Selected Poems 1966-1987 Page 8

  Bared and tensed as I am, all attention

  For your step following and damned if I look back.

  Sloe Gin

  The clear weather of juniper

  darkened into winter.

  She fed gin to sloes

  and sealed the glass container.

  When I unscrewed it

  I smelled the disturbed

  tart stillness of a bush

  rising through the pantry.

  When I poured it

  it had a cutting edge

  and flamed

  like Betelgeuse.

  I drink to you

  in smoke-mirled, blue-black,

  polished sloes, bitter

  and dependable.

  Chekhov on Sakhalin

  For Derek Mahon

  So, he would pay his ‘debt to medicine’.

  But first he drank cognac by the ocean

  With his back to all he travelled north to face.

  His head was swimming free as the troikas

  Of Tyumin, he looked down from the rail

  Of his thirty years and saw a mile

  Into himself as if he were clear water:

  Lake Baikal from the deckrail of the steamer.

  So far away, Moscow was like lost youth.

  And who was he, to savour in his mouth

  Fine spirits that the puzzled literati

  Packed off with him to a penal colony—

  Him, born, you may say, under the counter?

  At least that meant he knew its worth. No cantor

  In full throat by the iconostasis

  Got holier joy than he got from that glass

  That shone and warmed like diamonds warming

  On some pert young cleavage in a salon,

  Inviolable and affronting.

  He felt the glass go cold in the midnight sun.

  When he staggered up and smashed it on the stones

  It rang as clearly as the convicts’ chains

  That haunted him. All through the months to come

  It rang on like the burden of his freedom

  To try for the right tone—not tract, not thesis—

  And walk away from floggings. He who thought to squeeze

  His slave’s blood out and waken the free man

  Shadowed a convict guide through Sakhalin.

  Sandstone Keepsake

  It is a kind of chalky russet

  solidified gourd, sedimentary

  and so reliably dense and bricky

  I often clasp it and throw it from hand to hand.

  It was ruddier, with an underwater

  hint of contusion, when I lifted it,

  wading a shingle beach on Inishowen.

  Across the estuary light after light

  came on silently round the perimeter

  of the camp. A stone from Phlegethon,

  bloodied on the bed of hell’s hot river?

  Evening frost and the salt water

  made my hand smoke, as if I’d plucked the heart

  that damned Guy de Montfort to the boiling flood—

  but not really, though I remembered

  his victim’s heart in its casket, long venerated.

  Anyhow, there I was with the wet red stone

  in my hand, staring across at the watch-towers

  from my free state of image and allusion,

  swooped on, then dropped by trained binoculars:

  a silhouette not worth bothering about,

  out for the evening in scarf and waders

  and not about to set times wrong or right,

  stooping along, one of the venerators.

  From Shelf Life

  Granite Chip

  Houndstooth stone. Aberdeen of the mind.

  Saying An union in the cup I’ll throw

  I have hurt my hand, pressing it hard around

  this bit hammered off Joyce’s Martello

  Tower, this flecked insoluble brilliant

  I keep but feel little in common with—

  a kind of stone-age circumcising knife,

  a Calvin edge in my complaisant pith.

  Granite is jaggy, salty, punitive

  and exacting. Come to me, it says

  all you who labour and are burdened, I

  will not refresh you. And it adds, Seize

  the day. And, You can take me or leave me.

  Old Smoothing Iron

  Often I watched her lift it

  from where its compact wedge

  rode the back of the stove

  like a tug at anchor.

  To test its heat she’d stare

  and spit in its iron face

  or hold it up next her cheek

  to divine the stored danger.

  Soft thumps on the ironing board.

  Her dimpled angled elbow

  and intent stoop

  as she aimed the smoothing iron

  like a plane into linen,

  like the resentment of women.

  To work, her dumb lunge says,

  is to move a certain mass

  through a certain distance,

  is to pull your weight and feel

  exact and equal to it.

  Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.

  Stone from Delphi

  To be carried back to the shrine some dawn

  when the sea spreads its far sun-crops to the south

  and I make a morning offering again:

  that I may escape the miasma of spilled blood,

  govern the tongue, fear hybris, fear the god

  until he speaks in my untrammelled mouth.

  Making Strange

  I stood between them,

  the one with his travelled intelligence

  and tawny containment,

  his speech like the twang of a bowstring,

  and another, unshorn and bewildered

  in the tubs of his wellingtons,

  smiling at me for help,

  faced with this stranger I’d brought him.

  Then a cunning middle voice

  came out of the field across the road

  saying, ‘Be adept and be dialect,

  tell of this wind coming past the zinc hut,

  call me sweetbriar after the rain

  or snowberries cooled in the fog.

  But love the cut of this travelled one

  and call me also the cornfield of Boaz.

  Go beyond what’s reliable

  in all that keeps pleading and pleading,

  these eyes and puddles and stones,

  and recollect how bold you were

  when I visited you first

  with departures you cannot go back on.’

  A chaffinch flicked from an ash and next thing

  I found myself driving the stranger

  through my own country, adept

  at dialect, reciting my pride

  in all that I knew, that began to make strange

  at that same recitation.

  A Hazel Stick for Catherine Ann

  The living mother-of-pearl of a salmon

  just out of the water

  is gone just like that, but your stick

  is kept salmon-silver.

  Seasoned and bendy,

  it convinces the hand

  that what you have you hold

  to play with and pose with

  and lay about with.

  But then too it points back to cattle

  and spatter and beating

  the bars of a gate—

  the very stick we might cut

  from your family tree.

  The living cobalt of an afternoon

  dragonfly drew my eye to it first

  and the evening I trimmed it for you

  you saw your first glow-worm—

  all of us stood round in silence, even you

  gigantic enough to darken the sky

  for a glow-worm.

  And when I poked open the grass

  a tiny brightening den
lit the eye

  in the blunt cut end of your stick.

  A Kite for Michael and Christopher

  All through that Sunday afternoon

  a kite flew above Sunday,

  a tightened drumhead, an armful of blown chaff.

  I’d seen it grey and slippy in the making,

  I’d tapped it when it dried out white and stiff,

  I’d tied the bows of newspaper

  along its six-foot tail.

  But now it was far up like a small black lark

  and now it dragged as if the bellied string

  were a wet rope hauled upon

  to lift a shoal.

  My friend says that the human soul

  is about the weight of a snipe,

  yet the soul at anchor there,

  the string that sags and ascends,

  weigh like a furrow assumed into the heavens.

  Before the kite plunges down into the wood

  and this line goes useless

  take in your two hands, boys, and feel

  the strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief.

  You were born fit for it.

  Stand in here in front of me

  and take the strain.

  The Railway Children

  When we climbed the slopes of the cutting

  We were eye-level with the white cups

  Of the telegraph poles and the sizzling wires.

  Like lovely freehand they curved for miles

  East and miles west beyond us, sagging

  Under their burden of swallows.

  We were small and thought we knew nothing

  Worth knowing. We thought words travelled the wires

  In the shiny pouches of raindrops,

  Each one seeded full with the light

  Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves

  So infinitesimally scaled

  We could stream through the eye of a needle.

  The King of the Ditchbacks

  For John Montague

  I

  As if a trespasser

  unbolted a forgotten gate

  and ripped the growth

  tangling its lower bars—

  just beyond the hedge

  he has opened a dark morse

  along the bank,

  a crooked wounding

  of silent, cobwebbed

  grass. If I stop

  he stops

  like the moon.

  He lives in his feet

  and ears, weather-eyed,

  all pad and listening,

  a denless mover.

  Under the bridge

  his reflection shifts

  sideways to the current,

  mothy, alluring.

  I am haunted

  by his stealthy rustling,

  the unexpected spoor,

  the pollen settling.

  II

  I was sure I knew him. The time I’d spent obsessively in that upstairs room bringing myself close to him: each entranced hiatus as I chainsmoked and stared out the dormer into the grassy hillside I was laying myself open. He was depending on me as I hung out on the limb of a translated phrase like a youngster dared out onto an alder branch over the whirlpool. Small dreamself in the branches. Dream fears I inclined towards, interrogating:

  —Are you the one I ran upstairs to find drowned under running water in the bath?

  —The one the mowing machine severed like a hare in the stiff frieze of harvest?

  —Whose little bloody clothes we buried in the garden?

  —The one who lay awake in darkness a wall’s breadth from the troubled hoofs?

  After I had dared these invocations, I went back towards the gate to follow him. And my stealth was second nature to me, as if I were coming into my own. I remembered I had been vested for this calling.

  III

  When I was taken aside that day

  I had the sense of election:

  they dressed my head in a fishnet

  and plaited leafy twigs through meshes

  so my vision was a bird’s

  at the heart of a thicket

  and I spoke as I moved

  like a voice from a shaking bush.

  King of the ditchbacks,

  I went with them obediently

  to the edge of a pigeon wood—

  deciduous canopy, screened wain of evening

  we lay beneath in silence.

  No birds came, but I waited

  among briars and stones, or whispered

  or broke the watery gossamers

  if I moved a muscle.

  ‘Come back to us,’ they said, ‘in harvest,

  when we hide in the stooked corn,

  when the gundogs can hardly retrieve

  what’s brought down.’ And I saw myself

  rising to move in that dissimulation,

  top-knotted, masked in sheaves, noting

  the fall of birds: a rich young man

  leaving everything he had

  for a migrant solitude.

  Station Island

  I

  A hurry of bell-notes

  flew over morning hush

  and water-blistered cornfields,

  an escaped ringing

  that stopped as quickly

  as it started. Sunday,

  the silence breathed

  and could not settle back

  for a man had appeared

  at the side of the field

  with a bow-saw, held

  stiffly up like a lyre.

  He moved and stopped to gaze

  up into hazel bushes,

  angled his saw in,

  pulled back to gaze again

  and move on to the next.

  ‘I know you, Simon Sweeney,

  for an old Sabbath-breaker

  who has been dead for years.’

  ‘Damn all you know,’ he said,

  his eye still on the hedge

  and not turning his head.

  ‘I was your mystery man

  and am again this morning.

  Through gaps in the bushes,

  your First Communion face

  would watch me cutting timber.

  When cut or broken limbs

  of trees went yellow, when

  woodsmoke sharpened air

  or ditches rustled

  you sensed my trail there

  as if it had been sprayed.

  It left you half afraid.

  When they bade you listen

  in the bedroom dark

  to wind and rain in the trees

  and think of tinkers camped

  under a heeled-up cart

  you shut your eyes and saw

  a wet axle and spokes

  in moonlight, and me

  streaming from the shower,

  headed for your door.’

  Sunlight broke in the hazels,

  the quick bell-notes began

  a second time. I turned

  at another sound:

  a crowd of shawled women

  were wading the young corn,

  their skirts brushing softly.

  Their motion saddened morning.

  It whispered to the silence,

  ‘Pray for us, pray for us,’

  it conjured through the air

  until the field was full

  of half-remembered faces,

  a loosed congregation

  that straggled past and on.

  As I drew behind them

  I was a fasted pilgrim,

  light-headed, leaving home

  to face into my station.

  ‘Stay clear of all processions!’

  Sweeney shouted at me

  but the murmur of the crowd

  and their feet slushing through

  the tender, bladed growth

  had opened a drugged path

  I was set upon.

  I trailed those early-risers

  fallen into step

>   before the smokes were up.

  The quick bell rang again.

  II

  I was parked on a high road, listening

  to peewits and wind blowing round the car

  when something came to life in the driving mirror,

  someone walking fast in an overcoat

  and boots, bareheaded, big, determined

  in his sure haste along the crown of the road

  so that I felt myself the challenged one.

  The car door slammed. I was suddenly out

  face to face with an aggravated man

  raving on about nights spent listening for

  gun butts to come cracking on the door,

  yeomen on the rampage, and his neighbour

  among them, hammering home the shape of things.

  ‘Round about here you overtook the women,’

  I said, as the thing came clear. ‘Your Lough Derg Pilgrim

  haunts me every time I cross this mountain—

  as if I am being followed, or following.

  I’m on my road there now to do the station.’

  ‘O holy Jesus Christ, does nothing change?’

  His head jerked sharply side to side and up

  like a diver’s surfacing,

  then with a look that said, Who is this cub

  anyhow, he took cognizance again

  of where he was: the road, the mountain top,

  and the air, softened by a shower of rain,

  worked on his anger visibly until:

  ‘It is a road you travel on your own.

  I who learned to read in the reek of flax

  and smelled hanged bodies rotting on their gibbets

  and saw their looped slime gleaming from the sacks—

  hard-mouthed Ribbonmen and Orange bigots

  made me into the old fork-tongued turncoat

  who mucked the byre of their politics.

  If times were hard, I could be hard too.

  I made the traitor in me sink the knife.

  And maybe there’s a lesson there for you,

  whoever you are, wherever you come out of,

  for though there’s something natural in your smile

  there’s something in it strikes me as defensive.’

  ‘The angry role was never my vocation,’

  I said. ‘I come from County Derry,

  where the last marching bands of Ribbonmen

  on Patrick’s Day still played their “Hymn to Mary”.

  Obedient strains like theirs tuned me first

  and not that harp of unforgiving iron

  the Fenians strung. A lot of what you wrote

  I heard and did: this Lough Derg station,