New and Selected Poems Read online

  That rock where breakers shredded into rags,

  The leggy birds stilted on their own legs,

  Islands riding themselves out into the fog

  And drive back home, still with nothing to say

  Except that now you will uncode all landscapes

  By this: things founded clean on their own shapes,

  Water and ground in their extremity.

  Requiem for the Croppies

  The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley –

  No kitchens on the run, no striking camp –

  We moved quick and sudden in our own country.

  The priest lay behind ditches with the tramp.

  A people, hardly marching – on the hike –

  We found new tactics happening each day:

  We’d cut through reins and rider with the pike

  And stampede cattle into infantry,

  Then retreat through hedges where cavalry must be thrown.

  Until, on Vinegar Hill, the fatal conclave.

  Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.

  The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.

  They buried us without shroud or coffin

  And in August the barley grew up out of the grave.

  The Wife’s Tale

  When I had spread it all on linen cloth

  Under the hedge, I called them over.

  The hum and gulp of the thresher ran down

  And the big belt slewed to a standstill, straw

  Hanging undelivered in the jaws.

  There was such quiet that I heard their boots

  Crunching the stubble twenty yards away.

  He lay down and said ‘Give these fellows theirs,

  I’m in no hurry,’ plucking grass in handfuls

  And tossing it in the air. ‘That looks well.’

  (He nodded at my white cloth on the grass.)

  ‘I declare a woman could lay out a field

  Though boys like us have little call for cloths.’

  He winked, then watched me as I poured a cup

  And buttered the thick slices that he likes.

  ‘It’s threshing better than I thought, and mind

  It’s good clean seed. Away over there and look.’

  Always this inspection has to be made

  Even when I don’t know what to look for.

  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.

  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 t
o 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 long 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 Ο

  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