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  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 in its 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.

  The Riddle

  You never saw it used but still can hear

  The sift and fall of stuff hopped on the mesh,

  Clods and buds in a little dust-up,

  The dribbled pile accruing under it.

  Which would be better, what sticks or what falls through?

  Or does the choice itself create the value?

  Legs apart, deft-handed, start a mime

  To sift the sense of things from what’s imagined

  And work out what was happening in that story

  Of the man who carried water in a riddle.

  Was it culpable ignorance, or was it rather

  A via negativa through drops and let-downs?

  from THE CURE AT TROY (1990)

  Voices from Lemnos

  I

  CHORUS

  Philoctetes.

  Hercules.

  Odysseus.

  Heroes. Victims. Gods and human beings.

  All throwing shapes, every one of them

  Convinced he’s in the right, all of them glad

  To repeat themselves and their every last mistake,

  No matter what.

  People so deep into

  Their own self-pity self-pity buoys them up.

  People so staunch and true, they are pillars of truth,

  Shining with self-regard like polished stones.

  And their whole life spent admiring themselves

  For their own long-suffering.

  Highlighting old scars

  And flashing them around like decorations.

  I hate it, I always hated it, I am

  A part of it myself.

  II

  PHILOCTETES TO NEOPTOLEMUS

  Gods curse it!

  But it’s me the gods have cursed.

  They’ve let my name and story be wiped out.

  The real offenders got away with it

  And I am still here, rotting like a leper.

  Tell me, son. Achilles was your father.

  Did you ever maybe hear him mentioning

  A man who had inherited a bow –

  The actual bow and arrows that belonged

  To Hercules, and that Hercules gave him?

  Did you never hear, son, about Philoctetes?

  About the snake-bite he got at a shrine

  When the first fleet was voyaging to Troy?

  And then the way he broke out with a sore

  And was marooned on the commanders’ orders?

  Let me tell you, son, the way they deserted me.

  The sea and the sea-swell had me all worn out

  So I dozed and fell asleep under a rock

  Down on the shore.

  And there and then, like that,

  They headed off.

  And they were delighted.

  And the only thing

  They left me was a bundle of old rags.

  Some day I want them all to waken up

  The way I did that day. Imagine, son.

  The bay all empty. The ships all disappeared.

  Absolute loneliness. Nothing there except

  The beat of the waves and the beat of my raw wound …

  This island is a nowhere. Nobody

  Would ever put in here. There’s nothing.

  Nothing to attract a lookout’s eye.

  Nobody in his right mind would come near it.

  And the rare ones that ever did turn up

  Landed by accident, against their will.

  They would take pity on me, naturally.

  Share out their supplies and give me clothes.

  But not a one of them would ever, ever

  Take me on board with them to ship me home.

  Every day has been a weeping wound

  For ten years now. Ten years of misery –

  That’s all my service ever got for me.

  That’s what I’ve got to thank Odysseus for

  And Menelaus and Agamemnon.

  Gods curse them all!

  I ask for the retribution I deserve.

  III

  PHILOCTETES

  Have you not a sword for me? Or an axe? Or something?

  CHORUS

  What for?

  PHILOCTETES

  What for? What do you think for?

  For foot and head and hand. For the relief

  Of cutting myself off. I want away.

  CHORUS

  Away where?

  PHILOCTETES

  Away to the house of death.

  To my father, sitting waiting

  Under the clay roof. I’ll come back in to him

  Out of the light, out of his memory

  Of the day I left.

  We’ll be on the riverbank

  Again, and see the Greeks arriving

  And me setting out for Troy, in all good faith.

  IV

  CHORUS

  Human beings suffer.

  They torture one another.

  They get hurt and get hard.

  No poem or play or song

  Can fully right a wrong

  Inflicted and endured.

  History says, Don’t hope

  On this side of the grave,

  But then, once in a lifetime

  The longed-for tidal wave

  Of justice can rise up

  And hope and history rhyme.

  So hope for a great sea-change

  On the far side of revenge.

  Believe that a farther shore

  Is reachable from here.

  Believe in miracles

  And cures and healing wells.

  Call miracle self-healing,

  The utter self-revealing

  Double-take of feeling.

  If there’s fire on the mountain

  And lightning and storm

  And a god speaks from the sky

  That means someone is hearing

  The outcry and the birth-cry

  Of new life at its term.

  It means once in a lifetime

  That justice can rise up

  And hope and history rhyme.

  PHILOCTETES

  Hercules:

  I saw him in the fire.

  Hercules

  was shining in the air.

  I heard the voice of Hercules in my head.

  CHORUS

  I have opened the closed road

  Between the living and the dead

  To make the right road clear to you.

  I am the voice of Hercules now.

  Here on earth my labours were

  The stepping stones to upper air.

  Lives that suffer and come right

  Are backlit by immortal light.

  Go, Philoctetes, with this boy,

  Go and be cured and capture Troy.

  Asclepius will make you whole,

  Relieve your body and your soul.

  Go, with your bow. Conclude the sore

  And cruel stalemate of our war.

  Win by fair combat. But know to shun

  Reprisal killings when that’s done.

  Then take just spoils and sail at last

  Out of the bad dream of your past.

  Make sacrifice. Burn spoils to me.

  Shoot arrows in my memory.

  But when the city’s being sacked

  Pr
eserve the shrines. Show gods respect.

  Reverence for gods survives

  Our individual mortal lives.

  V

  CHORUS

  Now it’s high watermark

  And floodtide in the heart

  And time to go.

  The sea-nymphs in the spray

  Will be the chorus now.

  What’s left to say?

  Suspect too much sweet talk

  But never close your mind.

  It was a fortunate wind

  That blew me here. I leave

  Half-ready to believe

  That a crippled trust might walk

  And the half-true rhyme is love.

  from SEEING THINGS (1991)

  The Golden Bough

  (from Virgil, Aeneid, Book VI)

  Aeneas was praying and holding on the altar

  When the prophetess started to speak: ‘Blood relation of gods,

  Trojan, son of Anchises, the way down to Avernus is easy.

  Day and night black Pluto’s door stands open.

  But to retrace your steps and get back to upper air,

  This is the real task and the real undertaking.

  A few have been able to do it, sons of the gods

  Favoured by Jupiter Justus, or exalted to heaven

  In a blaze of heroic glory. Forests spread half-way down

  And Cocytus winds through the dark, licking its banks.

  Still, if love torments you so much and you so much desire

  To sail the Stygian lake twice and twice to inspect

  The underworld dark, if you must go beyond what’s permitted,

  Understand what you must do beforehand.

  Hidden in the thick of a tree is a bough made of gold

  And its leaves and pliable twigs are made of it too.

  It is sacred to underworld Juno, who is its patron,

  And overtopped by a grove where deep shadows mass

  Along far wooded valleys. No one is ever permitted

  To go down into earth’s hidden places unless he has first

  Plucked this golden-fledged tree-branch out of its tree

  And bestowed it on fair Proserpina, to whom it belongs

  By decree, her own special gift. And when it is plucked

  A second one grows in its place, golden once more,

  And the foliage growing upon it glimmers the same.

  Therefore look up and search deep and when you have found it

  Take hold of it boldly and duly. If fate has called you

  The bough will come away easily, of its own sweet accord.

  Otherwise, no matter how much strength you muster, you won’t

  Ever manage to quell it or fell it with the toughest of blades.’

  Markings

  I

  We marked the pitch: four jackets for four goalposts,

  That was all. The corners and the squares

  Were there like longitude and latitude

  Under the bumpy ground, to be

  Agreed about or disagreed about

  When the time came. And then we picked the teams

  And crossed the line our called names drew between us.

  Youngsters shouting their heads off in a field

  As the light died and they kept on playing

  Because by then they were playing in their heads

  And the actual kicked ball came to them

  Like a dream heaviness, and their own hard

  Breathing in the dark and skids on grass

  Sounded like effort in another world …

  It was quick and constant, a game that never need

  Be played out. Some limit had been passed,

  There was fleetness, furtherance, untiredness

  In time that was extra, unforeseen and free.

  II

  You also loved lines pegged out in the garden,

  The spade nicking the first straight edge along

  The tight white string. Or string stretched perfectly

  To make the outline of a house foundation,

  Pale timber battens set at right angles

  For every corner, each freshly sawn new board

  Spick and span in the oddly passive grass.

  Or the imaginary line straight down

  A field of grazing, to be ploughed open

  From the rod stuck in one headrig to the rod

  Stuck in the other.

  III

  All these things entered you

  As if they were both the door and what came through it.

  They marked the spot, marked time and held it open.

  A mower parted the bronze sea of corn.

  A windlass hauled the centre out of water.

  Two men with a cross-cut kept it swimming

  Into a felled beech backwards and forwards

  So that they seemed to row the steady earth.

  Man and Boy

  I

  ‘Catch the old one first,’

  (My father’s joke was also old, and heavy

  And predictable). ‘Then the young ones

  Will all follow, and Bob’s your uncle.’

  On slow bright river evenings, the sweet time

  Made him afraid we’d take too much for granted

  And so our spirits must be lightly checked.

  Blessed be down-to-earth! Blessed be highs!

  Blessed be the detachment of dumb love

  In that broad-backed, low-set man

  Who feared debt all his life, but now and then

  Could make a splash like the salmon he said was

  ‘As big as a wee pork pig by the sound of it’.

  II

  In earshot of the pool where the salmon jumped

  Back through its own unheard concentric soundwaves

  A mower leans forever on his scythe.

  He has mown himself to the centre of the field

  And stands in a final perfect ring

  Of sunlit stubble.

  ‘Go and tell your father,’ the mower says

  (He said it to my father who told me),

  ‘I have it mowed as clean as a new sixpence.’

  My father is a barefoot boy with news,

  Running at eye-level with weeds and stooks

  On the afternoon of his own father’s death.

  The open, black half of the half-door waits.

  I feel much heat and hurry in the air.

  I feel his legs and quick heels far away

  And strange as my own – when he will piggyback me

  At a great height, light-headed and thin-boned,

  Like a witless elder rescued from the fire.

  Seeing Things

  I

  Inishbofin on a Sunday morning.

  Sunlight, turfsmoke, seagulls, boatslip, diesel.

  One by one we were being handed down

  Into a boat that dipped and shilly-shallied

  Scaresomely every time. We sat tight

  On short cross-benches, in nervous twos and threes,

  Obedient, newly close, nobody speaking

  Except the boatmen, as the gunwales sank

  And seemed they might ship water any minute.

  The sea was very calm but even so,

  When the engine kicked and our ferryman

  Swayed for balance, reaching for the tiller,

  I panicked at the shiftiness and heft

  Of the craft itself. What guaranteed us –

  That quick response and buoyancy and swim –

  Kept me in agony. All the time

  As we went sailing evenly across

  The deep, still, seeable-down-into water,

  It was as if I looked from another boat

  Sailing through air, far up, and could see

  How riskily we fared into the morning,

  And loved in vain our bare, bowed, numbered heads.

  II

  Claritas. The dry-eyed Latin word

  Is perfect for the carved stone of the wat
er

  Where Jesus stands up to his unwet knees

  And John the Baptist pours out more water

  Over his head: all this in bright sunlight

  On the façade of a cathedral. Lines

  Hard and thin and sinuous represent

  The flowing river. Down between the lines

  Little antic fish are all go. Nothing else.

  And yet in that utter visibility

  The stone’s alive with what’s invisible:

  Waterweed, stirred sand-grains hurrying off,

  The shadowy, unshadowed stream itself.

  All afternoon, heat wavered on the steps

  And the air we stood up to our eyes in wavered

  Like the zig-zag hieroglyph for life itself.

  III

  Once upon a time my undrowned father

  Walked into our yard. He had gone to spray

  Potatoes in a field on the riverbank

  And wouldn’t bring me with him. The horse-sprayer

  Was too big and new-fangled, bluestone might

  Burn me in the eyes, the horse was fresh, I

  Might scare the horse, and so on. I threw stones

  At a bird on the shed roof, as much for

  The clatter of the stones as anything,

  But when he came back, I was inside the house

  And saw him out the window, scatter-eyed

  And daunted, strange without his hat,

  His step unguided, his ghosthood immanent.

  When he was turning on the riverbank,

  The horse had rusted and reared up and pitched

  Cart and sprayer and everything off balance