Selected Poems 1966-1987 Read online

  flax-pullings, dances, fair-days, crossroads chat

  and the shaky local voice of education.

  All that. And always, Orange drums.

  And neighbours on the roads at night with guns.’

  ‘I know, I know, I know, I know,’ he said,

  ‘but you have to try to make sense of what comes.

  Remember everything and keep your head.’

  ‘The alders in the hedge,’ I said, ‘mushrooms,

  dark-clumped grass where cows or horses dunged,

  the cluck when pith-lined chestnut shells split open

  in your hand, the melt of shells corrupting,

  old jam pots in a drain clogged up with mud—’

  But now Carleton was interrupting:

  ‘All this is like a trout kept in a spring

  or maggots sown in wounds—

  another life that cleans our element.

  We are earthworms of the earth, and all that

  has gone through us is what will be our trace.’

  He turned on his heel when he was saying this

  and headed up the road at the same hard pace.

  III

  I knelt. Hiatus. Habit’s afterlife …

  I was back among bead clicks and the murmurs

  from inside confessionals, side altars

  where candles died insinuating slight

  intimate smells of wax at body heat.

  There was an active, wind-stilled hush, as if

  in a shell the listened-for ocean stopped

  and a tide rested and sustained the roof.

  A seaside trinket floated then and idled

  in vision, like phosphorescent weed,

  a toy grotto with seedling mussel shells

  and cockles glued in patterns over it,

  pearls condensed from a child invalid’s breath

  into a shimmering ark, my house of gold

  that housed the snowdrop weather of her death

  long ago. I would stow away in the hold

  of our big oak sideboard and forage for it

  laid past in its tissue paper for good.

  It was like touching birds’ eggs, robbing the nest

  of the word wreath, as kept and dry and secret

  as her name, which they hardly ever spoke

  but was a white bird trapped inside me

  beating scared wings when Health of the Sick

  fluttered its pray for us in the litany.

  A cold draught blew under the kneeling boards.

  I thought of walking round

  and round a space utterly empty,

  utterly a source, like the idea of sound

  or like the absence sensed in swamp-fed air

  above a ring of walked-down grass and rushes

  where we once found the bad carcass and scrags of hair

  of our dog that had disappeared weeks before.

  IV

  Blurred swimmings as I faced the sun, my back

  to the stone pillar and the iron cross,

  ready to say the dream words I renounce …

  Blurred oval prints of newly ordained faces,

  ‘Father’ pronounced with a fawning relish,

  the sunlit tears of parents being blessed.

  I saw a young priest, glossy as a blackbird,

  as if he had stepped from his anointing

  a moment ago: his purple stole and cord

  or cincture tied loosely, his polished shoes

  unexpectedly secular beneath

  a pleated, lace-hemmed alb of linen cloth.

  His name had lain undisturbed for years

  like an old bicycle wheel in a ditch

  ripped at last from under jungling briars,

  wet and perished. My arms were open wide

  but I could not say the words. ‘The rain forest,’ he said,

  ‘you’ve never seen the like of it. I lasted

  only a couple of years. Bare-breasted

  women and rat-ribbed men. Everything wasted.

  I rotted like a pear. I sweated Masses…’

  His breath came short and shorter. ‘In longhouses

  I raised the chalice above headdresses.

  In hoc signo … On that abandoned

  mission compound, my vocation

  is a steam off drenched creepers.’

  I had broken off from the renunciation

  while he was speaking, to clear the way

  for other pilgrims queueing to get started.

  ‘I’m older now than you when you went away,’

  I ventured, feeling a strange reversal.

  ‘I never could see you on the foreign missions.

  I could only see you on a bicycle,

  a clerical student home for the summer

  doomed to the decent thing. Visiting neighbours.

  Drinking tea and praising home-made bread.

  Something in them would be ratified

  when they saw you at the door in your black suit,

  arriving like some sort of holy mascot.

  You gave too much relief, you raised a siege

  the world had laid against their kitchen grottoes

  hung with holy pictures and crucifixes.’

  ‘And you,’ he faltered, ‘what are you doing here

  but the same thing? What possessed you?

  I at least was young and unaware

  that what I thought was chosen was convention.

  But all this you were clear of you walked into

  over again. And the god has, as they say, withdrawn.

  What are you doing, going through these motions?

  Unless … Unless…’ Again he was short of breath

  and his whole fevered body yellowed and shook.

  ‘Unless you are here taking the last look.’

  Then where he stood was empty as the roads

  we both grew up beside, where the sick man

  had taken his last look one drizzly evening

  when the tarmac steamed with the first breath of spring,

  a knee-deep mist I waded silently

  behind him, on his circuits, visiting.

  V

  An old man’s hands, like soft paws rowing forward,

  groped for and warded off the air ahead.

  Barney Murphy shuffled on the concrete.

  Master Murphy. I heard the weakened voice

  bulling in sudden rage all over again

  and fell in behind, my eyes fixed on his heels

  like a man lifting swathes at a mower’s heels.

  His sockless feet were like the dried broad bean

  that split its stitches in the display jar

  high on a window in the old classroom,

  white as shy faces in the classroom door.

  ‘Master,’ those elders whispered, ‘I wonder, master…’

  rustling envelopes, proffering them, withdrawing,

  waiting for him to sign beside their mark,

  and ‘Master’ I repeated to myself

  so that he stopped but did not turn or move,

  gone quiet in the shoulders, his small head

  vigilant in the cold gusts off the lough.

  I moved ahead and faced him, shook his hand.

  Above the winged collar, his mottled face

  went distant in a smile as the voice

  readied itself and husked and scraped, ‘Good man,

  good man yourself,’ before it lapsed again

  in the limbo and dry urn of the larynx.

  The Adam’s apple in its weathered sac

  worked like the plunger of a pump in drought

  but yielded nothing to help the helpless smile.

  Morning field smells came past on the wind,

  the sex-cut of sweetbriar after rain,

  new-mown meadow hay, birds’ nests filled with leaves.

  ‘You’d have thought that Anahorish School

  was purgatory enough for any man,’

  I said. ‘Y
ou have done your station.’

  Then a little trembling happened and his breath

  rushed the air softly as scythes in his lost meadows.

  ‘Birch trees have overgrown Leitrim Moss,

  dairy herds are grazing where the school was

  and the school garden’s loose black mould is grass.’

  He was gone with that and I was faced wrong way

  into more pilgrims absorbed in this exercise.

  As I stood among their whispers and bare feet

  the mists of all the mornings I set out

  for Latin classes with him, face to face,

  refreshed me. Mensa, mensa, mensam

  sang in the air like a busy sharping-stone.

  ‘We’ll go some day to my uncle’s farm at Toome—’

  Another master spoke. ‘For what is the great

  moving power and spring of verse? Feeling, and

  in particular, love. When I went last year

  I drank three cups of water from the well.

  It was very cold. It stung me in the ears.

  You should have met him—’ Coming in as usual

  with the rubbed quotation and his cocked bird’s eye

  dabbing for detail. When you’re on the road

  give lifts to people, you’ll always learn something.

  There he went, in his belted gaberdine,

  and after him, a third fosterer,

  slack-shouldered and clear-eyed: ‘Sure I might have known

  once I had made the pad, you’d be after me

  sooner or later. Forty-two years on

  and you’ve got no farther! But after that again,

  where else would you go? Iceland, maybe? Maybe the Dordogne?’

  And then the parting shot. ‘In my own day

  the odd one came here on the hunt for women.’

  VI

  Freckle-face, fox-head, pod of the broom,

  Catkin-pixie, little fern-swish:

  Where did she arrive from?

  Like a wish wished

  And gone, her I chose at ‘secrets’

  And whispered to. When we were playing houses.

  I was sunstruck at the basilica door—

  A stillness far away, a space, a dish,

  A blackened tin and knocked-over stool—

  Like a tramped neolithic floor

  Uncovered among dunes where the bent grass

  Whispers on like reeds about Midas’s

  Secrets, secrets. I shut my ears to the bell.

  Head hugged. Eyes shut. Leaf ears. Don’t tell. Don’t tell.

  A stream of pilgrims answering the bell

  Trailed up the steps as I went down them

  Towards the bottle-green, still

  Shade of an oak. Shades of the Sabine farm

  On the beds of Saint Patrick’s Purgatory.

  Late summer, country distance, not an air:

  Loosen the toga for wine and poetry

  Till Phoebus returning routs the morning star.

  As a somnolent hymn to Mary rose

  I felt an old pang that bags of grain

  And the sloped shafts of forks and hoes

  Once mocked me with, at my own long virgin

  Fasts and thirsts, my nightly shadow feasts,

  Haunting the granaries of words like breasts.

  As if I knelt for years at a keyhole

  Mad for it, and all that ever opened

  Was the breathed-on grille of a confessional

  Until that night I saw her honey-skinned

  Shoulder-blades and the wheatlands of her back

  Through the wide keyhole of her keyhole dress

  And a window facing the deep south of luck

  Opened and I inhaled the land of kindness.

  As little flowers that were all bowed and shut

  By the night chills rise on their stems and open

  As soon as they have felt the touch of sunlight,

  So I revived in my own wilting powers

  And my heart flushed, like somebody set free.

  Translated, given, under the oak tree.

  VII

  I had come to the edge of the water,

  soothed by just looking, idling over it

  as if it were a clear barometer

  or a mirror, when his reflection

  did not appear but I sensed a presence

  entering into my concentration

  on not being concentrated as he spoke

  my name. And though I was reluctant

  I turned to meet his face and the shock

  is still in me at what I saw. His brow

  was blown open above the eye and blood

  had dried on his neck and cheek. ‘Easy now,’

  he said, ‘it’s only me. You’ve seen men as raw

  after a football match … What time it was

  when I was wakened up I still don’t know

  but I heard this knocking, knocking, and it

  scared me, like the phone in the small hours,

  so I had the sense not to put on the light

  but looked out from behind the curtain.

  I saw two customers on the doorstep

  and an old Land Rover with the doors open

  parked on the street, so I let the curtain drop;

  but they must have been waiting for it to move

  for they shouted to come down into the shop.

  She started to cry then and roll round the bed,

  lamenting and lamenting to herself,

  not even asking who it was. “Is your head

  astray, or what’s come over you?” I roared, more

  to bring myself to my senses

  than out of any real anger at her,

  for the knocking shook me, the way they kept it up,

  and her whingeing and half-screeching made it worse.

  All the time they were shouting, “Shop!

  Shop!” so I pulled on my shoes and a sportscoat

  and went back to the window and called out,

  “What do you want? Could you quieten the racket

  or I’ll not come down at all.” “There’s a child not well.

  Open up and see what you have got—pills

  or a powder or something in a bottle,”

  one of them said. He stepped back off the footpath

  so I could see his face in the streetlamp

  and when the other moved I knew them both.

  But bad and all as the knocking was, the quiet

  hit me worse. She was quiet herself now,

  lying dead still, whispering to watch out.

  At the bedroom door I switched on the light.

  “It’s odd they didn’t look for a chemist.

  Who are they anyway at this time of the night?”

  she asked me, with the eyes standing in her head.

  “I know them to see,” I said, but something

  made me reach and squeeze her hand across the bed

  before I went downstairs into the aisle

  of the shop. I stood there, going weak

  in the legs. I remember the stale smell

  of cooked meat or something coming through

  as I went to open up. From then on

  you know as much about it as I do.’

  ‘Did they say nothing?’ ‘Nothing. What would they say?’

  ‘Were they in uniform? Not masked in any way?’

  ‘They were barefaced as they would be in the day,

  shites thinking they were the be-all and the end-all.’

  ‘Not that it is any consolation,

  but they were caught,’ I told him, ‘and got jail.’

  Big-limbed, decent, open-faced, he stood

  forgetful of everything now except

  whatever was welling up in his spoiled head,

  beginning to smile. ‘You’ve put on weight

  since you did your courting in that big Austin

  you got the loan of on a Sunday night.’
/>   Through life and death he had hardly aged.

  There always was an athlete’s cleanliness

  shining off him, and except for the ravaged

  forehead and the blood, he was still that same

  rangy midfielder in a blue jersey

  and starched pants, the one stylist on the team,

  the perfect, clean, unthinkable victim.

  ‘Forgive the way I have lived indifferent—

  forgive my timid circumspect involvement,’

  I surprised myself by saying. ‘Forgive

  my eye,’ he said, ‘all that’s above my head.’

  And then a stun of pain seemed to go through him

  and he trembled like a heatwave and faded.

  VIII

  Black water. White waves. Furrows snowcapped.

  A magpie flew from the basilica

  and staggered in the granite airy space

  I was staring into, on my knees

  at the hard mouth of Saint Brigid’s Bed.

  I came to and there at the bed’s stone hub

  was my archaeologist, very like himself,

  with his scribe’s face smiling its straight-lipped smile,

  starting at the sight of me with the same old

  pretence of amazement, so that the wing

  of wood-kerne’s hair fanned down over his brow.

  And then as if a shower were blackening

  already blackened stubble, the dark weather

  of his unspoken pain came over him.

  A pilgrim bent and whispering on his rounds

  inside the bed passed between us slowly.

  ‘Those dreamy stars that pulsed across the screen

  beside you in the ward—your heartbeats, Tom, I mean—

  scared me the way they stripped things naked.

  My banter failed too early in that visit.

  I could not take my eyes off the machine.

  I had to head back straightaway to Dublin,

  guilty and empty, feeling I had said nothing

  and that, as usual, I had somehow broken

  covenants, and failed an obligation.

  I half-knew we would never meet again …

  Did our long gaze and last handshake contain

  nothing to appease that recognition?’

  ‘Nothing at all. But familiar stone

  had me half-numbed to face the thing alone.

  I loved my still-faced archaeology.

  The small crab-apple physiognomies

  on high crosses, carved heads in abbeys …

  Why else dig in for years in that hard place

  in a muck of bigotry under the walls

  picking through shards and Williamite cannon balls?

  But all that we just turned to banter too.

  I felt that I should have seen far more of you

  and maybe would have—but dead at thirty-two!

  Ah poet, lucky poet, tell me why