Selected Poems (1968-2014)
Page 6
FitzKrapp eating his banana by the mellow, yellow light of a rush.
Of the ‘Yes, let’s go’ spoken by Monsieur Tarragon,
of the early-ripening jardonelle, the tumorous jardon, the jargon
of jays, the jars
of tomato relish and the jars
of Victoria plums, absolutely de rigueur for a passable plum baba,
of the drawers full of balls of twine and butcher’s string,
of Dire Straits playing ‘The Sultans of Swing’,
of the horse’s hock suddenly erupting in those boils and buboes.
Of the Greek figurine of a pig, of the pig on a terracotta frieze,
of the sow dropping dead from some mysterious virus,
of your predilection for gammon
served with a sauce of coriander or cumin,
of the slippery elm, of the hornbeam or witch-, or even wych-,
hazel that’s good for stopping a haemor-
rhage in mid-flow, of the merest of mere
hints of elderberry curing everything from sciatica to a stitch.
Of the decree condemnator, the decree absolvitor, the decree nisi,
of Aosdána, of an chraobh cnuais,
of the fields of buckwheat
taken over by garget, inkberry, scoke – all names for pokeweed –
of Mother Courage, of Arturo Ui,
of those Sunday mornings spent picking at sesame
noodles and all sorts and conditions of dim sum,
of tea and ham sandwiches in the Nesbitt Arms hotel in Ardara.
Of the day your father came to call, of your leaving your sick-room
in what can only have been a state of delirium,
of how you simply wouldn’t relent
from your vision of a blind
watch-maker, of your fatal belief that fate
governs everything from the honey-rust of your father’s terrier’s
eyebrows to the horse that rusts and rears
in the furrow, of the furrows from which we can no more deviate
than they can from themselves, no more than the map of Europe
can be redrawn, than that Hermes might make a harp from his harpe,
than that we must live in a vale
of tears on the banks of the Lagan or the Foyle,
than that what we have is a done deal,
than that the Irish Hermes,
Lugh, might have leafed through his vast herbarium
for the leaf that had it within it, Mary, to anoint and anneal,
than that Lugh of the Long Arm might have found in the midst of lus
na leac or lus na treatha or Frannc-lus,
in the midst of eyebright, or speedwell, or tansy, an antidote,
than that this Incantata
might have you look up from your plate of copper or zinc
on which you’ve etched the row upon row
of army-worms, than that you might reach out, arrah,
and take in your ink-stained hands my own hands stained with ink.
from HAY
Lag
We were joined at the hip. We were joined at the hip
like some latter-day Chang and Eng,
though I lay in that dreadful kip
in North Carolina while you preferred to hang
loose in London, in that selfsame
‘room in Bayswater’. You wrapped yourself in a flag
(the red flag, with a white elephant, of Siam)
and contemplated the time lag.
It was Chang, I seem to recall, who tried to choke
Eng when he’d had one over the eight.
It was Chang whose breath was always so sickly-sour.
It was Chang who suffered a stroke.
Eng was forced to shoulder his weight.
It was Chang who died first. Eng lived on for five hours.
Symposium
You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it hold
its nose to the grindstone and hunt with the hounds.
Every dog has a stitch in time. Two heads? You’ve been sold
one good turn. One good turn deserves a bird in the hand.
A bird in the hand is better than no bread.
To have your cake is to pay Paul.
Make hay while you can still hit the nail on the head.
For want of a nail the sky might fall.
People in glass houses can’t see the wood
for the new broom. Rome wasn’t built between two stools.
Empty vessels wait for no man.
A hair of the dog is a friend indeed.
There’s no fool like the fool
who’s shot his bolt. There’s no smoke after the horse is gone.
Hay
This much I know. Just as I’m about to make that right turn
off Province Line Road
I meet another beat-up Volvo
carrying a load
of hay. (More accurately, a bale of lucerne
on the roof rack,
a bale of lucerne or fescue or alfalfa.)
My hands are raw. I’m itching to cut the twine, to unpack
that hay-accordion, that hay-concertina.
It must be ten o’clock. There’s still enough light
(not least from the glow
of the bales themselves) for a body to ascertain
that when one bursts, as now, something takes flight
from those hot-and-heavy box pleats. This much, at least, I know.
Long Finish
Ten years since we were married, since we stood
under a chuppah of pine boughs
in the middle of a little pinewood
and exchanged our wedding vows.
Save me, good thou,
a piece of marchpane, while I fill your glass with Simi
Chardonnay as high as decency allows,
and then some.
Bear with me now as I myself must bear
the scrutiny of a bottle of wine
that boasts of hints of plum and pear,
its muscadine
tempered by an oak backbone. I myself have designs
on the willow-boss
of your breast, on all your waist confines
between longing and loss.
The wonder is that we somehow have withstood
the soars and slumps in the Dow
of ten years of marriage and parenthood,
its summits and its sloughs –
that we’ve somehow
managed to withstand an almond-blossomy
five years of bitter rapture, five of blissful rows
(and then some
if we count the one or two to spare
when we’ve been firmly on cloud nine).
Even now, as you turn away from me with your one bare
shoulder, the veer of your neckline,
I glimpse the all-but-cleared-up eczema patch on your spine
and it brings to mind not the Schloss
that stands, transitory, tra la, Triestine,
between longing and loss
but a crude
hip trench in a field, covered with pine boughs,
in which two men in masks and hoods
who have themselves taken vows
wait for a farmer to break a bale for his cows
before opening fire with semi-
automatics, cutting him off slightly above the eyebrows,
and then some.
It brings to mind another, driving out to care
for six white-faced kine
finishing on heather and mountain air,
another who’ll shortly divine
the precise whereabouts of a land mine
on the road between Beragh and Sixmilecross,
who’ll shortly know what it is to have breasted the line
between longing and loss.
Such forbearance in the face of vicissitude
also brings to mind the little �
�there, theres’ and ‘now, nows’
of two sisters whose sleeves are imbued
with the constant douse and souse
of salt water through their salt house
in Matsukaze (or Pining Wind), by Zeami,
the salt house through which the wind soughs and soughs,
and then some
of the wind’s little ‘now, nows’ and ‘there, theres’
seem to intertwine
with those of Pining Wind and Autumn Rain, who must forbear
the dolour of their lives of boiling down brine.
For the double meaning of ‘pine’
is much the same in Japanese as English, coming across
both in the sense of ‘tree’ and the sense we assign
between ‘longing’ and ‘loss’
as when the ghost of Yukihira, the poet-courtier who wooed
both sisters, appears as a ghostly pine, pining among pine boughs.
Barely have Autumn Rain and Pining Wind renewed
their vows
than you turn back toward me, and your blouse,
while it covers the all-but-cleared-up patch of eczema,
falls as low as decency allows,
and then some.
Princess of Accutane, let’s no more try to refine
the pure drop from the dross
than distinguish, good thou, between mine and thine,
between longing and loss,
but rouse
ourselves each dawn, here on the shore at Suma,
with such force and fervour as spouses may yet espouse,
and then some.
Errata
For ‘Antrim’ read ‘Armagh’.
For ‘mother’ read ‘other’.
For ‘harm’ read ‘farm’.
For ‘feather’ read ‘father’.
For ‘Moncrieff’ read ‘Monteith’.
For ‘Beal Fierste’ read ‘Beal Feirste’.
For ‘brave’ read ‘grave’.
For ‘revered’ read ‘reversed’.
For ‘married’ read ‘marred’.
For ‘pull’ read ‘pall’.
For ‘ban’ read ‘bar’.
For ‘smell’ read ‘small’.
For ‘spike’ read ‘spoke’.
For ‘lost’ read ‘last’.
For ‘Steinbeck’ read ‘Steenbeck’.
For ‘ludic’ read ‘lucid’.
For ‘religion’ read ‘region’.
For ‘ode’ read code’.
For ‘Jane’ read ‘Jean’.
For ‘rod’ read ‘road’.
For ‘pharoah’ read ‘pharaoh’.
For ‘Fíor-Gael’ read ‘Fíor-Ghael’.
For ‘Jeffrey’ read ‘Jeffery’.
For ‘vigil’ read ‘Virgil’.
For ‘flageolet’ read ‘fava’.
For ‘veto’ read ‘vote’.
For ‘Aiofe’ read ‘Aoife’.
For ‘anecdote’ read ‘antidote’.
For ‘Rosemont’ read ‘Mount Rose’.
For ‘plump’ read ‘plumb’.
For ‘hearse’ read ‘hears’.
For ‘loom’ read ‘bloom’.
from MOY SAND AND GRAVEL
Moy Sand and Gravel
To come out of the Olympic Cinema and be taken aback
by how, in the time it took a dolly to travel
along its little track
to the point where two movie stars’ heads
had come together smackety-smack
and their kiss filled the whole screen,
those two great towers directly across the road
at Moy Sand and Gravel
had already washed, at least once, what had flowed
or been dredged from the Blackwater’s bed
and were washing it again, load by load,
as if washing might make it clean.
A Collegelands Catechism
Which is known as the ‘Orchard County’?
Which as the ‘Garden State’?
Which captain of the Bounty
was set adrift by his mate?
Who cooked and ate an omelette
midway across Niagara Falls?
Where did Setanta get
those magical hurley balls
he ram-stammed down the throat
of the blacksmith’s hound?
Why would a Greek philosopher of note
refuse to be bound
by convention but live in a tub
from which he might overhear,
as he went to rub
an apple on his sleeve, the mutineers
plotting to seize the Maid of the Mist
while it was still half-able to forge
ahead and make half a fist
of crossing the Niagara gorge,
the tub in which he might light a stove
and fold the beaten
eggs into themselves? Who unearthed the egg-trove?
And who, having eaten
the omelette, would marvel at how the Mounties
had so quickly closed in on him, late
of the ‘Orchard County’
by way of the ‘Garden State’?
The Loaf
When I put my finger to the hole they’ve cut for a dimmer switch
in a wall of plaster stiffened with horsehair
it seems I’ve scratched a two-hundred-year-old itch
with a pink and a pink and a pinkie-pick.
When I put my ear to the hole I’m suddenly aware
of spades and shovels turning up the gain
all the way from Raritan to the Delaware
with a clink and a clink and a clinky-click.
When I put my nose to the hole I smell the flood-plain
of the canal after a hurricane
and the spots of green grass where thousands of Irish have lain
with a stink and a stink and a stinky-stick.
When I put my eye to the hole I see one holding horse dung to the rain
in the hope, indeed, indeed,
of washing out a few whole ears of grain
with a wink and a wink and a winkie-wick.
And when I do at last succeed
in putting my mouth to the horsehair-fringed niche
I can taste the small loaf of bread he baked from that whole seed
with a link and a link and a linky-lick.
Redknots
The day our son is due is the very day
the redknots are meant to touch down
on their long haul
from Chile to the Arctic Circle,
where they’ll nest on the tundra
within a few feet
of where they were hatched.
Forty or fifty thousand of them
are meant to drop in along Delaware Bay.
They time their arrival on these shores
to coincide with the horseshoe crabs
laying their eggs in the sand.
Smallish birds to begin with,
the redknots have now lost half their weight.
Eating the eggs of the horseshoe crabs
is what gives them the strength to go on,
forty or fifty thousand of them getting up all at once
as if for a rock concert encore.
At the Sign of the Black Horse, September 1999
Awesome, the morning after Hurricane Floyd, to sit out in our driveway and gawk
at yet another canoe or kayak
coming down Canal Road, now under ten feet of water. We’ve wheeled to the brim
the old Biltrite pram
in which, wrapped in a shawl of Carrickmacross
lace and a bonnet
of his great-grandmother Sophie’s finest needlepoint,
Asher sleeps on, as likely as any of us to find a way across
the millrace on which logs (trees more than logs)
are borne along, to which the houses down by the old Gri
ggstown Locks
have given up their inventory.
I’m happy for once to be left high and dry,
happy that the house I may yet bring myself to call mine
is set on a two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old slab,
happy that, if need be, we might bundle a few belongings into a pillow slip
and climb the hill and escape, Please Examine
Your Change, to a place where the soul might indeed recover
radical innocence. A police launch manoeuvring by brought back troops on manoeuvre,
some child-kin of my children dipping a stale
crust in his bowl of kale
while listening to his parents complain about the cost
of running a household
in the Poland of the 1930s, the child who, Please Hold,
a peaked cap would shortly accost
for the whereabouts of his uncle, the sofer.
Awesome, however stormy yesterday’s weather, to calmly don a safari
hat that somewhat matches my safari coat
and, determined as I am to make the most of the power cut
here on Ararat,
tear another leaf from Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s
King Poppy to light the barbecue, the barbecue shortly to be laden
with Dorothy’s favourite medallions of young rat
and white-lipped peccary taken this morning not with old-fashioned piano wire
but the latest in traps. I’ll rake the ashes of the fire
on which they’ll cook, No Turn
On Red, and watch the Mediterranean
do its level best to meet the ‘Caribbon’,
as Dorothy pronounced it once, on Canal Road, No Way Out,
having taken down from the attic the ancient Underwood
with the one remaining black ribbon
and set up shop in a corner of the garage.
When we wheeled the old Biltrite baby carriage
to the brink this morning, I was awestruck to see in Asher’s glabrous
face a slew of interlopers
not from Maghery, as I might have expected, or Maghera, or Magherafelt
(though my connections there are now few and far between),
but the likes of that kale-eating child on whom the peaked cap, Verboten,
would shortly pin a star of yellow felt,
having accosted him on the Mosaic
proscription, Please Secure Your Own Oxygen Mask
Before Attending To Children, on the eating of white-lipped peccary.
Just one step ahead of the police launch, meanwhile, a 1920 Studebaker
had come down Canal Road, Do Not Fill