District and Circle Read online

  You encountered them in broad daylight, going about their usual business, yet there was always a feeling that they were coming towards you out of storytime. One of the menfolk, as often as not, with a bit of a halter, you on your way to school, he with a smell of woodsmoke off him, asking if you’d seen an old horse anywhere behind the hedges. The stillness of the low tarpaulin tent as you approached and passed, the green wood in the fire spitting under a pot slung from a tripod. Every time they landed in the district, there was an extra-ness in the air, as if a gate had been left open in the usual life, as if something might get in or get out.

  3. Boarders

  There’s no heat in the bus, but the engine’s running and up where a destination should be showing it just says PRIVATE, so it must be ours. We’re back in the days of peaked caps and braid piping, drivers mounting steps as ominously as hangmen, conductors with plump bags of coin, the ticket punch a-dangle on its chain. But this is a special bus, so there’ll be no tickets, no conductor, and no fare collection until the load is full.

  The stops are the same as every other time, clusters of us with suitcases assembled in shop doorways or at the appointed crossroads, the old bus getting up speed wherever the going’s good, but now she’s changing down on Glenshane Pass. The higher she goes, the heavier she pulls, and yet there’s no real hurry. Let the driver keep doing battle with the gear-stick, let his revs and double-clutchings drag the heart, anything to put off that last stop when he slows down at the summit and turns and seems about to take us back. Instead of which he halts, pulls on the handbrake, gives us time to settle, then switches off.

  When we start again, the full lock of the steering will be held, the labour of cut and spin leave tyre-marks in the gravel, the known country fall away behind us. But for the moment it’s altogether quiet, the whole bus shakes as he bangs the cabin door shut, comes round the side and in to lift the money. Unfamiliar, uninvolved, almost, it seems, angered, he deals with us one by one, as one by one we go farther into ourselves, wishing we were him on the journey back, flailing downhill with the windows all lit up, empty and faster and angrier bend after bend.

  THE LIFT

  A first green braird: the hawthorn half in leaf.

  Her funeral filled the road

  And could have stepped from some old photograph

  Of a Breton pardon, remote

  Familiar women and men in caps

  Walking four abreast, soon falling quiet.

  Then came the throttle and articulated whops

  Of a helicopter crossing, and afterwards

  Awareness of the sound of our own footsteps,

  Of open air, and the life behind those words

  “Open” and “air.” I remembered her aghast,

  Foetal, shaking, sweating, shrunk, wet-haired,

  A beaten breath, a misting mask, the flash

  Of one wild glance, like ghost surveillance

  From behind a gleam of helicopter glass.

  A lifetime, then the deathtime: reticence

  Keeping us together when together,

  All declaration deemed outspokenness.

  Favourite aunt, good sister, faithful daughter,

  Delicate since childhood, tough alloy

  Of disapproval, kindness, and hauteur,

  She took the risk, at last, of certain joys—

  Her birdtable and jubilating birds,

  The “fashion” in her wardrobe and her tallboy.

  Weather, in the end, would say our say.

  Reprise of griefs in summer’s clearest mornings,

  Children’s deaths in snowdrops and the may,

  Whole requiems at the sight of plants and gardens …

  They bore her lightly on the bier. Four women,

  Four friends—she would have called them girls—stepped in

  And claimed the final lift beneath the hawthorn.

  NONCE WORDS

  The road taken

  to bypass Cavan

  took me west,

  (a sign mistaken)

  so at Derrylin

  I turned east.

  Sun on ice,

  white floss

  on reed and bush,

  the bridge-iron cast

  in an Advent silence

  I drove across,

  then pulled in,

  parked, and sat

  breathing mist

  on the windscreen.

  Requiescat …

  I got out

  well happed up,

  stood at the frozen

  shore gazing

  at rimed horizon,

  my first stop

  like this in years.

  And blessed myself

  in the name of the nonce

  and happenstance,

  the Who knows

  and What nexts

  and So be its.

  STERN

  in memory of Ted Hughes

  “And what was it like,” I asked him,

  “Meeting Eliot?”

  “When he looked at you,”

  He said, “it was like standing on a quay

  Watching the prow of the Queen Mary

  Come towards you, very slowly.”

  Now it seems

  I’m standing on a pierhead watching him

  All the while watching me as he rows out

  And a wooden end-stopped stern

  Labours and shimmers and dips,

  Making no real headway.

  OUT OF THIS WORLD

  in memory of Czeslaw Milosz

  l. “Like everybody else …”

  “Like everybody else, I bowed my head

  during the consecration of the bread and wine,

  lifted my eyes to the raised host and raised chalice,

  believed (whatever it means) that a change occurred.

  I went to the altar rails and received the mystery

  on my tongue, returned to my place, shut my eyes fast, made

  an act of thanksgiving, opened my eyes, and felt

  time starting up again.

  There was never a scene

  when I had it out with myself or with another.

  The loss occurred off stage. And yet I cannot

  disavow words like ‘thanksgiving’ or ‘host’

  or ‘communion bread.’ They have an undying

  tremor and draw, like well water far down.”

  2. Brancardier

  You’re off, a pilgrim, in the age of steam:

  Derry, Dun Laoghaire, Dover, Rue du Bac

  (Prayers for the Blessed M. M. Alacoque,

  That she be canonized). Then leisure time

  That evening in Paris, whence to Lourdes,

  Learning to trust your learning on the way:

  “Non, pas de vin, merci. Mais oui, du thé,”

  And the waiter’s gone to take you at your word.

  Hotel de quoi in Rue de quoi? All gone.

  But not your designation, brancardier,

  And your coloured bandolier, as you lift and lay

  The sick on stretchers in precincts of the shrine

  Or on bleak concrete to await their bath.

  And always the word “cure” hangs in the air

  Like crutches hung up near the grotto altar.

  And always prayers out loud or under breath.

  Belgian miners in blue dungarees

  March in procession, carrying brass lamps.

  Sodalities with sashes, poles, and pennants

  Move up the line. Mantillas, rosaries,

  And the unam sanctam catholicam acoustic

  Of that underground basilica—maybe

  Not gone but not what was meant to be,

  The concrete reinforcement of the Mystical

  Body, the Eleusis of its age.

  I brought back one plastic canteen litre

  On a shoulder strap (très chic) of the Lourdes water.

  One small glass dome that englobed an image

  Of the Virgin above barefoot Bern
adette—

  Shake it and the clear liquid would snow

  Flakes like white angel feathers on the grotto.

  And (for stretcher-bearing work) a certificate.

  3. Saw Music

  Q. Do you renounce the world?

  A. I do renounce it.

  Barrie Cooke has begun to paint “godbeams,”

  Vents of brightness that make the light of heaven

  Look like stretched sheets of fluted silk or rayon

  In an old-style draper’s window. Airslides, scrims,

  And scumble. Columnar sift. But his actual palette

  Is ever sludge and smudge, as if a shower

  Made puddles on the spirit’s winnowing floor.

  What it reminds me of is a wet night

  In Belfast, around Christmas, when the man

  Who played the saw inside the puddled doorway

  Of a downtown shop, in light from a display

  Of tinselled stuffs and sleigh bells blinking neon,

  Started to draw his bow across the blade.

  The stainless steel was oiled or Vaselined,

  The saw stood upside down, and his left hand

  Pressed light or heavy as the tune required

  Flop-wobble grace note or high banshee whine.

  Rain spat upon his threadbare gaberdine,

  Into his cap where the occasional tossed coin

  Basked on damp lining, the raindrops glittering

  Like the saw’s greased teeth his bow caressed and crossed

  Back across unharmed. “The art of oil painting—

  Daubs fixed on canvas—is a paltry thing

  Compared with what cries out to be expressed,”

  The poet said, who lies this god-beamed day

  Coffined in Kraków, as out of this world now

  As the untranscendent music of the saw

  He might have heard in Vilnius or Warsaw

  And would not have renounced, however paltry.

  IN IOWA

  In Iowa once, among the Mennonites

  In a slathering blizzard, conveyed all afternoon

  Through sleet-glit pelting hard against the windscreen

  And a wiper’s strong absolving slumps and flits,

  I saw, abandoned in the open gap

  Of a field where wilted corn stalks flagged the snow,

  A mowing machine. Snow brimmed its iron seat,

  Heaped each spoked wheel with a thick white brow,

  And took the shine off oil in the black-toothed gears.

  Verily I came forth from that wilderness

  As one unbaptized who had known darkness

  At the third hour and the veil in tattters.

  In Iowa once. In the slush and rush and hiss

  Not of parted but as of rising waters.

  HÖFN

  The three-tongued glacier has begun to melt.

  What will we do, they ask, when boulder-milt

  Comes wallowing across the delta flats

  And the miles-deep shag ice makes its move?

  I saw it, ridged and rock-set, from above,

  Undead grey-gristed earth-pelt, aeon-scruff,

  And feared its coldness that still seemed enough

  To iceblock the plane window dimmed with breath,

  Deepfreeze the seep of adamantine tilth

  And every warm, mouthwatering word of mouth.

  ON THE SPOT

  A cold clutch, a whole nestful, all but hidden

  In last year’s autumn leaf-mould, and I knew

  By the mattness and the stillness of them, rotten,

  Making death sweat of a morning dew

  That didn’t so much shine the shells as damp them.

  I was down on my hands and knees there in the wet

  Grass under the hedge, adoring it,

  Early riser busy reaching in

  And used to finding warm eggs. But instead

  This sudden polar stud

  And stigma and dawn stone-circle chill

  In my mortified right hand, proof positive

  Of what conspired on the spot to addle

  Matter in its planetary stand-off.

  THE TOLLUND MAN IN SPRINGTIME

  Into your virtual city I’ll have passed

  Unregistered by scans, screens, hidden eyes,

  Lapping myself in time, an absorbed face

  Coming and going, neither god nor ghost,

  Not at odds or at one, but simply lost

  To you and yours, out under seeding grass

  And trickles of kesh water, sphagnum moss,

  Dead bracken on the spreadfield, red as rust.

  I reawoke to revel in the spirit

  They strengthened when they chose to put me down

  For their own good. And to a sixth-sensed threat:

  Panicked snipe offshooting into twilight,

  Then going awry, larks quietened in the sun,

  Clear alteration in the bog-pooled rain.

  Scone of peat, composite bog-dough

  They trampled like a muddy vintage, then

  Slabbed and spread and turned to dry in sun—

  Though never kindling-dry the whole way through—

  A dead-weight, slow-burn lukewarmth in the flue,

  Ashless, flameless, its very smoke a sullen

  Waft of swamp-breath … And me, so long unrisen,

  I knew that same dead weight in joint and sinew

  Until a spade-plate slid and soughed and plied

  At my buried ear, and the levered sod

  Got lifted up; then once I felt the air

  I was like turned turf in the breath of God,

  Bog-bodied on the sixth day, brown and bare,

  And on the last, all told, unatrophied.

  My heavy head. Bronze-buffed. Ear to the ground.

  My eye at turf level. Its snailskin lid.

  My cushioned cheek and brow. My phantom hand

  And arm and leg and shoulder that felt pillowed

  As fleshily as when the bog pith weighed

  To mould me to itself and it to me

  Between when I was buried and unburied.

  Between what happened and was meant to be.

  On show for years while all that lay in wait

  Still waited. Disembodied. Far renowned.

  Faith placed in me, me faithless as a stone

  The harrow turned up when the crop was sown.

  Out in the Danish night I’d hear soft wind

  And remember moony water in a rut.

  “The soul exceeds its circumstances.” Yes.

  History not to be granted the last word

  Or the first claim … In the end I gathered

  From the display-case peat my staying powers,

  Told my webbed wrists to be like silver birches,

  My old uncallused hands to be young sward,

  The spade-cut skin to heal, and got restored

  By telling myself this. Late as it was,

  The early bird still sang, the meadow hay

  Still buttercupped and daisied, sky was new.

  I smelled the air, exhaust fumes, silage reek,

  Heard from my heather bed the thickened traffic

  Swarm at a roundabout five fields away

  And transatlantic flights stacked in the blue.

  Cattle out in rain, their knowledgeable

  Solid standing and readiness to wait,

  These I learned from. My study was the wet,

  My head as washy as a head of kale,

  Shedding water like the flanks and tail

  Of every dumb beast sunk above the cloot

  In trampled gaps, bringing their heavyweight

  Silence to bear on nosed-at sludge and puddle.

  Of another world, unlearnable, and so

  To be lived by, whatever it was I knew

  Came back to me. Newfound contrariness.

  In check-out lines, at cash-points, in those queues

  Of wired, far-faced smilers
, I stood off,

  Bulrush, head in air, far from its lough.

  Through every check and scan I carried with me

  A bunch of Tollund rushes—roots and all—

  Bagged in their own bog-damp. In an old stairwell

  Broom cupboard where I had hoped they’d stay

  Damp until transplanted, they went musty.

  Every green-skinned stalk turned friable,

  The drowned-mouse fibres withered and the whole

  Limp, soggy cluster lost its frank bouquet

  Of weed leaf and turf mould. Dust in my palm

  And in my nostrils dust, should I shake it off

  Or mix it in with spit in pollen’s name

  And my own? As a man would, cutting turf,

  I straightened, spat on my hands, felt benefit,

  And spirited myself into the street.

  MOYULLA

  In those days she flowed

  black-lick and quick

  under the sallies,

  the coldness off her

  like the coldness off you—

  your cheek and your clothes

  and your moves—when you come in

  from gardening.

  She was in the swim

  of herself, her gravel shallows

  swarmed, pollen sowings

  tarnished her pools.

  And so what, did I hear

  somebody cry? Let them

  cry if it suits them,

  but let it be for her,

  her stones, her purls, her pebbles

  slicked and blurred

  with algae, as if her name

  and addressing water

  suffered muddying,

  her clear vowels

  a great vowel shift,

  Moyola to Moyulla.

  Milk-fevered river.

  Froth at the mouth

  of the discharge pipe,

  gidsome flotsam …

  Barefooted on the bank,

  glad-eyed, ankle-grassed,

  I saw it all

  and loved it at the time—