Selected Poems 1966-1987 Read online

  With a remote mime

  Of something beyond patience,

  Your gaping wordless proof

  Of lunar distances

  Travelled beyond love.

  Westering

  In California

  I sit under Rand McNally’s

  ‘Official Map of the Moon’—

  The colour of frogskin,

  Its enlarged pores held

  Open and one called

  ‘Pitiscus’ at eye level—

  Recalling the last night

  In Donegal, my shadow

  Neat upon the whitewash

  From her bony shine,

  The cobbles of the yard

  Lit pale as eggs.

  Summer had been a free fall

  Ending there,

  The empty amphitheatre

  Of the west. Good Friday

  We had started out

  Past shopblinds drawn on the afternoon,

  Cars stilled outside still churches,

  Bikes tilting to a wall;

  We drove by,

  A dwindling interruption,

  As clappers smacked

  On a bare altar

  And congregations bent

  To the studded crucifix.

  What nails dropped out that hour?

  Roads unreeled, unreeled

  Falling light as casts

  Laid down

  On shining waters.

  Under the moon’s stigmata

  Six thousand miles away,

  I imagine untroubled dust,

  A loosening gravity,

  Christ weighing by his hands.

  FROM

  Stations

  (1975)

  Nesting-Ground

  The sandmartins’ nests were loopholes of darkness in the riverbank. He could imagine his arm going in to the armpit, sleeved and straitened, but because he once felt the cold prick of a dead robin’s claw and the surprising density of its tiny beak he only gazed.

  He heard cheeping far in but because the men had once shown him a rat’s nest in the butt of a stack where chaff and powdered cornstalks adhered to the moist pink necks and backs he only listened.

  As he stood sentry, gazing, waiting, he thought of putting his ear to one of the abandoned holes and listening for the silence under the ground.

  England’s Difficulty

  I moved like a double agent among the big concepts.

  The word ‘enemy’ had the toothed efficiency of a mowing machine. It was a mechanical and distant noise beyond that opaque security, that autonomous ignorance.

  ‘When the Germans bombed Belfast it was the bitterest Orange parts were hit the worst.’

  I was on somebody’s shoulder, conveyed through the starlit yard to see the sky glowing over Anahorish. Grown-ups lowered their voices and resettled in the kitchen as if tired out after an excursion.

  Behind the blackout, Germany called to lamplit kitchens through fretted baize, dry battery, wet battery, capillary wires, domed valves that squeaked and burbled as the dial-hand absolved Stuttgart and Leipzig.

  ‘He’s an artist, this Haw Haw. He can fairly leave it into them.’

  I lodged with ‘the enemies of Ulster’, the scullions outside the walls. An adept at banter, I crossed the lines with carefully enunciated passwords, manned every speech with checkpoints and reported back to nobody.

  Visitant

  It kept treading air, as if it were a ghost with claims on us, precipitating in the heat tremor. Then, released from its distorting mirror, up the fields there comes this awkwardly smiling foreigner, awkwardly received, who gentled the long Sunday afternoon just by sitting with us.

  Where are you now, real visitant, who vivified ‘parole’ and ‘POW’? Where are the rings garnetted with bits of toothbrush, the ships in bottles, the Tyrol landscapes globed in electric bulbs?

  ‘They’ve hands for anything, these Germans.’

  He walked back into the refining lick of the grass, behind the particular judgements of captor and harbourer. As he walks yet, feeling our eyes on his back, treading the air of the image he achieved, released to his fatigues.

  Trial Runs

  WELCOME HOME YE LADS OF THE EIGHTH ARMY. There must be some defiance in it because it was painted along the demesne wall, a banner headline over the old news of REMEMBER 1690 and NO SURRENDER, a great wingspan of lettering I hurried under with the messages.

  In a khaki shirt and brass-buckled belt, a demobbed neighbour leaned against our jamb. My father jingled silver deep in both pockets and laughed when the big clicking rosary beads were produced.

  ‘Did they make a papish of you over there?’

  ‘Oh, damn the fear! I stole them for you, Paddy, off the pope’s dresser when his back was turned.’

  ‘You could harness a donkey with them.’

  Their laughter sailed above my head, a hoarse clamour, two big nervous birds dipping and lifting, making trial runs over a territory.

  Cloistered

  Light was calloused in the leaded panes of the college chapel and shafted into the terrazzo rink of the sanctuary. The duty priest tested his diction against pillar and plaster, we tested our elbows on the hard bevel of the benches or split the gold-barred thickness of our missals.

  I could make a book of hours of those six years, a Flemish calendar of rite and pastime set on a walled hill. Look: there is a hillside cemetery behind us and across the river the plough going in a field and, in between, the gated town. Here, an obedient clerk kissing a bishop’s ring, here a frieze of seasonal games, and here the assiduous illuminator himself, bowed to his desk in a corner.

  In the study hall my hand was cold as a scribe’s in winter. The supervisor rustled past, sibilant, vapouring into his breviary, his welted brogues unexpectedly secular under the soutane. Now I bisected the line AB, now found my foothold in a main verb in Livy. From my dormer after lights-out I revised the constellations and in the morning broke the ice in an enamelled water-jug with exhilarated self-regard.

  The Stations of the West

  On my first night in the Gaeltacht the old woman spoke to me in English: ‘You will be all right.’ I sat on a twilit bedside listening through the wall to fluent Irish, homesick for a speech I was to extirpate.

  I had come west to inhale the absolute weather. The visionaries breathed on my face a smell of soup-kitchens, they mixed the dust of croppies’ graves with the fasting spittle of our creed and anointed my lips. Ephete, they urged. I blushed but only managed a few words.

  Neither did any gift of tongues descend in my days in that upper room when all around me seemed to prophesy. But still I would recall the stations of the west, white sand, hard rock, light ascending like its definition over Rannafast and Errigal, Annaghry and Kincasslagh: names portable as altar stones, unleavened elements.

  Incertus

  I went disguised in it, pronouncing it with a soft church-Latin c, tagging it under my efforts like a damp fuse. Uncertain. A shy soul fretting and all that. Expert obeisance.

  Oh yes, I crept before I walked. The old pseudonym lies there like a mouldering tegument.

  FROM

  North

  (1975)

  Mossbawn

  For Mary Heaney

  1. Sunlight

  There was a sunlit absence.

  The helmeted pump in the yard

  heated its iron,

  water honeyed

  in the slung bucket

  and the sun stood

  like a griddle cooling

  against the wall

  of each long afternoon.

  So, her hands scuffled

  over the bakeboard,

  the reddening stove

  sent its plaque of heat

  against her where she stood

  in a floury apron

  by the window.

  Now she dusts the board

  with a goose’s wing,

  now sits, broad-lapped,

  with whitened nails


  and measling shins:

  here is a space

  again, the scone rising

  to the tick of two clocks.

  And here is love

  like a tinsmith’s scoop

  sunk past its gleam

  in the meal-bin.

  2. The Seed Cutters

  They seem hundreds of years away. Brueghel,

  You’ll know them if I can get them true.

  They kneel under the hedge in a half-circle

  Behind a windbreak wind is breaking through.

  They are the seed cutters. The tuck and frill

  Of leaf-sprout is on the seed potatoes

  Buried under that straw. With time to kill,

  They are taking their time. Each sharp knife goes

  Lazily halving each root that falls apart

  In the palm of the hand: a milky gleam,

  And, at the centre, a dark watermark.

  Oh, calendar customs! Under the broom

  Yellowing over them, compose the frieze

  With all of us there, our anonymities.

  Funeral Rites

  I

  I shouldered a kind of manhood

  stepping in to lift the coffins

  of dead relations.

  They had been laid out

  in tainted rooms,

  their eyelids glistening,

  their dough-white hands

  shackled in rosary beads.

  Their puffed knuckles

  had unwrinkled, the nails

  were darkened, the wrists

  obediently sloped.

  The dulse-brown shroud,

  the quilted-satin cribs:

  I knelt courteously

  admiring it all

  as wax melted down

  and veined the candles,

  the flames hovering

  to the women hovering

  behind me.

  And always, in a corner,

  the coffin lid,

  its nail-heads dressed

  with little gleaming crosses.

  Dear soapstone masks,

  kissing their igloo brows

  had to suffice

  before the nails were sunk

  and the black glacier

  of each funeral

  pushed away.

  II

  Now as news comes in

  of each neighbourly murder

  we pine for ceremony,

  customary rhythms:

  the temperate footsteps

  of a cortège, winding past

  each blinded home.

  I would restore

  the great chambers of Boyne,

  prepare a sepulchre

  under the cupmarked stones.

  Out of side-streets and by-roads

  purring family cars

  nose into line,

  the whole country tunes

  to the muffled drumming

  of ten thousand engines.

  Somnambulant women,

  left behind, move

  through emptied kitchens

  imagining our slow triumph

  towards the mounds.

  Quiet as a serpent

  in its grassy boulevard,

  the procession drags its tail

  out of the Gap of the North

  as its head already enters

  the megalithic doorway.

  III

  When they have put the stone

  back in its mouth

  we will drive north again

  past Strang and Carling fjords,

  the cud of memory

  allayed for once, arbitration

  of the feud placated,

  imagining those under the hill

  disposed like Gunnar

  who lay beautiful

  inside his burial mound,

  though dead by violence

  and unavenged.

  Men said that he was chanting

  verses about honour

  and that four lights burned

  in corners of the chamber:

  which opened then, as he turned

  with a joyful face

  to look at the moon.

  North

  I returned to a long strand,

  the hammered curve of a bay,

  and found only the secular

  powers of the Atlantic thundering.

  I faced the unmagical

  invitations of Iceland,

  the pathetic colonies

  of Greenland, and suddenly

  those fabulous raiders,

  those lying in Orkney and Dublin

  measured against

  their long swords rusting,

  those in the solid

  belly of stone ships,

  those hacked and glinting

  in the gravel of thawed streams

  were ocean-deafened voices

  warning me, lifted again

  in violence and epiphany.

  The longship’s swimming tongue

  was buoyant with hindsight—

  it said Thor’s hammer swung

  to geography and trade,

  thick-witted couplings and revenges,

  the hatreds and behindbacks

  of the althing, lies and women,

  exhaustions nominated peace,

  memory incubating the spilled blood.

  It said, ‘Lie down

  in the word-hoard, burrow

  the coil and gleam

  of your furrowed brain.

  Compose in darkness.

  Expect aurora borealis

  in the long foray

  but no cascade of light.

  Keep your eye clear

  as the bleb of the icicle,

  trust the feel of what nubbed treasure

  your hands have known.’

  Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces

  I

  It could be a jaw-bone

  or a rib or a portion cut

  from something sturdier:

  anyhow, a small outline

  was incised, a cage

  or trellis to conjure in.

  Like a child’s tongue

  following the toils

  of his calligraphy,

  like an eel swallowed

  in a basket of eels,

  the line amazes itself

  eluding the hand

  that fed it,

  a bill in flight,

  a swimming nostril.

  II

  These are trial pieces,

  the craft’s mystery

  improvised on bone:

  foliage, bestiaries,

  interlacings elaborate

  as the netted routes

  of ancestry and trade.

  That have to be

  magnified on display

  so that the nostril

  is a migrant prow

  sniffing the Liffey,

  swanning it up to the ford,

  dissembling itself

  in antler combs, bone pins,

  coins, weights, scale-pans.

  III

  Like a long sword

  sheathed in its moisting

  burial clays,

  the keel stuck fast

  in the slip of the bank,

  its clinker-built hull

  spined and plosive

  as Dublin.

  And now we reach in

  for shards of the vertebrae,

  the ribs of hurdle,

  the mother-wet caches—

  and for this trial piece

  incised by a child,

  a longship, a buoyant

  migrant line.

  IV

  That enters my longhand,

  turns cursive, unscarfing

  a zoomorphic wake,

  a worm of thought

  I follow into the mud.

  I am Hamlet the Dane,

  skull-handler, parablist,

  smeller of rot

  in the state, infused

  with its poisons,r />
  pinioned by ghosts

  and affections,

  murders and pieties,

  coming to consciousness

  by jumping in graves,

  dithering, blathering.

  V

  Come fly with me,

  come sniff the wind

  with the expertise

  of the Vikings—

  neighbourly, scoretaking

  killers, haggers

  and hagglers, gombeen-men,

  hoarders of grudges and gain.

  With a butcher’s aplomb

  they spread out your lungs

  and made you warm wings

  for your shoulders.

  Old fathers, be with us.

  Old cunning assessors

  of feuds and of sites

  for ambush or town.

  VI

  ‘Did you ever hear tell,’

  said Jimmy Farrell,

  ‘of the skulls they have

  in the city of Dublin?

  White skulls and black skulls

  and yellow skulls, and some

  with full teeth, and some

  haven’t only but one,’

  and compounded history

  in the pan of ‘an old Dane,

  maybe, was drowned

  in the Flood.’

  My words lick around

  cobbled quays, go hunting

  lightly as pampooties

  over the skull-capped ground.

  Bone Dreams

  I

  White bone found

  on the grazing:

  the rough, porous

  language of touch

  and its yellowing, ribbed

  impression in the grass—

  a small ship-burial.

  As dead as stone,

  flint-find, nugget

  of chalk,

  I touch it again,

  I wind it in

  the sling of mind

  to pitch it at England

  and follow its drop

  to strange fields.

  II

  Bone-house:

  a skeleton

  in the tongue’s

  old dungeons.

  I push back

  through dictions,

  Elizabethan canopies,

  Norman devices,

  the erotic mayflowers

  of Provence

  and the ivied Latins

  of churchmen

  to the scop’s

  twang, the iron

  flash of consonants

  cleaving the line.