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第7章 from NORTH (1975)

Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication

for Mary Heaney

1 Sunlight

There was a sunlit absence.

The helmeted pump in the yard

heated its iron,

water honeyed

in the slung bucket

and the sun stood

like a griddle cooling

against the wall

of each long afternoon.

So, her hands scuffled

over the bakeboard,

the reddening stove

sent its plaque of heat

against her where she stood

in a floury apron

by the window.

Now she dusts the board

with a goose's wing,

now sits, broad-lapped,

with whitened nails

and measling shins:

here is a space

again, the scone rising

to the tick of two clocks.

And here is love

like a tinsmith's scoop

sunk past its gleam

in the meal-bin.

2 The Seed Cutters

They seem hundreds of years away. Brueghel,

You'll know them if I can get them true.

They kneel under the hedge in a half-circle

Behind a windbreak wind is breaking through.

They are the seed cutters. The tuck and frill

Of leaf-sprout is on the seed potatoes

Buried under that straw. With time to kill,

They are taking their time. Each sharp knife goes

Lazily halving each root that falls apart

In the palm of the hand: a milky gleam,

And, at the centre, a dark watermark.

Oh, calendar customs! Under the broom

Yellowing over them, compose the frieze

With all of us there, our anonymities.

Funeral Rites

I

I shouldered a kind of manhood

stepping in to lift the coffins

of dead relations.

They had been laid out

in tainted rooms,

their eyelids glistening,

their dough-white hands

shackled in rosary beads.

Their puffed knuckles

had unwrinkled, the nails

were darkened, the wrists

obediently sloped.

The dulse-brown shroud,

the quilted satin cribs:

I knelt courteously

admiring it all

as wax melted down

and veined the candles,

the flames hovering

to the women hovering

behind me.

And always, in a corner,

the coffin lid,

its nail-heads dressed

with little gleaming crosses.

Dear soapstone masks,

kissing their igloo brows

had to suffice

before the nails were sunk

and the black glacier

of each funeral

pushed away.

II

Now as news comes in

of each neighbourly murder

we pine for ceremony,

customary rhythms:

the temperate footsteps

of a cortège, winding past

each blinded home.

I would restore

the great chambers of Boyne,

prepare a sepulchre

under the cupmarked stones.

Out of side-streets and by-roads

purring family cars

nose into line,

the whole country tunes

to the muffled drumming

of ten thousand engines.

Somnambulant women,

left behind, move

through emptied kitchens

imagining our slow triumph

towards the mounds.

Quiet as a serpent

in its grassy boulevard,

the procession drags its tail

out of the Gap of the North

as its head already enters

the megalithic doorway.

III

When they have put the stone

back in its mouth

we will drive north again

past Strang and Carling fjords,

the cud of memory

allayed for once, arbitration

of the feud placated,

imagining those under the hill

disposed like Gunnar

who lay beautiful

inside his burial mound,

though dead by violence

and unavenged.

Men said that he was chanting

verses about honour

and that four lights burned

in corners of the chamber:

which opened then, as he turned

with a joyful face

to look at the moon.

North

I returned to a long strand,

the hammered curve of a bay,

and found only the secular

powers of the Atlantic thundering.

I faced the unmagical

invitations of Iceland,

the pathetic colonies

of Greenland, and suddenly

those fabulous raiders,

those lying in Orkney and Dublin

measured against

their long swords rusting,

those in the solid

belly of stone ships,

those hacked and glinting

in the gravel of thawed streams

were ocean-deafened voices

warning me, lifted again

in violence and epiphany.

The longship's swimming tongue

was buoyant with hindsight –

it said Thor's hammer swung

to geography and trade,

thick-witted couplings and revenges,

the hatreds and behind-backs

of the althing, lies and women,

exhaustions nominated peace,

memory incubating the spilled blood.

It said, 'Lie down

in the word-hoard, burrow

the coil and gleam

of your furrowed brain.

Compose in darkness.

Expect aurora borealis

in the long foray

but no cascade of light.

Keep your eye clear

as the bleb of the icicle,

trust the feel of what nubbed treasure

your hands have known.'

Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces

I

It could be a jaw-bone

or a rib or a portion cut

from something sturdier:

anyhow, a small outline

was incised, a cage

or trellis to conjure in.

Like a child's tongue

following the toils

of his calligraphy,

like an eel swallowed

in a basket of eels,

the line amazes itself

eluding the hand

that fed it,

a bill in flight,

a swimming nostril.

II

These are trial pieces,

the craft's mystery

improvised on bone:

foliage, bestiaries,

interlacings elaborate

as the netted routes

of ancestry and trade.

That have to be

magnified on display

so that the nostril

is a migrant prow

sniffing the Liffey,

swanning it up to the ford,

dissembling itself

in antler combs, bone pins,

coins, weights, scale-pans.

III

Like a long sword

sheathed in its moisting

burial clays,

the keel stuck fast

in the slip of the bank,

its clinker-built hull

spined and plosive

as Dublin.

And now we reach in

for shards of the vertebrae,

the ribs of hurdle,

the mother-wet caches –

and for this trial piece

incised by a child,

a longship, a buoyant

migrant line.

IV

That enters my longhand,

turns cursive, unscarfing

a zoomorphic wake,

a worm of thought

I follow into the mud.

I am Hamlet the Dane,

skull-handler, parablist,

smeller of rot

in the state, infused

with its poisons,

pinioned by ghosts

and affections,

murders and pieties,

coming to consciousness

by jumping in graves,

dithering, blathering.

V

Come fly with me,

come sniff the wind

with the expertise

of the Vikings –

neighbourly, scoretaking

killers, haggers

and hagglers, gombeen-men,

hoarders of grudges and gain.

With a butcher's aplomb

they spread out your lungs

and made you warm wings

for your shoulders.

Old fathers, be with us.

Old cunning assessors

of feuds and of sites

for ambush or town.

VI

'Did you ever hear tell,'

said Jimmy Farrell,

'of the skulls they have

in the city of Dublin?

White skulls and black skulls

and yellow skulls, and some

with full teeth, and some

haven't only but one,'

and compounded history

in the pan of 'an old Dane,

maybe, was drowned

in the Flood.'

My words lick around

cobbled quays, go hunting

lightly as pampooties

over the skull-capped ground.

Bone Dreams

I

White bone found

on the grazing:

the rough, porous

language of touch

and its yellowing, ribbed

impression in the grass –

a small ship-burial.

As dead as stone,

flint-find, nugget

of chalk,

I touch it again,

I wind it in

the sling of mind

to pitch it at England

and follow its drop

to strange fields.

II

Bone-house:

a skeleton

in the tongue's

old dungeons.

I push back

through dictions,

Elizabethan canopies,

Norman devices,

the erotic mayflowers

of Provence

and the ivied Latins

of churchmen

to the scop's

twang, the iron

flash of consonants

cleaving the line.

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 turf-cutter'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 an 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.

Kinship

I

Kinned by hieroglyphic

peat on a spreadfield

to the strangled victim,

the love-nest in the bracken,

I step through origins

like a dog turning

its memories of wilderness

on the kitchen mat:

the bog floor shakes,

water cheeps and lisps

as I walk down

rushes and heather.

I love this turf-face,

its black incisions,

the cooped secrets

of process and ritual;

I love the spring

off the ground,

each bank a gallows drop,

each open pool

the unstopped mouth

of an urn, a moon-drinker,

not to be sounded

by the naked eye.

II

Quagmire, swampland, morass:

the slime kingdoms,

domains of the cold-blooded,

of mud pads and dirtied eggs.

But bog

meaning soft,

the fall of windless rain,

pupil of amber.

Ruminant ground,

digestion of mollusc

and seed-pod,

deep pollen-bin.

Earth-pantry, bone-vault,

sun-bank, embalmer

of votive goods

and sabred fugitives.

Insatiable bride.

Sword-swallower,

casket, midden,

floe of history.

Ground that will strip

its dark side,

nesting ground,

outback of my mind.

III

I found a turf-spade

hidden under bracken,

laid flat, and overgrown

with a green fog.

As I raised it

the soft lips of the growth

muttered and split,

a tawny rut

opening at my feet

like a shed skin,

the shaft wettish

as I sank it upright

and beginning to

steam in the sun.

And now they have twinned

that obelisk:

among the stones,

under a bearded cairn

a love-nest is disturbed,

catkin and bog-cotton tremble

as they raise up

the cloven oak-limb.

I stand at the edge of centuries

facing a goddess.

IV

This centre holds

and spreads,

sump and seedbed,

a bag of waters

and a melting grave.

The mothers of autumn

sour and sink,

ferments of husk and leaf

deepen their ochres.

Mosses come to a head,

heather unseeds,

brackens deposit

their bronze.

This is the vowel of earth

dreaming its root

in flowers and snow,

mutation of weathers

and seasons,

a windfall composing

the floor it rots into.

I grew out of all this

like a weeping willow

inclined to

the appetites of gravity.

V

The hand-carved felloes

of the turf-cart wheels

buried in a litter

of turf mould,

the cupid's bow

of the tail-board,

the socketed lips

of the cribs:

I deified the man

who rode there,

god of the waggon,

the hearth-feeder.

I was his privileged

attendant, a bearer

of bread and drink,

the squire of his circuits.

When summer died

and wives forsook the fields

we were abroad,

saluted, given right-of-way.

Watch our progress

down the haw-lit hedges,

my manly pride

when he speaks to me.

VI

And you, Tacitus,

observe how I make my grove

on an old crannog

piled by the fearful dead:

a desolate peace.

Our mother ground

is sour with the blood

of her faithful,

they lie gargling

in her sacred heart

as the legions stare

from the ramparts.

Come back to this

'island of the ocean'

where nothing will suffice.

Read the inhumed faces

of casualty and victim;

report us fairly,

how we slaughter

for the common good

and shave the heads

of the notorious,

how the goddess swallows

our love and terror.

Act of Union

I

Tonight, 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.

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

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

Heating in sunlight, the 'spud'

Of the dynamo gleaming and cocked back,

The pedal treads hanging relieved

Of the boot of the law.

His cap was upside down

On the floor, next his chair.

The line of its pressure ran like a bevel

In his slightly sweating hair.

He had unstrapped

The heavy ledger, and my father

Was making tillage returns

In acres, roods, and perches.

Arithmetic and fear.

I sat staring at the polished holster

With its buttoned flap, the braid cord

Looped into the revolver butt.

'Any other root crops?

Mangolds? Marrowstems? Anything like that?'

'No.' But was there not a line

Of turnips where the seed ran out

In the potato field? I assumed

Small guilts and sat

Imagining the black hole in the barracks.

He stood up, shifted the baton-case

Further round on his belt,

Closed the domesday book,

Fitted his cap back with two hands,

And looked at me as he said goodbye.

A shadow bobbed in the window.

He was snapping the carrier spring

Over the ledger. His boot pushed off

And the bicycle ticked, ticked, ticked.

3 Orange Drums, Tyrone, 1966

The lambeg balloons at his belly, weighs

Him back on his haunches, lodging thunder

Grossly there between his chin and his knees.

He is raised up by what he buckles under.

Each arm extended by a seasoned rod,

He parades behind it. And though the drummers

Are granted passage through the nodding crowd,

It is the drums preside, like giant tumours.

To every cocked ear, expert in its greed,

His battered signature subscribes 'No Pope'.

The goatskin's sometimes plastered with his blood.

The air is pounding like a stethoscope.

4 Summer 1969

While the Constabulary covered the mob

Firing into the Falls, I was suffering

Only the bullying sun of Madrid.

Each afternoon, in the casserole heat

Of the flat, as I sweated my way through

The life of Joyce, stinks from the fishmarket

Rose like the reek off a flax-dam.

At night on the balcony, gules of wine,

A sense of children in their dark corners,

Old women in black shawls near open windows,

The air a canyon rivering in Spanish.

We talked our way home over starlit plains

Where patent leather of the Guardia Civil

Gleamed like fish-bellies in flax-poisoned waters.

'Go back,' one said, 'try to touch the people.'

Another conjured Lorca from his hill.

We sat through death-counts and bullfight reports

On the television, celebrities

Arrived from where the real thing still happened.

I retreated to the cool of the Prado.

Goya's 'Shootings of the Third of May'

Covered a wall – the thrown-up arms

And spasm of the rebel, the helmeted

And knapsacked military, the efficient

Rake of the fusillade. In the next room,

His nightmares, grafted to the palace wall –

Dark cyclones, hosting, breaking; Saturn

Jewelled in the blood of his own children,

Gigantic Chaos turning his brute hips

Over the world. Also, that holmgang

Where two berserks club each other to death

For honour's sake, greaved in a bog, and sinking.

He painted with his fists and elbows, flourished

The stained cape of his heart as history charged.

5 Fosterage

for Michael McLaverty

'Description is revelation!' Royal

Avenue, Belfast, 1962,

A Saturday afternoon, glad to meet

Me, newly cubbed in language, he gripped

My elbow. 'Listen. Go your own way.

Do your own work. Remember

Katherine Mansfield – I will tell

How the laundry basket squeaked … that note of exile.'

But to hell with overstating it:

'Don't have the veins bulging in your Biro.'

And then, 'Poor Hopkins!' I have the Journals

He gave me, underlined, his buckled self

Obeisant to their pain. He discerned

The lineaments of patience everywhere

And fostered me and sent me out, with words

Imposing on my tongue like obols.

6 Exposure

It is December in Wicklow:

Alders dripping, birches

Inheriting the last light,

The ash tree cold to look at.

A comet that was lost

Should be visible at sunset,

Those million tons of light

Like a glimmer of haws and rose-hips,

And I sometimes see a falling star.

If I could come on meteorite!

Instead I walk through damp leaves,

Husks, the spent flukes of autumn,

Imagining a hero

On some muddy compound,

His gift like a slingstone

Whirled for the desperate.

How did I end up like this?

I often think of my friends'

Beautiful prismatic counselling

And the anvil brains of some who hate me

As I sit weighing and weighing

My responsible tristia.

For what? For the ear? For the people?

For what is said behind-backs?

Rain comes down through the alders,

Its low conducive voices

Mutter about let-downs and erosions

And yet each drop recalls

The diamond absolutes.

I am neither internee nor informer;

An inner émigré, grown long-haired

And thoughtful; a wood-kerne

Escaped from the massacre,

Taking protective colouring

From bole and bark, feeling

Every wind that blows;

Who, blowing up these sparks

For their meagre heat, have missed

The once-in-a-lifetime portent,

The comet's pulsing rose.

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