New Selected Poems (1988-2013)

by Seamus Heaney

  I knew that same dead weight in joint and sinew

  Until a spade-plate slid and soughed and plied

  At my buried ear, and the levered sod

  Got lifted up; then once I felt the air

  I was like turned turf in the breath of God,

  Bog-bodied on the sixth day, brown and bare,

  And on the last, all told, unatrophied.

  *

  My heavy head. Bronze-buffed. Ear to the ground.

  My eye at turf level. Its snailskin lid.

  My cushioned cheek and brow. My phantom hand

  And arm and leg and shoulder that felt pillowed

  As fleshily as when the bog pith weighed

  To mould me to itself and it to me

  Between when I was buried and unburied.

  Between what happened and was meant to be.

  On show for years while all that lay in wait

  Still waited. Disembodied. Far renowned.

  Faith placed in me, me faithless as a stone

  The harrow turned up when the crop was sown.

  Out in the Danish night I’d hear soft wind

  And remember moony water in a rut.

  *

  ‘The soul exceeds its circumstances.’ Yes.

  History not to be granted the last word

  Or the first claim … In the end I gathered

  From the display-case peat my staying powers,

  Told my webbed wrists to be like silver birches,

  My old uncallused hands to be young sward,

  The spade-cut skin to heal, and got restored

  By telling myself this. Late as it was,

  The early bird still sang, the meadow hay

  Still buttercupped and daisied, sky was new.

  I smelled the air, exhaust fumes, silage reek,

  Heard from my heather bed the thickened traffic

  Swarm at a roundabout five fields away

  And transatlantic flights stacked in the blue.

  *

  Cattle out in rain, their knowledgeable

  Solid standing and readiness to wait,

  These I learned from. My study was the wet,

  My head as washy as a head of kale,

  Shedding water like the flanks and tail

  Of every dumb beast sunk above the cloot

  In trampled gaps, bringing their heavyweight

  Silence to bear on nosed-at sludge and puddle.

  Of another world, unlearnable, and so

  To be lived by, whatever it was I knew

  Came back to me. Newfound contrariness.

  In check-out lines, at cash-points, in those queues

  Of wired, far-faced smilers, I stood off,

  Bulrush, head in air, far from its lough.

  *

  Through every check and scan I carried with me

  A bunch of Tollund rushes – roots and all –

  Bagged in their own bog-damp. In an old stairwell

  Broom cupboard where I had hoped they’d stay

  Damp until transplanted, they went musty.

  Every green-skinned stalk turned friable,

  The drowned-mouse fibres withered and the whole

  Limp, soggy cluster lost its frank bouquet

  Of weed leaf and turf mould. Dust in my palm

  And in my nostrils dust, should I shake it off

  Or mix it in with spit in pollen’s name

  And my own? As a man would, cutting turf,

  I straightened, spat on my hands, felt benefit

  And spirited myself into the street.

  Planting the Alder

  For the bark, dulled argent, roundly wrapped

  And pigeon-collared.

  For the splitter-splatter, guttering

  Rain-flirt leaves.

  For the snub and clot of the first green cones,

  Smelted emerald, chlorophyll.

  For the scut and scat of cones in winter,

  So rattle-skinned, so fossil-brittle.

  For the alder-wood, flame-red when torn

  Branch from branch.

  But mostly for the swinging locks

  Of yellow catkins,

  Plant it, plant it,

  Streel-head in the rain.

  Tate’s Avenue

  Not the brown and fawn car rug, that first one

  Spread on sand by the sea but breathing land-breaths,

  Its vestal folds unfolded, its comfort zone

  Edged with a fringe of sepia-coloured wool tails.

  Not the one scraggy with crusts and eggshells

  And olive stones and cheese and salami rinds

  Laid out by the torrents of the Guadalquivir

  Where we got drunk before the corrida.

  Instead, again, it’s locked-park Sunday Belfast,

  A walled back yard, the dust-bins high and silent

  As a page is turned, a finger twirls warm hair

  And nothing gives on the rug or the ground beneath it.

  I lay at my length and felt the lumpy earth,

  Keen-sensed more than ever through discomfort,

  But never shifted off the plaid square once.

  When we moved I had your measure and you had mine.

  Fiddleheads

  Fiddlehead ferns are a delicacy where? Japan? Estonia? Ireland long ago?

  I say Japan because when I think of those delicious things I think of my friend Toraiwa, and the surprise I felt when he asked me about the erotic. He said it belonged in poetry and he wanted more of

  So here they are, Toraiwa, frilled, infolded, tenderized, in a little steaming basket, just for you.

  Quitting Time

  The hosed-down chamfered concrete pleases him.

  He’ll wait a while before he kills the light

  On the cleaned-up yard, its pails and farrowing crate,

  And the cast-iron pump immobile as a herm

  Upstanding elsewhere, in another time.

  More and more this last look at the wet

  Shine of the place is what means most to him –

  And to repeat the phrase, ‘My head is light’,

  Because it often is as he reaches back

  And switches off, a home-based man at home

  In the end with little. Except this same

  Night after nightness, redding up the work,

  The song of a tubular steel gate in the dark

  As he pulls it to and starts his uphill trek.

  The Blackbird of Glanmore

  On the grass when I arrive,

  Filling the stillness with life,

  But ready to scare off

  At the very first wrong move.

  In the ivy when I leave.

  It’s you, blackbird, I love.

  I park, pause, take heed.

  Breathe. Just breathe and sit

  And lines I once translated

  Come back: ‘I want away

  To the house of death, to my father

  Under the low clay roof.’

  And I think of one gone to him,

  A little stillness dancer –

  Haunter-son, lost brother –

  Cavorting through the yard,

  So glad to see me home,

  My homesick first term over.

  And think of a neighbour’s words

  Long after the accident:

  ‘Yon bird on the shed roof,

  Up on the ridge for weeks –

  I said nothing at the time

  But I never liked yon bird.’

  The automatic lock

  Clunks shut, the blackbird’s panic

  Is shortlived, for a second

  I’ve a bird’s eye view of myself,

  A shadow on raked gravel

  In front of my house of life.

  Hedge-hop, I am absolute

  For you, your ready talkback,

  Your each stand-offish comeback,

  Your picky, nervy goldbeak –

  On the grass when I arrive,

  In the
ivy when I leave.

  ‘Had I not been awake’

  Had I not been awake I would have missed it,

  A wind that rose and whirled until the roof

  Pattered with quick leaves off the sycamore

  And got me up, the whole of me a-patter,

  Alive and ticking like an electric fence:

  Had I not been awake I would have missed it,

  It came and went so unexpectedly

  And almost it seemed dangerously,

  Returning like an animal to the house,

  A courier blast that there and then

  Lapsed ordinary. But not ever

  After. And not now.

  Album

  I

  Now the oil-fired heating boiler comes to life

  Abruptly, drowsily, like the timed collapse

  Of a sawn down tree, I imagine them

  In summer season, as it must have been,

  And the place, it dawns on me,

  Could have been Grove Hill before the oaks were cut,

  Where I’d often stand with them on airy Sundays

  Shin-deep in hilltop bluebells, looking out

  At Magherafelt’s four spires in the distance.

  Too late, alas, now for the apt quotation

  About a love that’s proved by steady gazing

  Not at each other but in the same direction.

  II

  Quercus, the oak. And Quaerite, Seek ye.

  Among green leaves and acorns in mosaic

  (Our college arms surmounted by columba,

  Dove of the church, of Derry’s sainted grove)

  The footworn motto stayed indelible:

  Seek ye first the Kingdom … Fair and square

  I stood on in the Junior House hallway

  A grey eye will look back

  Seeing them as a couple, I now see,

  For the first time, all the more together

  For having had to turn and walk away, as close

  In the leaving (or closer) as in the getting.

  III

  It’s winter at the seaside where they’ve gone

  For the wedding meal. And I am at the table,

  Uninvited, ineluctable.

  A skirl of gulls. A smell of cooking fish.

  Plump dormant silver. Stranded silence. Tears.

  Their bibbed waitress unlids a clinking dish

  And leaves them to it, under chandeliers.

  And to all the anniversaries of this

  They are not ever going to observe

  Or mention even in the years to come.

  And now the man who drove them here will drive

  Them back, and by evening we’ll be home.

  IV

  Were I to have embraced him anywhere

  It would have been on the riverbank

  That summer before college, him in his prime,

  Me at the time not thinking how he must

  Keep coming with me because I’d soon be leaving.

  That should have been the first, but it didn’t happen.

  The second did, at New Ferry one night

  When he was very drunk and needed help

  To do up trouser buttons. And the third

  Was on the landing during his last week,

  Helping him to the bathroom, my right arm

  Taking the webby weight of his underarm.

  V

  It took a grandson to do it properly,

  To rush him in the armchair

  With a snatch raid on his neck,

  Proving him thus vulnerable to delight,

  Coming as great proofs often come

  Of a sudden, one-off, then the steady dawning

  Of whatever erat demonstrandum.

  Just as a moment back a son’s three tries

  At an embrace in Elysium

  Swam up into my very arms, and in and out

  Of the Latin stem itself, the phantom

  Verus that has slipped from ‘very’.

  The Conway Stewart

  ‘Medium’, 14-carat nib,

  Three gold bands in the clip-on screw-top,

  In the mottled barrel a spatulate, thin

  Pump-action lever

  The shopkeeper

  Demonstrated,

  The nib uncapped,

  Treating it to its first deep snorkel

  In a newly opened ink-bottle,

  Guttery, snottery,

  Letting it rest then at an angle

  To ingest,

  Giving us time

  To look together and away

  From our parting, due that evening,

  To my longhand

  ‘Dear’

  To them, next day.

  Uncoupled

  I

  Who is this coming to the ash-pit

  Walking tall, as if in a procession,

  Bearing in front of her a slender pan

  Withdrawn just now from underneath

  The firebox, weighty, full to the brim

  With whitish dust and flakes still sparking hot

  That the wind is blowing into her apron bib,

  Into her mouth and eyes while she proceeds

  Unwavering, keeping her burden horizontal still,

  Hands in a tight, sore grip round the metal knob,

  Proceeds until we have lost sight of her

  Where the worn path turns behind the henhouse.

  II

  Who is this, not much higher than the cattle,

  Working his way towards me through the pen,

  His ashplant in one hand

  Lifted and pointing, a stick of keel

  In the other, calling to where I’m perched

  On top of a shaky gate,

  Waving and calling something I cannot hear

  With all the lowing and roaring, lorries revving

  At the far end of the yard, the dealers

  Shouting among themselves, and now to him

  So that his eyes leave mine and I know

  The pain of loss before I know the term.

  The Butts

  His suits hung in the wardrobe, broad

  And short

  And slightly bandy-sleeved,

  Flattened back

  Against themselves,

  A bit stand-offish.

  Stale smoke and oxter-sweat

  Came at you in a stirred-up brew

  When you reached in,

  A whole rake of thornproof and blue serge

  Swung heavily

  Like waterweed disturbed. I sniffed

  Tonic unfreshness,

  Then delved past flap and lining

  For the forbidden handfuls.

  But a kind of empty-handedness

  Transpired … Out of suit-cloth

  Pressed against my face,

  Out of those layered stuffs

  That surged and gave,

  Out of the cold smooth pocket-lining

  Nothing but chaff cocoons,

  A paperiness not known again

  Until the last days came

  And we must learn to reach well in beneath

  Each meagre armpit

  To lift and sponge him,

  One on either side,

  Feeling his lightness,

  Having to dab and work

  Closer than anybody liked

  But having, for all that,

  To keep working.

  Chanson d’Aventure

  Love’s mysteries in souls do grow,

  But yet the body is his book.

  I

  Strapped on, wheeled out, forklifted, locked

  In position for the drive,

  Bone-shaken, bumped at speed,

  The nurse a passenger in front, you ensconced

  In her vacated corner seat, me flat on my back –

  Our postures all the journey still the same,

  Everything and nothing spoken,

  Our eyebeams threaded laser-fast, no transport

  Ever like it until then,
in the sunlit cold

  Of a Sunday morning ambulance

  When we might, O my love, have quoted Donne

  On love on hold, body and soul apart.

  II

  Apart: the very word is like a bell

  That the sexton Malachy Boyle outrolled

  In illo tempore in Bellaghy

  Or the one I tolled in Derry in my turn

  As college bellman, the haul of it there still

  In the heel of my once capable

  Warm hand, hand that I could not feel you lift

  And lag in yours throughout that journey

  When it lay flop-heavy as a bellpull

  And we careered at speed through Dungloe,

  Glendoan, our gaze ecstatic and bisected

  By a hooked-up drip-feed to the cannula.

  III

  The charioteer at Delphi holds his own,

  His six horses and chariot gone,

  His left hand lopped

  From a wrist protruding like an open spout,