short

  And slightly bandy-sleeved,

  Flattened back

  Against themselves,

  A bit stand-offish.

  Stale smoke and oxter-sweat

  Came at you in a stirred-up brew

  When you reached in,

  A whole rake of thornproof and blue serge

  Swung heavily

  Like waterweed disturbed. I sniffed

  Tonic unfreshness,

  Then delved past flap and lining

  For the forbidden handfuls.

  But a kind of empty-handedness

  Transpired … Out of suit-cloth

  Pressed against my face,

  Out of those layered stuffs

  That surged and gave,

  Out of the cold smooth pocket-lining

  Nothing but chaff cocoons,

  A paperiness not known again

  Until the last days came

  And we must learn to reach well in beneath

  Each meagre armpit

  To lift and sponge him,

  One on either side,

  Feeling his lightness,

  Having to dab and work

  Closer than anybody liked

  But having, for all that,

  To keep working.

  Chanson d’Aventure

  Love’s mysteries in souls do grow,

  But yet the body is his book.

  I

  Strapped on, wheeled out, forklifted, locked

  In position for the drive,

  Bone-shaken, bumped at speed,

  The nurse a passenger in front, you ensconced

  In her vacated corner seat, me flat on my back –

  Our postures all the journey still the same,

  Everything and nothing spoken,

  Our eyebeams threaded laser-fast, no transport

  Ever like it until then, in the sunlit cold

  Of a Sunday morning ambulance

  When we might, O my love, have quoted Donne

  On love on hold, body and soul apart.

  II

  Apart: the very word is like a bell

  That the sexton Malachy Boyle outrolled

  In illo tempore in Bellaghy

  Or the one I tolled in Derry in my turn

  As college bellman, the haul of it there still

  In the heel of my once capable

  Warm hand, hand that I could not feel you lift

  And lag in yours throughout that journey

  When it lay flop-heavy as a bellpull

  And we careered at speed through Dungloe,

  Glendoan, our gaze ecstatic and bisected

  By a hooked-up drip-feed to the cannula.

  III

  The charioteer at Delphi holds his own,

  His six horses and chariot gone,

  His left hand lopped

  From a wrist protruding like an open spout,

  Bronze reins astream in his right, his gaze ahead

  Empty as the space where the team should be,

  His eyes-front, straight-backed posture like my own

  Doing physio in the corridor, holding up

  As if once more I’d found myself in step

  Between two shafts, another’s hand on mine,

  Each slither of the share, each stone it hit

  Registered like a pulse in the timbered grips.

  Miracle

  Not the one who takes up his bed and walks

  But the ones who have known him all along

  And carry him in –

  Their shoulders numb, the ache and stoop deeplocked

  In their backs, the stretcher handles

  Slippery with sweat. And no let-up

  Until he’s strapped on tight, made tiltable

  And raised to the tiled roof, then lowered for healing.

  Be mindful of them as they stand and wait

  For the burn of the paid-out ropes to cool,

  Their slight lightheadedness and incredulity

  To pass, those ones who had known him all along.

  Human Chain

  for Terence Brown

  Seeing the bags of meal passed hand to hand

  In close-up by the aid workers, and soldiers

  Firing over the mob, I was braced again

  With a grip on two sack corners,

  Two packed wads of grain I’d worked to lugs

  To give me purchase, ready for the heave –

  The eye-to-eye, one-two, one-two upswing

  On to the trailer, then the stoop and drag and drain

  Of the next lift. Nothing surpassed

  That quick unburdening, backbreak’s truest payback,

  A letting go which will not come again.

  Or it will, once. And for all.

  A Mite-Box

  But still in your cupped palm to feel

  The chunk and clink of an alms-collecting mite-box,

  Full to its slotted lid with copper coins,

  Pennies and halfpennies donated for

  ‘The foreign missions’ … Made from a cardboard kit,

  Wedge-roofed like a little oratory

  And yours to tote as you made the rounds,

  Indulged on every doorstep, each donation

  Accounted for by a pinprick in a card –

  A way for all to see a way to heaven,

  The same as when a pinholed Camera

  Obscura unblinds the sun eclipsed.

  An Old Refrain

  I

  Robin-run-the-hedge

  We called the vetch –

  A fading straggle

  Of Lincoln green

  English stitchwork

  Unravelling

  With a hey-nonny-no

  Along the Wood Road.

  Sticky entangling

  Berry and thread

  Summering in

  On the tousled verge.

  II

  In seggins

  Hear the wind

  Among the sedge,

  In boortree

  The elderberry’s

  Dank indulgence,

  In benweed

  Ragwort’s

  Singular unbending,

  In easing

  Drips of night rain

  From the eaves.

  The Wood Road

  Resurfaced, never widened,

  The verges grassy as when

  Bill Pickering lay with his gun

  Under the summer hedge

  Nightwatching, in uniform –

  Special militiaman.

  Moonlight on rifle barrels,

  On the windscreen of a van

  Roadblocking the road,

  The rest of his staunch patrol

  In profile, sentry-loyal,

  Harassing Mulhollandstown.

  Or me in broad daylight

  On top of
a cartload

  Of turf built trig and tight,

  Looked up to, looking down,

  Allowed the reins like an adult

  As the old cart rocked and rollicked.

  Then that August day I walked it

  To the hunger striker’s wake,

  Across a silent yard,

  In past a watching crowd

  To where the guarded corpse

  And a guard of honour stared.

  Or the stain at the end of the lane

  Where the child on her bike was hit

  By a speed-merchant from nowhere

  Hard-rounding the corner,

  A back wheel spinning in sunshine,

  A headlamp in smithereens.

  Film it in sepia,