New and Selected Poems Page 3

  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 near by

  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 tore 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, Grabaulle, 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.

  Ο 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

  Ο we tented our wound all right

  under the homely sheet

  and lay as if the 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

  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 –

&
nbsp; 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.

  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?’

  ‘O 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 on 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.

  Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication

  For Mary Heaney