Selected Poems 1966-1987 Read online

  what seemed deserved and promised passed me by?’

  I could not speak. I saw a hoard of black

  basalt axe heads, smooth as a beetle’s back,

  a cairn of stone force that might detonate,

  the eggs of danger. And then I saw a face

  he had once given me, a plaster cast

  of an abbess, done by the Gowran master,

  mild-mouthed and cowled, a character of grace.

  ‘Your gift will be a candle in our house.’

  But he had gone when I looked to meet his eyes

  and hunkering instead there in his place

  was a bleeding, pale-faced boy, plastered in mud.

  ‘The red-hot pokers blazed a lovely red

  in Jerpoint the Sunday I was murdered,’

  he said quietly. ‘Now do you remember?

  You were there with poets when you got the word

  and stayed there with them, while your own flesh and blood

  was carted to Bellaghy from the Fews.

  They showed more agitation at the news

  than you did.’

  ‘But they were getting crisis

  first-hand, Colum, they had happened in on

  live sectarian assassination.

  I was dumb, encountering what was destined.’

  And so I pleaded with my second cousin.

  ‘I kept seeing a grey stretch of Lough Beg

  and the strand empty at daybreak.

  I felt like the bottom of a dried-up lake.’

  ‘You saw that, and you wrote that—not the fact.

  You confused evasion and artistic tact.

  The Protestant who shot me through the head

  I accuse directly, but indirectly, you

  who now atone perhaps upon this bed

  for the way you whitewashed ugliness and drew

  the lovely blinds of the Purgatorio

  and saccharined my death with morning dew.’

  Then I seemed to waken out of sleep

  among more pilgrims whom I did not know

  drifting to the hostel for the night.

  IX

  ‘My brain dried like spread turf, my stomach

  Shrank to a cinder and tightened and cracked.

  Often I was dogs on my own track

  Of blood on wet grass that I could have licked.

  Under the prison blanket, an ambush

  Stillness I felt safe in settled round me.

  Streetlights came on in small towns, the bomb flash

  Came before the sound, I saw country

  I knew from Glenshane down to Toome

  And heard a car I could make out years away

  With me in the back of it like a white-faced groom,

  A hit-man on the brink, emptied and deadly.

  When the police yielded my coffin, I was light

  As my head when I took aim.’

  This voice from blight

  And hunger died through the black dorm:

  There he was, laid out with a drift of Mass cards

  At his shrouded feet. Then the firing party’s

  Volley in the yard. I saw woodworm

  In gate posts and door jambs, smelt mildew

  From the byre loft where he watched and hid

  From fields his draped coffin would raft through.

  Unquiet soul, they should have buried you

  In the bog where you threw your first grenade,

  Where only helicopters and curlews

  Make their maimed music, and sphagnum moss

  Could teach you its medicinal repose

  Until, when the weasel whistles on its tail,

  No other weasel will obey its call.

  I dreamt and drifted. All seemed to run to waste

  As down a swirl of mucky, glittering flood

  Strange polyp floated like a huge corrupt

  Magnolia bloom, surreal as a shed breast,

  My softly awash and blanching self-disgust.

  And I cried among night waters, ‘I repent

  My unweaned life that kept me competent

  To sleepwalk with connivance and mistrust.’

  Then, like a pistil growing from the polyp,

  A lighted candle rose and steadied up

  Until the whole bright-masted thing retrieved

  A course and the currents it had gone with

  Were what it rode and showed. No more adrift,

  My feet touched bottom and my heart revived.

  Then something round and clear

  And mildly turbulent, like a bubbleskin

  Or a moon in smoothly rippled lough water

  Rose in a cobwebbed space: the molten

  Inside-sheen of an instrument

  Revolved its polished convexes full

  Upon me, so close and brilliant

  I seemed to pitch back in a headlong fall.

  And then it was the clarity of waking

  To sunlight and a bell and gushing taps

  In the next cubicle. Still there for the taking!

  The old brass trumpet with its valves and stops

  I found once in loft thatch, a mystery

  I shied from then, for I thought such trove beyond me.

  ‘I hate how quick I was to know my place.

  I hate where I was born, hate everything

  That made me biddable and unforthcoming,’

  I mouthed at my half-composed face

  In the shaving mirror, like somebody

  Drunk in the bathroom during a party,

  Lulled and repelled by his own reflection.

  As if the cairnstone could defy the cairn.

  As if the eddy could reform the pool.

  As if a stone swirled under a cascade,

  Eroded and eroding in its bed,

  Could grind itself down to a different core.

  Then I thought of the tribe whose dances never fail

  For they keep dancing till they sight the deer.

  X

  Morning stir in the hostel. A pot

  hooked on forged links. Soot flakes. Plumping water.

  The open door brilliant with sunlight.

  Hearthsmoke rambling and a thud of earthenware

  drumming me back until I saw the mug

  beyond my reach on its high shelf, the one

  patterned with blue cornflowers, sprig after sprig

  repeating round it, as quiet as a milestone …

  When had it not been there? There was one night

  when fit-up actors used it for a prop

  and I sat in the dark hall estranged from it

  as a couple vowed and called it their loving cup

  and held it in our gaze until the curtain

  jerked shut with an ordinary noise.

  Dipped and glamoured then by this translation,

  it was restored to its old haircracked doze

  on the mantelpiece, its parchment glazes fast—

  as the otter surfaced once with Ronan’s psalter

  miraculously unharmed, that had been lost

  a day and a night under lough water.

  And so the saint praised God on the lough shore

  for that dazzle of impossibility

  I credited again in the sun-filled door,

  so absolutely light it could put out fire.

  XI

  As if the prisms of the kaleidoscope

  I plunged once in a butt of muddied water

  surfaced like a marvellous lightship

  and out of its silted crystals a monk’s face

  that had spoken years ago from behind a grille

  spoke again about the need and chance

  to salvage everything, to re-envisage

  the zenith and glimpsed jewels of any gift

  mistakenly abased …

  What came to nothing could always be replenished.

  ‘Read poems as prayers,’ he said, ‘and for your penance

  translate me something by Juan de la Cruz.’

>   Returned from Spain to our chapped wilderness,

  his consonants aspirate, his forehead shining,

  he had made me feel there was nothing to confess.

  Now his sandalled passage stirred me on to this:

  How well I know that fountain, filling, running,

  although it is the night.

  That eternal fountain, hidden away,

  I know its haven and its secrecy

  although it is the night.

  But not its source because it does not have one,

  which is all sources’ source and origin

  although it is the night.

  No other thing can be so beautiful.

  Here the earth and heaven drink their fill

  although it is the night.

  So pellucid it never can be muddied,

  and I know that all light radiates from it

  although it is the night.

  I know no sounding-line can find its bottom,

  nobody ford or plumb its deepest fathom

  although it is the night.

  And its current so in flood it overspills

  to water hell and heaven and all peoples

  although it is the night.

  And the current that is generated there,

  as far as it wills to, it can flow that far

  although it is the night.

  And from these two a third current proceeds

  which neither of these two, I know, precedes

  although it is the night.

  This eternal fountain hides and splashes

  within this living bread that is life to us

  although it is the night.

  Hear it calling out to every creature.

  And they drink these waters, although it is dark here

  because it is the night.

  I am repining for this living fountain.

  Within this bread of life I see it plain

  although it is the night.

  XII

  Like a convalescent, I took the hand

  stretched down from the jetty, sensed again

  an alien comfort as I stepped on ground

  to find the helping hand still gripping mine,

  fish-cold and bony, but whether to guide

  or to be guided I could not be certain

  for the tall man in step at my side

  seemed blind, though he walked straight as a rush

  upon his ash plant, his eyes fixed straight ahead.

  Then I knew him in the flesh

  out there on the tarmac among the cars,

  wintered hard and sharp as a blackthorn bush.

  His voice eddying with the vowels of all rivers

  came back to me, though he did not speak yet,

  a voice like a prosecutor’s or a singer’s,

  cunning, narcotic, mimic, definite

  as a steel nib’s downstroke, quick and clean,

  and suddenly he hit a litter basket

  with his stick, saying, ‘Your obligation

  is not discharged by any common rite.

  What you do you must do on your own.

  The main thing is to write

  for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust

  that imagines its haven like your hands at night

  dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.

  You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.

  Take off from here. And don’t be so earnest,

  so ready for the sackcloth and the ashes.

  Let go, let fly, forget.

  You’ve listened long enough. Now strike your note.’

  It was as if I had stepped free into space

  alone with nothing that I had not known

  already. Raindrops blew in my face

  as I came to and heard the harangue and jeers

  going on and on: ‘The English language

  belongs to us. You are raking at dead fires,

  rehearsing the old whinges at your age.

  That subject people stuff is a cod’s game,

  infantile, like this peasant pilgrimage.

  You lose more of yourself than you redeem

  doing the decent thing. Keep at a tangent.

  When they make the circle wide, it’s time to swim

  out on your own and fill the element

  with signatures on your own frequency,

  echo-soundings, searches, probes, allurements,

  elver-gleams in the dark of the whole sea.’

  The shower broke in a cloudburst, the tarmac

  fumed and sizzled. As he moved off quickly

  the downpour loosed its screens round his straight walk.

  From Sweeney Redivivus

  In the Beech

  I was a lookout posted and forgotten.

  On one side under me, the concrete road.

  On the other, the bullocks’ covert,

  the breath and plaster of a drinking place

  where the school-leaver discovered peace

  to touch himself in the reek of churned-up mud.

  And the tree itself a strangeness and a comfort,

  as much a column as a bole. The very ivy

  puzzled its milk-tooth frills and tapers

  over the grain: was it bark or masonry?

  I watched the red-brick chimney rear

  its stamen course by course,

  and the steeplejacks up there at their antics

  like flies against the mountain.

  I felt the tanks’ advance beginning

  at the cynosure of the growth rings,

  then winced at their imperium refreshed

  in each powdered bolt mark on the concrete.

  And the pilot with his goggles back came in

  so low I could see the cockpit rivets.

  My hidebound boundary tree. My tree of knowledge.

  My thick-tapped, soft-fledged, airy listening post.

  The First Kingdom

  The royal roads were cow paths.

  The queen mother hunkered on a stool

  and played the harpstrings of milk

  into a wooden pail.

  With seasoned sticks the nobles

  lorded it over the hindquarters of cattle.

  Units of measurement were pondered

  by the cartful, barrowful and bucketful.

  Time was a backward rote of names and mishaps,

  bad harvests, fires, unfair settlements,

  deaths in floods, murders and miscarriages.

  And if my rights to it all came only

  by their acclamation, what was it worth?

  I blew hot and blew cold.

  They were two-faced and accommodating.

  And seed, breed and generation still

  they are holding on, every bit

  as pious and exacting and demeaned.

  The First Flight

  It was more sleepwalk than spasm

  yet that was a time when the times

  were also in spasm—

  the ties and the knots running through us

  split open

  down the lines of the grain.

  As I drew close to pebbles and berries,

  the smell of wild garlic, relearning

  the acoustic of frost

  and the meaning of woodnote,

  my shadow over the field

  was only a spin-off,

  my empty place an excuse

  for shifts in the camp, old rehearsals

  of debts and betrayal.

  Singly they came to the tree

  with a stone in each pocket

  to whistle and bill me back in

  and I would collide and cascade

  through leaves when they left,

  my point of repose knocked askew.

  I was mired in attachment

  until they began to pronounce me

  a feeder off battlefields

  so I mastered new rungs of the air

  to survey out of reach

  their bonfires on
hills, their hosting

  and fasting, the levies from Scotland

  as always, and the people of art

  diverting their rhythmical chants

  to fend off the onslaught of winds

  I would welcome and climb

  at the top of my bent.

  Drifting Off

  The guttersnipe and the albatross

  gliding for days without a single wingbeat

  were equally beyond me.

  I yearned for the gannet’s strike,

  the unbegrudging concentration

  of the heron.

  In the camaraderie of rookeries,

  in the spiteful vigilance of colonies

  I was at home.

  I learned to distrust

  the allure of the cuckoo

  and the gossip of starlings,

  kept faith with doughty bullfinches,

  levelled my wit too often

  to the small-minded wren

  and too often caved in

  to the pathos of waterhens

  and panicky corncrakes.

  I gave much credence to stragglers,

  overrated the composure of blackbirds

  and the folklore of magpies.

  But when goldfinch or kingfisher rent

  the veil of the usual,

  pinions whispered and braced

  as I stooped, unwieldy

  and brimming,

  my spurs at the ready.

  The Cleric

  I heard new words prayed at cows

  in the byre, found his sign

  on the crock and the hidden still,

  smelled fumes from his censer

  in the first smokes of morning.

  Next thing he was making a progress

  through gaps, stepping out sites,

  sinking his crozier deep

  in the fort-hearth.

  If he had stuck to his own

  cramp-jawed abbesses and intoners

  dibbling round the enclosure,

  his Latin and blather of love,

  his parchments and scheming

  in letters shipped over water—

  but no, he overbore

  with his unctions and orders,

  he had to get in on the ground.

  History that planted its standards

  on his gables and spires

  ousted me to the marches

  of skulking and whingeing.

  Or did I desert?

  Give him his due, in the end

  he opened my path to a kingdom

  of such scope and neuter allegiance

  my emptiness reigns at its whim.

  The Master

  He dwelt in himself

  like a rook in an unroofed tower.

  To get close I had to maintain

  a climb up deserted ramparts