Selected Poems 1966-1987 Read online

  III

  In the coffered

  riches of grammar

  and declensions

  I found bān-hūs,

  its fire, benches,

  wattle and rafters,

  where the soul

  fluttered a while

  in the roofspace.

  There was a small crock

  for the brain,

  and a cauldron

  of generation

  swung at the centre:

  love-den, blood-holt,

  dream-bower.

  IV

  Come back past

  philology and kennings,

  re-enter memory

  where the bone’s lair

  is a love-nest

  in the grass.

  I hold my lady’s head

  like a crystal

  and ossify myself

  by gazing: I am screes

  on her escarpments,

  a chalk giant

  carved upon her downs.

  Soon my hands, on the sunken

  fosse of her spine,

  move towards the passes.

  V

  And we end up

  cradling each other

  between the lips

  of an earthwork.

  As I estimate

  for pleasure

  her knuckles’ paving,

  the turning stiles

  of the elbows,

  the vallum of her brow

  and the long wicket

  of collar-bone,

  I have begun to pace

  the Hadrian’s Wall

  of her shoulder, dreaming

  of Maiden Castle.

  VI

  One morning in Devon

  I found a dead mole

  with the dew still beading it.

  I had thought the mole

  a big-boned coulter

  but there it was

  small and cold

  as the thick of a chisel.

  I was told ‘Blow,

  blow back the fur on his head.

  Those little points

  were the eyes.

  And feel the shoulders.’

  I touched small distant Pennines,

  a pelt of grass and grain

  running south.

  Bog Queen

  I lay waiting

  between turf-face and demesne wall,

  between heathery levels

  and glass-toothed stone.

  My body was braille

  for the creeping influences:

  dawn suns groped over my head

  and cooled at my feet,

  through my fabrics and skins

  the seeps of winter

  digested me,

  the illiterate roots

  pondered and died

  in the cavings

  of stomach and socket.

  I lay waiting

  on the gravel bottom,

  my brain darkening,

  a jar of spawn

  fermenting underground

  dreams of Baltic amber.

  Bruised berries under my nails,

  the vital hoard reducing

  in the crock of the pelvis.

  My diadem grew carious,

  gemstones dropped

  in the peat floe

  like the bearings of history.

  My sash was a black glacier

  wrinkling, dyed weaves

  and Phoenician stitchwork

  retted on my breasts’

  soft moraines.

  I knew winter cold

  like the nuzzle of fjords

  at my thighs—

  the soaked fledge, the heavy

  swaddle of hides.

  My skull hibernated

  in the wet nest of my hair.

  Which they robbed.

  I was barbered

  and stripped

  by a turfcutter’s spade

  who veiled me again

  and packed coomb softly

  between the stone jambs

  at my head and my feet.

  Till a peer’s wife bribed him.

  The plait of my hair,

  a slimy birth-cord

  of bog, had been cut

  and I rose from the dark,

  hacked bone, skull-ware,

  frayed stitches, tufts,

  small gleams on the bank.

  The Grauballe Man

  As if he had been poured

  in tar, he lies

  on a pillow of turf

  and seems to weep

  the black river of himself.

  The grain of his wrists

  is like bog oak,

  the ball of his heel

  like a basalt egg.

  His instep has shrunk

  cold as a swan’s foot

  or a wet swamp root.

  His hips are the ridge

  and purse of a mussel,

  his spine an eel arrested

  under a glisten of mud.

  The head lifts,

  the chin is a visor

  raised above the vent

  of his slashed throat

  that has tanned and toughened.

  The cured wound

  opens inwards to a dark

  elderberry place.

  Who will say ‘corpse’

  to his vivid cast?

  Who will say ‘body’

  to his opaque repose?

  And his rusted hair,

  a mat unlikely

  as a foetus’s.

  I first saw his twisted face

  in a photograph,

  a head and shoulder

  out of the peat,

  bruised like a forceps baby,

  but now he lies

  perfected in my memory,

  down to the red horn

  of his nails,

  hung in the scales

  with beauty and atrocity:

  with the Dying Gaul

  too strictly compassed

  on his shield,

  with the actual weight

  of each hooded victim,

  slashed and dumped.

  Punishment

  I can feel the tug

  of the halter at the nape

  of her neck, the wind

  on her naked front.

  It blows her nipples

  to amber beads,

  it shakes the frail rigging

  of her ribs.

  I can see her drowned

  body in the bog,

  the weighing stone,

  the floating rods and boughs.

  Under which at first

  she was a barked sapling

  that is dug up

  oak-bone, brain-firkin:

  her shaved head

  like a stubble of black corn,

  her blindfold a soiled bandage,

  her noose a ring

  to store

  the memories of love.

  Little adulteress,

  before they punished you

  you were flaxen-haired,

  undernourished, and your

  tar-black face was beautiful.

  My poor scapegoat,

  I almost love you

  but would have cast, I know,

  the stones of silence.

  I am the artful voyeur

  of your brain’s exposed

  and darkened combs,

  your muscles’ webbing

  and all your numbered bones:

  I who have stood dumb

  when your betraying sisters,

  cauled in tar,

  wept by the railings,

  who would connive

  in civilized outrage

  yet understand the exact

  and tribal, intimate revenge.

  Strange Fruit

  Here is the girl’s head like an exhumed gourd.

  Oval-faced, prune-skinned, prune-stones for teeth.

  They unswaddled the wet fern of her hair

  And made a
n exhibition of its coil,

  Let the air at her leathery beauty.

  Pash of tallow, perishable treasure:

  Her broken nose is dark as a turf clod,

  Her eyeholes blank as pools in the old workings.

  Diodorus Siculus confessed

  His gradual ease among the likes of this:

  Murdered, forgotten, nameless, terrible

  Beheaded girl, outstaring axe

  And beatification, outstaring

  What had begun to feel like reverence.

  Act of Union

  I

  To-night, a first movement, a pulse,

  As if the rain in bogland gathered head

  To slip and flood: a bog-burst,

  A gash breaking open the ferny bed.

  Your back is a firm line of eastern coast

  And arms and legs are thrown

  Beyond your gradual hills. I caress

  The heaving province where our past has grown.

  I am the tall kingdom over your shoulder

  That you would neither cajole nor ignore.

  Conquest is a lie. I grow older

  Conceding your half-independent shore

  Within whose borders now my legacy

  Culminates inexorably.

  II

  And I am still imperially

  Male, leaving you with the pain,

  The rending process in the colony,

  The battering ram, the boom burst from within.

  The act sprouted an obstinate fifth column

  Whose stance is growing unilateral.

  His heart beneath your heart is a wardrum

  Mustering force. His parasitical

  And ignorant little fists already

  Beat at your borders and I know they’re cocked

  At me across the water. No treaty

  I foresee will salve completely your tracked

  And stretchmarked body, the big pain

  That leaves you raw, like opened ground, again.

  Hercules and Antaeus

  Sky-born and royal,

  snake-choker, dung-heaver,

  his mind big with golden apples,

  his future hung with trophies,

  Hercules has the measure

  of resistance and black powers

  feeding off the territory.

  Antaeus, the mould-hugger,

  is weaned at last:

  a fall was a renewal

  but now he is raised up—

  the challenger’s intelligence

  is a spur of light,

  a blue prong graiping him

  out of his element

  into a dream of loss

  and origins—the cradling dark,

  the river-veins, the secret gullies

  of his strength,

  the hatching grounds

  of cave and souterrain,

  he has bequeathed it all

  to elegists. Balor will die

  and Byrthnoth and Sitting Bull.

  Hercules lifts his arms

  in a remorseless V,

  his triumph unassailed

  by the powers he has shaken,

  and lifts and banks Antaeus

  high as a profiled ridge,

  a sleeping giant,

  pap for the dispossessed.

  From Whatever You Say Say Nothing

  I

  I’m writing this just after an encounter

  With an English journalist in search of ‘views

  On the Irish thing’. I’m back in winter

  Quarters where bad news is no longer news,

  Where media-men and stringers sniff and point,

  Where zoom lenses, recorders and coiled leads

  Litter the hotels. The times are out of joint

  But I incline as much to rosary beads

  As to the jottings and analyses

  Of politicians and newspapermen

  Who’ve scribbled down the long campaign from gas

  And protest to gelignite and Sten,

  Who proved upon their pulses ‘escalate’,

  ‘Backlash’ and ‘crack-down’, ‘the provisional wing’,

  ‘Polarization’ and ‘long-standing hate’.

  Yet I live here, I live here too, I sing,

  Expertly civil-tongued with civil neighbours

  On the high wires of first wireless reports,

  Sucking the fake taste, the stony flavours

  Of those sanctioned, old, elaborate retorts:

  ‘Oh, it’s disgraceful, surely, I agree,’

  ‘Where’s it going to end?’ ‘It’s getting worse.’

  ‘They’re murderers.’ ‘Internment, understandably…’

  The ‘voice of sanity’ is getting hoarse.

  III

  ‘Religion’s never mentioned here,’ of course.

  ‘You know them by their eyes,’ and hold your tongue.

  ‘One side’s as bad as the other,’ never worse.

  Christ, it’s near time that some small leak was sprung

  In the great dykes the Dutchman made

  To dam the dangerous tide that followed Seamus.

  Yet for all this art and sedentary trade

  I am incapable. The famous

  Northern reticence, the tight gag of place

  And times: yes, yes. Of the ‘wee six’ I sing

  Where to be saved you only must save face

  And whatever you say, you say nothing.

  Smoke-signals are loud-mouthed compared with us:

  Manoeuvrings to find out name and school,

  Subtle discrimination by addresses

  With hardly an exception to the rule

  That Norman, Ken and Sidney signalled Prod

  And Seamus (call me Sean) was sure-fire Pape.

  O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,

  Of open minds as open as a trap,

  Where tongues lie coiled, as under flames lie wicks,

  Where half of us, as in a wooden horse,

  Were cabin’d and confined like wily Greeks,

  Besieged within the siege, whispering morse.

  IV

  This morning from a dewy motorway

  I saw the new camp for the internees:

  A bomb had left a crater of fresh clay

  In the roadside, and over in the trees

  Machine-gun posts defined a real stockade.

  There was that white mist you get on a low ground

  And it was déjà-vu, some film made

  Of Stalag 17, a bad dream with no sound.

  Is there a life before death? That’s chalked up

  In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain,

  Coherent miseries, a bite and sup,

  We hug our little destiny again.

  From Singing School

  Fair seedtime had my soul, and I grew up

  Fostered alike by beauty and by fear;

  Much favoured in my birthplace, and no less

  In that beloved Vale to which, erelong,

  I was transplanted …

  —WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, The Prelude

  He [the stable-boy] had a book of Orange rhymes, and the days when we read them together in the hay-loft gave me the pleasure of rhyme for the first time. Later on I can remember being told, when there was a rumour of a Fenian rising, that rifles were being handed out to the Orangemen; and presently, when I began to dream of my future life, I thought I would like to die fighting the Fenians.

  —W. B. YEATS, Autobiographies

  1. The Ministry of Fear

  For Seamus Deane

  Well, as Kavanagh said, we have lived

  In important places. The lonely scarp

  Of St Columb’s College, where I billeted

  For six years, overlooked your Bogside.

  I gazed into new worlds: the inflamed throat

  Of Brandywell, its floodlit dogtrack,

  The throttle of the hare. In the first week

  I was so homesick I couldn’t even eat<
br />
  The biscuits left to sweeten my exile.

  I threw them over the fence one night

  In September 1951

  When the lights of houses in the Lecky Road

  Were amber in the fog. It was an act

  Of stealth.

  Then Belfast, and then Berkeley.

  Here’s two on’s are sophisticated,

  Dabbling in verses till they have become

  A life: from bulky envelopes arriving

  In vacation time to slim volumes

  Despatched ‘with the author’s compliments’.

  Those poems in longhand, ripped from the wire spine

  Of your exercise book, bewildered me—

  Vowels and ideas bandied free

  As the seed-pods blowing off our sycamores.

  I tried to write about the sycamores

  And innovated a South Derry rhyme

  With hushed and lulled full chimes for pushed and pulled.

  Those hobnailed boots from beyond the mountain

  Were walking, by God, all over the fine

  Lawns of elocution.

  Have our accents

  Changed? ‘Catholics, in general, don’t speak

  As well as students from the Protestant schools.’

  Remember that stuff? Inferiority

  Complexes, stuff that dreams were made on.

  ‘What’s your name, Heaney?’

  ‘Heaney, Father.’

  ‘Fair

  Enough.’

  On my first day, the leather strap

  Went epileptic in the Big Study,

  Its echoes plashing over our bowed heads,

  But I still wrote home that a boarder’s life

  Was not so bad, shying as usual.

  On long vacations, then, I came to life

  In the kissing seat of an Austin 16

  Parked at a gable, the engine running,

  My fingers tight as ivy on her shoulders,

  A light left burning for her in the kitchen.

  And heading back for home, the summer’s

  Freedom dwindling night by night, the air

  All moonlight and a scent of hay, policemen

  Swung their crimson flashlamps, crowding round

  The car like black cattle, snuffing and pointing

  The muzzle of a Sten gun in my eye:

  ‘What’s your name, driver?’

  ‘Seamus…’

  Seamus?

  They once read my letters at a roadblock

  And shone their torches on your hieroglyphics,

  ‘Svelte dictions’ in a very florid hand.

  Ulster was British, but with no rights on

  The English lyric: all around us, though

  We hadn’t named it, the ministry of fear.

  2. A Constable Calls

  His bicycle stood at the window-sill,

  The rubber cowl of a mud-splasher

  Skirting the front mudguard,

  Its fat black handlegrips