Selected Poems 1966-1987 Read online

  God of the stone heap, where the stones were verdicts

  Cast solidly at his feet, piling up around him

  Until he stood waist-deep in the cairn

  Of his apotheosis: maybe a gate-pillar

  Or a tumbled wallstead where hogweed earths the silence

  Somebody will break at last to say, ‘Here

  His spirit lingers,’ and will have said too much.

  The Spoonbait

  So a new similitude is given us

  And we say: The soul may be compared

  Unto a spoonbait that a child discovers

  Beneath the sliding lid of a pencil case,

  Glimpsed once and imagined for a lifetime

  Risen and free and spooling out of nowhere—

  A shooting star going back up the darkness.

  It flees him and it burns him all at once

  Like the single drop that Dives implored

  Falling and falling into a great gulf.

  Then exit, the polished helmet of a hero

  Laid out amidships above scudding water.

  Exit, alternatively, a toy of light

  Reeled through him upstream, snagging on nothing.

  Clearances

  In Memoriam M.K.H., 1911–1984

  She taught me what her uncle once taught her:

  How easily the biggest coal block split

  If you got the grain and hammer angled right.

  The sound of that relaxed alluring blow,

  Its co-opted and obliterated echo,

  Taught me to hit, taught me to loosen,

  Taught me between the hammer and the block

  To face the music. Teach me now to listen,

  To strike it rich behind the linear black.

  1

  A cobble thrown a hundred years ago

  Keeps coming at me, the first stone

  Aimed at a great-grandmother’s turncoat brow.

  The pony jerks and the riot’s on.

  She’s crouched low in the trap

  Running the gauntlet that first Sunday

  Down the brae to Mass at a panicked gallop.

  He whips on through the town to cries of ‘Lundy!’

  Call her ‘The Convert’. ‘The Exogamous Bride’.

  Anyhow, it is a genre piece

  Inherited on my mother’s side

  And mine to dispose with now she’s gone.

  Instead of silver and Victorian lace,

  The exonerating, exonerated stone.

  2

  Polished linoleum shone there. Brass taps shone.

  The china cups were very white and big—

  An unchipped set with sugar bowl and jug.

  The kettle whistled. Sandwich and tea scone

  Were present and correct. In case it run,

  The butter must be kept out of the sun.

  And don’t be dropping crumbs. Don’t tilt your chair.

  Don’t reach. Don’t point. Don’t make noise when you stir.

  It is Number 5, New Row, Land of the Dead,

  Where grandfather is rising from his place

  With spectacles pushed back on a clean bald head

  To welcome a bewildered homing daughter

  Before she even knocks. ‘What’s this? What’s this?’

  And they sit down in the shining room together.

  3

  When all the others were away at Mass

  I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.

  They broke the silence, let fall one by one

  Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:

  Cold comforts set between us, things to share

  Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.

  And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes

  From each other’s work would bring us to our senses.

  So while the parish priest at her bedside

  Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying

  And some were responding and some crying

  I remembered her head bent towards my head,

  Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives—

  Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

  4

  Fear of affectation made her affect

  Inadequacy whenever it came to

  Pronouncing words ‘beyond her’. Bertold Brek.

  She’d manage something hampered and askew

  Every time, as if she might betray

  The hampered and inadequate by too

  Well-adjusted a vocabulary.

  With more challenge than pride, she’d tell me, ‘You

  Know all them things.’ So I governed my tongue

  In front of her, a genuinely well-

  Adjusted adequate betrayal

  Of what I knew better. I’d naw and aye

  And decently relapse into the wrong

  Grammar which kept us allied and at bay.

  5

  The cool that came off sheets just off the line

  Made me think the damp must still be in them

  But when I took my corners of the linen

  And pulled against her, first straight down the hem

  And then diagonally, then flapped and shook

  The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind,

  They made a dried-out undulating thwack.

  So we’d stretch and fold and end up hand to hand

  For a split second as if nothing had happened

  For nothing had that had not always happened

  Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go,

  Coming close again by holding back

  In moves where I was x and she was o

  Inscribed in sheets she’d sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.

  6

  In the first flush of the Easter holidays

  The ceremonies during Holy Week

  Were highpoints of our Sons and Lovers phase.

  The midnight fire. The paschal candlestick.

  Elbow to elbow, glad to be kneeling next

  To each other up there near the front

  Of the packed church, we would follow the text

  And rubrics for the blessing of the font.

  As the hind longs for the streams, so my soul …

  Dippings. Towellings. The water breathed on.

  The water mixed with chrism and with oil.

  Cruet tinkle. Formal incensation

  And the psalmist’s outcry taken up with pride:

  Day and night my tears have been my bread.

  7

  In the last minutes he said more to her

  Almost than in all their life together.

  ‘You’ll be in New Row on Monday night

  And I’ll come up for you and you’ll be glad

  When I walk in the door … Isn’t that right?’

  His head was bent down to her propped-up head.

  She could not hear but we were overjoyed.

  He called her good and girl. Then she was dead,

  The searching for a pulsebeat was abandoned

  And we all knew one thing by being there.

  The space we stood around had been emptied

  Into us to keep, it penetrated

  Clearances that suddenly stood open.

  High cries were felled and a pure change happened.

  8

  I thought of walking round and round a space

  Utterly empty, utterly a source

  Where the decked chestnut tree had lost its place

  In our front hedge above the wallflowers.

  The white chips jumped and jumped and skited high.

  I heard the hatchet’s differentiated

  Accurate cut, the crack, the sigh

  And collapse of what luxuriated

  Through the shocked tips and wreckage of it all.

  Deep-planted and long gone, my coeval

  Chestnut from a jam jar in a hole,

  Its heft and hush become a bright nowhere,

  A soul ramifying and forever

  Silent, bey
ond silence listened for.

  The Milk Factory

  Scuts of froth swirled from the discharge pipe.

  We halted on the other bank and watched

  A milky water run from the pierced side

  Of milk itself, the crock of its substance spilt

  Across white limbo floors where shift-workers

  Waded round the clock, and the factory

  Kept its distance like a bright-decked star-ship.

  There we go, soft-eyed calves of the dew,

  Astonished and assumed into fluorescence.

  The Wishing Tree

  I thought of her as the wishing tree that died

  And saw it lifted, root and branch, to heaven,

  Trailing a shower of all that had been driven

  Need by need by need into its hale

  Sap-wood and bark: coin and pin and nail

  Came streaming from it like a comet-tail

  New-minted and dissolved. I had a vision

  Of an airy branch-head rising through damp cloud,

  Of turned-up faces where the tree had stood.

  Wolfe Tone

  Light as a skiff, manoeuvrable

  yet outmanoeuvred,

  I affected epaulettes and a cockade,

  wrote a style well-bred and impervious

  to the solidarity I angled for,

  and played the ancient Roman with a razor.

  I was the shouldered oar that ended up

  far from the brine and whiff of venture,

  like a scratching-post or a crossroads flagpole,

  out of my element among small farmers—

  I who once wakened to the shouts of men

  rising from the bottom of the sea,

  men in their shirts mounting through deep water

  when the Atlantic stove our cabin’s dead lights in

  and the big fleet split and Ireland dwindled

  as we ran before the gale under bare poles.

  From the Canton of Expectation

  I

  We lived deep in a land of optative moods,

  under high, banked clouds of resignation.

  A rustle of loss in the phrase Not in our lifetime,

  the broken nerve when we prayed Vouchsafe or Deign,

  were creditable, sufficient to the day.

  Once a year we gathered in a field

  of dance platforms and tents where children sang

  songs they had learned by rote in the old language.

  An auctioneer who had fought in the brotherhood

  enumerated the humiliations

  we always took for granted, but not even he

  considered this, I think, a call to action.

  Iron-mouthed loudspeakers shook the air

  yet nobody felt blamed. He had confirmed us.

  When our rebel anthem played the meeting shut

  we turned for home and the usual harassment

  by militiamen on overtime at roadblocks.

  II

  And next thing, suddenly, this change of mood.

  Books open in the newly wired kitchens.

  Young heads that might have dozed a life away

  against the flanks of milking cows were busy

  paving and pencilling their first causeways

  across the prescribed texts. The paving stones

  of quadrangles came next and a grammar

  of imperatives, the new age of demands.

  They would banish the conditional for ever,

  this generation born impervious to

  the triumph in our cries of de profundis.

  Our faith in winning by enduring most

  they made anathema, intelligences

  brightened and unmannerly as crowbars.

  III

  What looks the strongest has outlived its term.

  The future lies with what’s affirmed from under.

  These things that corroborated us when we dwelt

  under the aegis of our stealthy patron,

  the guardian angel of passivity,

  now sink a fang of menace in my shoulder.

  I repeat the word ‘stricken’ to myself

  and stand bareheaded under the banked clouds

  edged more and more with brassy thunderlight.

  I yearn for hammerblows on clinkered planks,

  the uncompromised report of driven thole-pins,

  to know there is one among us who never swerved

  from all his instincts told him was right action,

  who stood his ground in the indicative,

  whose boat will lift when the cloudburst happens.

  The Mud Vision

  Statues with exposed hearts and barbed-wire crowns

  Still stood in alcoves, hares flitted beneath

  The dozing bellies of jets, our menu-writers

  And punks with aerosol sprays held their own

  With the best of them. Satellite link-ups

  Wafted over us the blessings of popes, heliports

  Maintained a charmed circle for idols on tour

  And casualties on their stretchers. We sleepwalked

  The line between panic and formulae, screentested

  Our first native models and the last of the mummers,

  Watching ourselves at a distance, advantaged

  And airy as a man on a springboard

  Who keeps limbering up because the man cannot dive.

  And then in the foggy midlands it appeared,

  Our mud vision, as if a rose window of mud

  Had invented itself out of the glittery damp,

  A gossamer wheel, concentric with its own hub

  Of nebulous dirt, sullied yet lucent.

  We had heard of the sun standing still and the sun

  That changed colour, but we were vouchsafed

  Original clay, transfigured and spinning.

  And then the sunsets ran murky, the wiper

  Could never entirely clean off the windscreen,

  Reservoirs tasted of silt, a light fuzz

  Accrued in the hair and the eyebrows, and some

  Took to wearing a smudge on their foreheads

  To be prepared for whatever. Vigils

  Began to be kept around puddled gaps,

  On altars bulrushes ousted the lilies

  And a rota of invalids came and went

  On beds they could lease placed in range of the shower.

  A generation who had seen a sign!

  Those nights when we stood in an umber dew and smelled

  Mould in the verbena, or woke to a light

  Furrow-breath on the pillow, when the talk

  Was all about who had seen it and our fear

  Was touched with a secret pride, only ourselves

  Could be adequate then to our lives. When the rainbow

  Curved flood-brown and ran like a water-rat’s back

  So that drivers on the hard shoulder switched off to watch,

  We wished it away, and yet we presumed it a test

  That would prove us beyond expectation.

  We lived, of course, to learn the folly of that.

  One day it was gone and the east gable

  Where its trembling corolla had balanced

  Was starkly a ruin again, with dandelions

  Blowing high up on the ledges, and moss

  That slumbered on through its increase. As cameras raked

  The site from every angle, experts

  Began their post factum jabber and all of us

  Crowded in tight for the big explanations.

  Just like that, we forgot that the vision was ours,

  Our one chance to know the incomparable

  And dive to a future. What might have been origin

  We dissipated in news. The clarified place

  Had retrieved neither us nor itself—except

  You could say we survived. So say that, and watch us

  Who had our chance to be mud-men, convinced and estranged,

  Figure in our
own eyes for the eyes of the world.

  The Disappearing Island

  Once we presumed to found ourselves for good

  Between its blue hills and those sandless shores

  Where we spent our desperate night in prayer and vigil,

  Once we had gathered driftwood, made a hearth

  And hung our cauldron like a firmament,

  The island broke beneath us like a wave.

  The land sustaining us seemed to hold firm

  Only when we embraced it in extremis.

  All I believe that happened there was vision.

  Notes

  The pieces from Stations included here were first printed in a pamphlet in Belfast (Ulsterman Publications, 1975); and the extracts from Sweeney Astray are based upon Irish originals in Buile Suibhne. Sweeney’s voice is also present, displaced out of its medieval context, in ‘Sweeney Redivivus’.

  ‘Station Island’ is set upon an island of that name in Lough Derg in County Donegal. For centuries it has been the site of a pilgrimage which involves fasting, praying, and going barefoot around the ‘beds’—stone circles believed to be the remaining foundations of early monastic buildings. Each unit of these penitential exercises is called a ‘station’. William Carleton, who figures in Section II, published a famous account of his experiences on the island in Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (1830–33). The poem by Saint John of the Cross translated in Section XI is ‘Cantar del alma que se huelga de conoscar a Dios por fe’. (Further annotations to this title poem and to some other poems in the volume are available in Station Island.)

  S.H.

  Index of Titles

  The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.

  Act of Union

  After a Killing (Triptych, I)

  Afterwards, An

  Alphabets

  Anahorish

  Artist, An

  At the Water’s Edge (Triptych, III)

  Badgers, The

  Blackberry-Picking

  Bogland

  Bog Oak

  Bog Queen

  Bone Dreams

  Broagh

  Bye-Child

  Casualty

  Chekhov on Sakhalin

  Clearances

  Cleric, The

  Cloistered