Selected Poems 1966-1987 Read online

  But I ran my hand in the half-filled bags

  Hooked to the slots. It was hard as shot,

  Innumerable and cool. The bags gaped

  Where the chutes ran back to the stilled drum

  And forks were stuck at angles in the ground

  As javelins might mark lost battlefields.

  I moved between them back across the stubble.

  They lay in the ring of their own crusts and dregs

  Smoking and saying nothing. ‘There’s good yield,

  Isn’t there?’—as proud as if he were the land itself—

  ‘Enough for crushing and for sowing both.’

  And that was it. I’d come and he had shown me,

  So I belonged no further to the work.

  I gathered cups and folded up the cloth

  And went. But they still kept their ease

  Spread out, unbuttoned, grateful, under the trees.

  Night Drive

  The smells of ordinariness

  Were new on the night drive through France:

  Rain and hay and woods on the air

  Made warm draughts in the open car.

  Signposts whitened relentlessly.

  Montreuil, Abbéville, Beauvais

  Were promised, promised, came and went,

  Each place granting its name’s fulfilment.

  A combine groaning its way late

  Bled seeds across its work-light.

  A forest fire smouldered out.

  One by one small cafés shut.

  I thought of you continuously

  A thousand miles south where Italy

  Laid its loin to France on the darkened sphere.

  Your ordinariness was renewed there.

  Relic of Memory

  The lough waters

  Can petrify wood:

  Old oars and posts

  Over the years

  Harden their grain,

  Incarcerate ghosts

  Of sap and season.

  The shallows lap

  And give and take:

  Constant ablutions,

  Such drowning love

  Stun a stake

  To stalagmite.

  Dead lava,

  The cooling star,

  Coal and diamond

  Or sudden birth

  Of burnt meteor

  Are too simple,

  Without the lure

  That relic stored—

  A piece of stone

  On the shelf at school,

  Oatmeal-coloured.

  Bogland

  For T. P. Flanagan

  We have no prairies

  To slice a big sun at evening—

  Everywhere the eye concedes to

  Encroaching horizon,

  Is wooed into the cyclops’ eye

  Of a tarn. Our unfenced country

  Is bog that keeps crusting

  Between the sights of the sun.

  They’ve taken the skeleton

  Of the Great Irish Elk

  Out of the peat, set it up,

  An astounding crate full of air.

  Butter sunk under

  More than a hundred years

  Was recovered salty and white.

  The ground itself is kind, black butter

  Melting and opening underfoot,

  Missing its last definition

  By millions of years.

  They’ll never dig coal here,

  Only the waterlogged trunks

  Of great firs, soft as pulp.

  Our pioneers keep striking

  Inwards and downwards,

  Every layer they strip

  Seems camped on before.

  The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.

  The wet centre is bottomless.

  FROM

  Wintering Out

  (1972)

  Bog Oak

  A carter’s trophy

  split for rafters,

  a cobwebbed, black,

  long-seasoned rib

  under the first thatch.

  I might tarry

  with the moustached

  dead, the creel-fillers,

  or eavesdrop on

  their hopeless wisdom

  as a blow-down of smoke

  struggles over the half-door

  and mizzling rain

  blurs the far end

  of the cart track.

  The softening ruts

  lead back to no

  ‘oak groves’, no

  cutters of mistletoe

  in the green clearings.

  Perhaps I just make out

  Edmund Spenser,

  dreaming sunlight,

  encroached upon by

  geniuses who creep

  ‘out of every corner

  of the woodes and glennes’

  towards watercress and carrion.

  Anahorish

  My ‘place of clear water’,

  the first hill in the world

  where springs washed into

  the shiny grass

  and darkened cobbles

  in the bed of the lane.

  Anahorish, soft gradient

  of consonant, vowel-meadow,

  after-image of lamps

  swung through the yards

  on winter evenings.

  With pails and barrows

  those mound-dwellers

  go waist-deep in mist

  to break the light ice

  at wells and dunghills.

  Gifts of Rain

  I

  Cloudburst and steady downpour now

  for days.

  Still mammal,

  straw-footed on the mud,

  he begins to sense weather

  by his skin.

  A nimble snout of flood

  licks over stepping stones

  and goes uprooting.

  He fords

  his life by sounding.

  Soundings.

  II

  A man wading lost fields

  breaks the pane of flood:

  a flower of mud-

  water blooms up to his reflection

  like a cut swaying

  its red spoors through a basin.

  His hands grub

  where the spade has uncastled

  sunken drills, an atlantis

  he depends on. So

  he is hooped to where he planted

  and sky and ground

  are running naturally among his arms

  that grope the cropping land.

  III

  When rains were gathering

  there would be an all-night

  roaring off the ford.

  Their world-schooled ear

  could monitor the usual

  confabulations, the race

  slabbering past the gable,

  the Moyola harping on

  its gravel beds:

  all spouts by daylight

  brimmed with their own airs

  and overflowed each barrel

  in long tresses.

  I cock my ear

  at an absence—

  in the shared calling of blood

  arrives my need

  for antediluvian lore.

  Soft voices of the dead

  are whispering by the shore

  that I would question

  (and for my children’s sake)

  about crops rotted, river mud

  glazing the baked clay floor.

  IV

  The tawny guttural water

  spells itself: Moyola

  is its own score and consort,

  bedding the locale

  in the utterance,

  reed music, an old chanter

  breathing its mists

  through vowels and history.

  A swollen river,

  a mating call of sound

  rises to pleasure me, Dives,

  hoarder of common ground.

  Broagh

  Riverbank, the l
ong rigs

  ending in broad docken

  and a canopied pad

  down to the ford.

  The garden mould

  bruised easily, the shower

  gathering in your heelmark

  was the black O

  in Broagh,

  its low tattoo

  among the windy boortrees

  and rhubarb-blades

  ended almost

  suddenly, like that last

  gh the strangers found

  difficult to manage.

  Oracle

  Hide in the hollow trunk

  of the willow tree,

  its listening familiar,

  until, as usual, they

  cuckoo your name

  across the fields.

  You can hear them

  draw the poles of stiles

  as they approach

  calling you out:

  small mouth and ear

  in a woody cleft,

  lobe and larynx

  of the mossy places.

  A New Song

  I met a girl from Derrygarve

  And the name, a lost potent musk,

  Recalled the river’s long swerve,

  A kingfisher’s blue bolt at dusk

  And stepping stones like black molars

  Sunk in the ford, the shifty glaze

  Of the whirlpool, the Moyola

  Pleasuring beneath alder trees.

  And Derrygarve, I thought, was just:

  Vanished music, twilit water—

  A smooth libation of the past

  Poured by this chance vestal daughter.

  But now our river tongues must rise

  From licking deep in native haunts

  To flood, with vowelling embrace,

  Demesnes staked out in consonants.

  And Castledawson we’ll enlist

  And Upperlands, each planted bawn—

  Like bleaching-greens resumed by grass—

  A vocable, as rath and bullaun.

  The Other Side

  I

  Thigh-deep in sedge and marigolds

  a neighbour laid his shadow

  on the stream, vouching

  ‘It’s poor as Lazarus, that ground,’

  and brushed away

  among the shaken leafage.

  I lay where his lea sloped

  to meet our fallow,

  nested on moss and rushes,

  my ear swallowing

  his fabulous, biblical dismissal,

  that tongue of chosen people.

  When he would stand like that

  on the other side, white-haired,

  swinging his blackthorn

  at the marsh weeds,

  he prophesied above our scraggy acres,

  then turned away

  towards his promised furrows

  on the hill, a wake of pollen

  drifting to our bank, next season’s tares.

  II

  For days we would rehearse

  each patriarchal dictum:

  Lazarus, the Pharaoh, Solomon

  and David and Goliath rolled

  magnificently, like loads of hay

  too big for our small lanes,

  or faltered on a rut—

  ‘Your side of the house, I believe,

  hardly rule by the Book at all.’

  His brain was a whitewashed kitchen

  hung with texts, swept tidy

  as the body o’ the kirk.

  III

  Then sometimes when the rosary was dragging

  mournfully on in the kitchen

  we would hear his step round the gable

  though not until after the litany

  would the knock come to the door

  and the casual whistle strike up

  on the doorstep. ‘A right-looking night,’

  he might say, ‘I was dandering by

  and says I, I might as well call.’

  But now I stand behind him

  in the dark yard, in the moan of prayers,

  He puts a hand in a pocket

  or taps a little tune with the blackthorn

  shyly, as if he were party to

  lovemaking or a stranger’s weeping.

  Should I slip away, I wonder,

  or go up and touch his shoulder

  and talk about the weather

  or the price of grass-seed?

  The Tollund Man

  I

  Some day I will go to Aarhus

  To see his peat-brown head,

  The mild pods of his eye-lids,

  His pointed skin cap.

  In the flat country nearby

  Where they dug him out,

  His last gruel of winter seeds

  Caked in his stomach,

  Naked except for

  The cap, noose and girdle,

  I will stand a long time.

  Bridegroom to the goddess,

  She tightened her torc on him

  And opened her fen,

  Those dark juices working

  Him to a saint’s kept body,

  Trove of the turfcutters’

  Honeycombed workings.

  Now his stained face

  Reposes at Aarhus.

  II

  I could risk blasphemy,

  Consecrate the cauldron bog

  Our holy ground and pray

  Him to make germinate

  The scattered, ambushed

  Flesh of labourers,

  Stockinged corpses

  Laid out in the farmyards,

  Tell-tale skin and teeth

  Flecking the sleepers

  Of four young brothers, trailed

  For miles along the lines.

  III

  Something of his sad freedom

  As he rode the tumbril

  Should come to me, driving,

  Saying the names

  Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard,

  Watching the pointing hands

  Of country people,

  Not knowing their tongue.

  Out there in Jutland

  In the old man-killing parishes

  I will feel lost,

  Unhappy and at home.

  Wedding Day

  I am afraid.

  Sound has stopped in the day

  And the images reel over

  And over. Why all those tears,

  The wild grief on his face

  Outside the taxi? The sap

  Of mourning rises

  In our waving guests.

  You sing behind the tall cake

  Like a deserted bride

  Who persists, demented,

  And goes through the ritual.

  When I went to the Gents

  There was a skewered heart

  And a legend of love. Let me

  Sleep on your breast to the airport.

  Summer Home

  I

  Was it wind off the dumps

  or something in heat

  dogging us, the summer gone sour,

  a fouled nest incubating somewhere?

  Whose fault, I wondered, inquisitor

  of the possessed air.

  To realize suddenly,

  whip off the mat

  that was larval, moving—

  and scald, scald, scald.

  II

  Bushing the door, my arms full

  of wild cherry and rhododendron,

  I hear her small lost weeping

  through the hall, that bells and hoarsens

  on my name, my name.

  O love, here is the blame.

  The loosened flowers between us

  gather in, compose

  for a May altar of sorts.

  These frank and falling blooms

  soon taint to a sweet chrism.

  Attend. Anoint the wound.

  III

  Oh, we tented our wound all right

  under the homely sheet

  and lay as if t
he cold flat of a blade

  had winded us.

  More and more I postulate

  thick healings, like now

  as you bend in the shower

  water lives down the tilting stoups of your breasts.

  IV

  With a final

  unmusical drive

  long grains begin

  to open and split

  ahead and once more

  we sap

  the white, trodden

  path to the heart.

  V

  My children weep out the hot foreign night.

  We walk the floor, my foul mouth takes it out

  On you and we lie stiff till dawn

  Attends the pillow, and the maize, and vine

  That holds its filling burden to the light.

  Yesterday rocks sang when we tapped

  Stalactites in the cave’s old, dripping dark—

  Our love calls tiny as a tuning fork.

  Limbo

  Fishermen at Ballyshannon

  Netted an infant last night

  Along with the salmon.

  An illegitimate spawning,

  A small one thrown back

  To the waters. But I’m sure

  As she stood in the shallows

  Ducking him tenderly

  Till the frozen knobs of her wrists

  Were dead as the gravel,

  He was a minnow with hooks

  Tearing her open.

  She waded in under

  The sign of her cross.

  He was hauled in with the fish.

  Now limbo will be

  A cold glitter of souls

  Through some far briny zone.

  Even Christ’s palms, unhealed,

  Smart and cannot fish there.

  Bye-Child

  He was discovered in the henhouse where she had confined him. He was incapable of saying anything.

  When the lamp glowed,

  A yolk of light

  In their back window,

  The child in the outhouse

  Put his eye to a chink—

  Little henhouse boy,

  Sharp-faced as new moons

  Remembered, your photo still

  Glimpsed like a rodent

  On the floor of my mind,

  Little moon man,

  Kennelled and faithful

  At the foot of the yard,

  Your frail shape, luminous,

  Weightless, is stirring the dust,

  The cobwebs, old droppings

  Under the roosts

  And dry smells from scraps

  She put through your trapdoor

  Morning and evening.

  After those footsteps, silence;

  Vigils, solitudes, fasts,

  Unchristened tears,

  A puzzled love of the light.

  But now you speak at last