Selected Poems 1966-1987 Page 6

  With the habitual

  Slow consolation

  Of a dawdling engine,

  The line lifted, hand

  Over fist, cold sunshine

  On the water, the land

  Banked under fog: that morning

  When he took me in his boat,

  The screw purling, turning

  Indolent fathoms white,

  I tasted freedom with him.

  To get out early, haul

  Steadily off the bottom,

  Dispraise the catch, and smile

  As you find a rhythm

  Working you, slow mile by mile,

  Into your proper haunt

  Somewhere, well out, beyond …

  Dawn-sniffing revenant,

  Plodder through midnight rain,

  Question me again.

  The Badgers

  When the badger glimmered away

  into another garden

  you stood, half-lit with whiskey,

  sensing you had disturbed

  some soft returning.

  The murdered dead,

  you thought.

  But could it not have been

  some violent shattered boy

  nosing out what got mislaid

  between the cradle and the explosion,

  evenings when windows stood open

  and the compost smoked down the backs?

  Visitations are taken for signs.

  At a second house I listened

  for duntings under the laurels

  and heard intimations whispered

  about being vaguely honoured.

  And to read even by carcasses

  the badgers have come back.

  One that grew notorious

  lay untouched in the roadside.

  Last night one had me braking

  but more in fear than in honour.

  Cool from the sett and redolent

  of his runs under the night,

  the bogey of fern country

  broke cover in me

  for what he is:

  pig family

  and not at all what he’s painted.

  How perilous is it to choose

  not to love the life we’re shown?

  His sturdy dirty body

  and interloping grovel.

  The intelligence in his bone.

  The unquestionable houseboy’s shoulders

  that could have been my own.

  The Singer’s House

  When they said Carrickfergus I could hear

  the frosty echo of saltminers’ picks.

  I imagined it, chambered and glinting,

  a township built of light.

  What do we say any more

  to conjure the salt of our earth?

  So much comes and is gone

  that should be crystal and kept,

  and amicable weathers

  that bring up the grain of things,

  their tang of season and store,

  are all the packing we’ll get.

  So I say to myself Gweebarra

  and its music hits off the place

  like water hitting off granite.

  I see the glittering sound

  framed in your window,

  knives and forks set on oilcloth,

  and the seals’ heads, suddenly outlined,

  scanning everything.

  People here used to believe

  that drowned souls lived in the seals.

  At spring tides they might change shape.

  They loved music and swam in for a singer

  who might stand at the end of summer

  in the mouth of a whitewashed turf-shed,

  his shoulder to the jamb, his song

  a rowboat far out in evening.

  When I came here first you were always singing,

  a hint of the clip of the pick

  in your winnowing climb and attack.

  Raise it again, man. We still believe what we hear.

  The Guttural Muse

  Late summer, and at midnight

  I smelt the heat of the day:

  At my window over the hotel car park

  I breathed the muddied night airs off the lake

  And watched a young crowd leave the discotheque.

  Their voices rose up thick and comforting

  As oily bubbles the feeding tench sent up

  That evening at dusk—the slimy tench

  Once called the ‘doctor fish’ because his slime

  Was said to heal the wounds of fish that touched it.

  A girl in a white dress

  Was being courted out among the cars:

  As her voice swarmed and puddled into laughs

  I felt like some old pike all badged with sores

  Wanting to swim in touch with soft-mouthed life.

  Glanmore Sonnets

  For Ann Saddlemyer,

  our heartiest welcomer

  I

  Vowels ploughed into other: opened ground.

  The mildest February for twenty years

  Is mist bands over furrows, a deep no sound

  Vulnerable to distant gargling tractors.

  Our road is steaming, the turned-up acres breathe.

  Now the good life could be to cross a field

  And art a paradigm of earth new from the lathe

  Of ploughs. My lea is deeply tilled.

  Old ploughsocks gorge the subsoil of each sense

  And I am quickened with a redolence

  Of farmland as a dark unblown rose.

  Wait then … Breasting the mist, in sowers’ aprons,

  My ghosts come striding into their spring stations.

  The dream grain whirls like freakish Easter snows.

  II

  Sensings, mountings from the hiding places,

  Words entering almost the sense of touch

  Ferreting themselves out of their dark hutch—

  ‘These things are not secrets but mysteries,’

  Oisin Kelly told me years ago

  In Belfast, hankering after stone

  That connived with the chisel, as if the grain

  Remembered what the mallet tapped to know.

  Then I landed in the hedge-school of Glanmore

  And from the backs of ditches hoped to raise

  A voice caught back off slug-horn and slow chanter

  That might continue, hold, dispel, appease:

  Vowels ploughed into other, opened ground,

  Each verse returning like the plough turned round.

  III

  This evening the cuckoo and the corncrake

  (So much, too much) consorted at twilight.

  It was all crepuscular and iambic.

  Out on the field a baby rabbit

  Took his bearings, and I knew the deer

  (I’ve seen them too from the window of the house,

  Like connoisseurs, inquisitive of air)

  Were careful under larch and May-green spruce.

  I had said earlier, ‘I won’t relapse

  From this strange loneliness I’ve brought us to.

  Dorothy and William—’ She interrupts:

  ‘You’re not going to compare us two…?’

  Outside a rustling and twig-combing breeze

  Refreshes and relents. Is cadences.

  IV

  I used to lie with an ear to the line

  For that way, they said, there should come a sound

  Escaping ahead, an iron tune

  Of flange and piston pitched along the ground,

  But I never heard that. Always, instead,

  Struck couplings and shuntings two miles away

  Lifted over the woods. The head

  Of a horse swirled back from a gate, a grey

  Turnover of haunch and mane, and I’d look

  Up to the cutting where she’d soon appear.

  Two fields back, in the house, small ripples shook

  Silently across our drinking water

>   (As they are shaking now across my heart)

  And vanished into where they seemed to start.

  V

  Soft corrugations in the boortree’s trunk,

  Its green young shoots, its rods like freckled solder:

  It was our bower as children, a greenish, dank

  And snapping memory as I get older.

  And elderberry I have learned to call it.

  I love its blooms like saucers brimmed with meal,

  Its berries a swart caviar of shot,

  A buoyant spawn, a light bruised out of purple.

  Elderberry? It is shires dreaming wine.

  Boortree is bower tree, where I played ‘touching tongues’

  And felt another’s texture quick on mine.

  So, etymologist of roots and graftings,

  I fall back to my tree-house and would crouch

  Where small buds shoot and flourish in the hush.

  VI

  He lived there in the unsayable lights.

  He saw the fuchsia in a drizzling noon,

  The elderflower at dusk like a risen moon

  And green fields greying on the windswept heights.

  ‘I will break through,’ he said, ‘what I glazed over

  With perfect mist and peaceful absences’—

  Sudden and sure as the man who dared the ice

  And raced his bike across the Moyola River.

  A man we never saw. But in that winter

  Of nineteen forty-seven, when the snow

  Kept the country bright as a studio,

  In a cold where things might crystallize or founder,

  His story quickened us, a wild white goose

  Heard after dark above the drifted house.

  VII

  Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Irish Sea:

  Green, swift upsurges, North Atlantic flux

  Conjured by that strong gale-warning voice,

  Collapse into a sibilant penumbra.

  Midnight and closedown. Sirens of the tundra,

  Of eel-road, seal-road, keel-road, whale-road, raise

  Their wind-compounded keen behind the baize

  And drive the trawlers to the lee of Wicklow.

  L’Etoile, Le Guillemot, La Belle Hélène

  Nursed their bright names this morning in the bay

  That toiled like mortar. It was marvellous

  And actual, I said out loud, ‘A haven,’

  The word deepening, clearing, like the sky

  Elsewhere on Minches, Cromarty, The Faroes.

  VIII

  Thunderlight on the split logs: big raindrops

  At body heat and lush with omen

  Spattering dark on the hatchet iron.

  This morning when a magpie with jerky steps

  Inspected a horse asleep beside the wood

  I thought of dew on armour and carrion.

  What would I meet, blood-boltered, on the road?

  How deep into the woodpile sat the toad?

  What welters through this dark hush on the crops?

  Do you remember that pension in Les Landes

  Where the old one rocked and rocked and rocked

  A mongol in her lap, to little songs?

  Come to me quick, I am upstairs shaking.

  My all of you birchwood in lightning.

  IX

  Outside the kitchen window a black rat

  Sways on the briar like infected fruit:

  ‘It looked me through, it stared me out, I’m not

  Imagining things. Go you out to it.’

  Did we come to the wilderness for this?

  We have our burnished bay tree at the gate,

  Classical, hung with the reek of silage

  From the next farm, tart-leafed as inwit.

  Blood on a pitchfork, blood on chaff and hay,

  Rats speared in the sweat and dust of threshing—

  What is my apology for poetry?

  The empty briar is swishing

  When I come down, and beyond, inside, your face

  Haunts like a new moon glimpsed through tangled glass.

  X

  I dreamt we slept in a moss in Donegal

  On turf banks under blankets, with our faces

  Exposed all night in a wetting drizzle,

  Pallid as the dripping sapling birches.

  Lorenzo and Jessica in a cold climate.

  Diarmuid and Grainne waiting to be found.

  Darkly asperged and censed, we were laid out

  Like breathing effigies on a raised ground.

  And in that dream I dreamt—how like you this?—

  Our first night years ago in that hotel

  When you came with your deliberate kiss

  To raise us towards the lovely and painful

  Covenants of flesh; our separateness;

  The respite in our dewy dreaming faces.

  An Afterwards

  She would plunge all poets in the ninth circle

  And fix them, tooth in skull, tonguing for brain;

  For backbiting in life she’d make their hell

  A rabid egotistical daisy-chain.

  Unyielding, spurred, ambitious, unblunted,

  Lockjawed, mantrapped, each a fastened badger

  Jockeying for position, hasped and mounted

  Like Ugolino on Archbishop Roger.

  And when she’d make her circuit of the ice,

  Aided and abetted by Virgil’s wife,

  I would cry out, ‘My sweet, who wears the bays

  In our green land above, whose is the life

  Most dedicated and exemplary?’

  And she: ‘I have closed my widowed ears

  To the sulphurous news of poets and poetry.

  Why could you not have, oftener, in our years

  Unclenched, and come down laughing from your room

  And walked the twilight with me and your children—

  Like that one evening of elder bloom

  And hay, when the wild roses were fading?’

  And (as some maker gaffs me in the neck)

  ‘You weren’t the worst. You aspired to a kind,

  Indifferent, faults-on-both-sides tact.

  You left us first, and then those books, behind.’

  The Otter

  When you plunged

  The light of Tuscany wavered

  And swung through the pool

  From top to bottom.

  I loved your wet head and smashing crawl,

  Your fine swimmer’s back and shoulders

  Surfacing and surfacing again

  This year and every year since.

  I sat dry-throated on the warm stones.

  You were beyond me.

  The mellowed clarities, the grape-deep air

  Thinned and disappointed.

  Thank God for the slow loadening,

  When I hold you now

  We are close and deep

  As the atmosphere on water.

  My two hands are plumbed water.

  You are my palpable, lithe

  Otter of memory

  In the pool of the moment,

  Turning to swim on your back,

  Each silent, thigh-shaking kick

  Retilting the light,

  Heaving the cool at your neck.

  And suddenly you’re out,

  Back again, intent as ever,

  Heavy and frisky in your freshened pelt,

  Printing the stones.

  The Skunk

  Up, black, striped and damasked like the chasuble

  At a funeral Mass, the skunk’s tail

  Paraded the skunk. Night after night

  I expected her like a visitor.

  The refrigerator whinnied into silence.

  My desk light softened beyond the verandah.

  Small oranges loomed in the orange tree.

  I began to be tense as a voyeur.

  After eleven years I was composing

  Love-letters again, broaching the word
‘wife’

  Like a stored cask, as if its slender vowel

  Had mutated into the night earth and air

  Of California. The beautiful, useless

  Tang of eucalyptus spelt your absence.

  The aftermath of a mouthful of wine

  Was like inhaling you off a cold pillow.

  And there she was, the intent and glamorous,

  Ordinary, mysterious skunk,

  Mythologized, demythologized,

  Snuffing the boards five feet beyond me.

  It all came back to me last night, stirred

  By the sootfall of your things at bedtime,

  Your head-down, tail-up hunt in a bottom drawer

  For the black plunge-line nightdress.

  A Dream of Jealousy

  Walking with you and another lady

  In wooded parkland, the whispering grass

  Ran its fingers through our guessing silence

  And the trees opened into a shady

  Unexpected clearing where we sat down.

  I think the candour of the light dismayed us.

  We talked about desire and being jealous,

  Our conversation a loose single gown

  Or a white picnic tablecloth spread out

  Like a book of manners in the wilderness.

  ‘Show me,’ I said to our companion, ‘what

  I have much coveted, your breast’s mauve star.’

  And she consented. Oh, neither these verses

  Nor my prudence, love, can heal your wounded stare.

  From Field Work

  I

  Where the sally tree went pale in every breeze,

  where the perfect eye of the nesting blackbird watched,

  where one fern was always green

  I was standing watching you

  take the pad from the gatehouse at the crossing

  and reach to lift a white wash off the whins.

  I could see the vaccination mark

  stretched on your upper arm, and smell the coal smell

  of the train that comes between us, a slow goods,

  waggon after waggon full of big-eyed cattle.

  III

  Not the mud slick,

  not the black weedy water

  full of alder cones and pock-marked leaves.

  Not the cow parsley in winter

  with its old whitened shins and wrists,

  its sibilance, its shaking.

  Not even the tart green shade of summer

  thick with butterflies

  and fungus plump as a leather saddle.

  No. But in a still corner,

  braced to its pebble-dashed wall,