hung with texts, swept tidy
as the body o’ the kirk.
III
Then sometimes when the rosary was dragging
mournfully on in the kitchen
we would hear his step round the gable
though not until after the litany
would the knock come to the door
and the casual whistle strike up
on the doorstep. ‘A right-looking night,’ he might say, ‘I was dandering by
and says I, I might as well call.’
But now I stand behind him
in the dark yard, in the moan of prayers.
He puts a hand in a pocket
or taps a little tune with the blackthorn
shyly, as if he were party to
lovemaking or a stranger’s weeping.
Should I slip away, I wonder,
or go up and touch his shoulder
and talk about the weather
or the price of grass-seed?
The Tollund Man
I
Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eye-lids,
His pointed skin cap.
In the flat country near by
Where they dug him out,
His last gruel of winter seeds
Caked in his stomach,
Naked except for
The cap, noose and girdle,
I will stand a long time.
Bridegroom to the goddess,
She tightened her tore on him
And opened her fen,
Those dark juices working
Him to a saint’s kept body,
Trove of the turfcutters’
Honeycombed workings.
Now his stained face
Reposes at Aarhus.
II
I could risk blasphemy,
Consecrate the cauldron bog
Our holy ground and pray
Him to make germinate
The scattered, ambushed
Flesh of labourers,
Stockinged corpses
Laid out in the farmyards,
Tell-tale skin and teeth
Flecking the sleepers
Of four young brothers, trailed
For miles along the lines.
III
Something of his sad freedom
As he rode the tumbril
Should come to me, driving,
Saying the names
Tollund, Grabaulle, Nebelgard,
Watching the pointing hands
Of country people,
Not knowing their tongue.
Out there in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy and at home.
Wedding Day
I am afraid.
Sound has stopped in the day
And the images reel over
And over. Why all those tears,
The wild grief on his face
Outside the taxi? The sap
Of mourning rises
In our waving guests.
You sing behind the tall cake
Like a deserted bride
Who persists, demented,
And goes through the ritual.
When I went to the gents
There was a skewered heart
And a legend of love. Let me
Sleep on your breast to the airport.
Summer Home
I
Was it wind off the dumps
or something in heat
dogging us, the summer gone sour,
a fouled nest incubating somewhere?
Whose fault, I wondered, inquisitor
of the possessed air.
To realize suddenly,
whip off the mat
that was larval, moving –
and scald, scald, scald.
II
Bushing the door, my arms full
of wild cherry and rhododendron,
I hear her small lost weeping
through the hall, that bells and hoarsens
on my name, my name.
Ο love, here is the blame.
The loosened flowers between us
gather in, compose
for a May altar of sorts.
These frank and falling blooms
soon taint to a sweet chrism.
Attend. Anoint the wound.
III
Ο we tented our wound all right
under the homely sheet
and lay as if the cold flat of a blade
had winded us.
More and more I postulate
thick healings, like now
as you bend in the shower
water lives down the tilting stoups of your breasts.
IV
With a final
unmusical drive
long grains begin
to open and split
ahead and once more
we sap
the white, trodden
path to the heart.
V
My children weep out the hot foreign night.
We walk the floor, my foul mouth takes it out
On you and we lie stiff till dawn
Attends the pillow, and the maize, and vine
That holds its filling burden to the light.
Yesterday rocks sang when we tapped
Stalactites in the cave’s old, dripping dark –
Our love calls tiny as a tuning fork.
Limbo
Fishermen at Ballyshannon
Netted an infant last night
Along with the salmon.
An illegitimate spawning,
A small one thrown back
To the waters. But I’m sure
As she stood in the shallows
Ducking him tenderly
Till the frozen knobs of her wrists
Were dead as the gravel,
He was a minnow with hooks
Tearing her open.
She waded in under
The sign of her cross.
He was hauled in with the fish.
Now limbo will be
A cold glitter of souls
Through some far briny zone.
Even Christ’s palms, unhealed,
Smart and cannot fish there.
Bye-Child
He was discovered in the henhouse
where she had confined him. He was
incapable of saying anything.
When the lamp glowed,
A yolk of light
In their back window,
The child in the outhouse
Put his eye to a chink –
Little henhouse boy,
Sharp-faced as new moons
Remembered, your photo still
Glimpsed like a rodent
On the floor of my mind,
Little moon man,
Kennelled and faithful
At the foot of the yard,
Your frail shape, luminous,
Weightless, is stirring the dust,
The cobwebs, old droppings
Under the roosts
And dry smells from scraps
She put through your trapdoor
Morning and evening.
After those footsteps, silence;
Vigils, solitudes, fasts,
Unchristened tears,
A puzzled love of the light.
But now you speak at last
With a remote mime
Of something beyond patience,
Your gaping wordless proof
Of lunar distances
Travelled beyond love.
Westering
In California
I sit under Rand McNally’s
‘Official Map of the Moon’ –
The colour of frogskin,
Its enlarged pores held
Open and one called
‘Pitiscus’ at eye level –
&
nbsp; Recalling the last night
In Donegal, my shadow
Neat upon the whitewash
From her bony shine,
The cobbles of the yard
Lit pale as eggs.
Summer had been a free fall
Ending there,
The empty amphitheatre
Of the west. Good Friday
We had started out
Past shopblinds drawn on the afternoon,
Cars stilled outside still churches,
Bikes tilting to a wall;
We drove by,
A dwindling interruption,
As clappers smacked
On a bare altar
And congregations bent
To the studded crucifix.
What nails dropped out that hour?
Roads unreeled, unreeled
Falling light as casts
Laid down
On shining waters.
Under the moon’s stigmata
Six thousand miles away,
I imagine untroubled dust,
A loosening gravity,
Christ weighing by his hands.
Nesting-Ground
The sandmartins’ nests were loopholes of darkness in the riverbank. He could imagine his arm going in to the armpit, sleeved and straitened, but because he once felt the cold prick of a dead robin’s claw and the surprising density of its tiny beak he only gazed.
He heard cheeping far in but because the men had once shown him a rat’s nest in the butt of a stack where chaff and powdered cornstalks adhered to the moist pink necks and backs he only listened.
As he stood sentry, gazing, waiting, he thought of putting his ear to one of the abandoned holes and listening for the silence under the ground.
England’s Difficulty
I moved like a double agent among the big concepts.
The word ‘enemy’ had the toothed efficiency of a mowing machine. It was a mechanical and distant noise beyond that opaque security, that autonomous ignorance.
‘When the Germans bombed Belfast it was the bitterest Orange parts were hit the worst.’
I was on somebody’s shoulder, conveyed through the starlit yard to see the sky glowing over Anahorish. Grown-ups lowered their voices and resettled in the kitchen as if tired out after an excursion.
Behind the blackout, Germany called to lamplit kitchens through fretted baize, dry battery, wet battery, capillary wires, domed valves that squeaked and burbled as the dial-hand absolved Stuttgart and Leipzig.
‘He’s an artist, this Haw Haw. He can fairly leave it into them.’
I lodged with ‘the enemies of Ulster’, the scullions outside the walls. An adept at banter, I crossed the lines with carefully enunciated passwords, manned every speech with checkpoints and reported back to nobody.
Visitant
It kept treading air, as if it were a ghost with claims on us, precipitating in the heat tremor. Then, released from its distorting mirror, up the fields there comes this awkwardly smiling foreigner, awkwardly received, who gentled the long Sunday afternoon just by sitting with us.
Where are you now, real visitant, who vivified ‘parole’ and ‘POW’? Where are the rings garnetted with bits of toothbrush, the ships in bottles, the Tyrol landscapes globed in electric bulbs?
‘They’ve hands for anything, these Germans.’
He walked back into the refining lick of the grass, behind the particular judgements of captor and harbourer. As he walks yet, feeling our eyes on his back, treading the air of the image he achieved, released to his fatigues.
Trial Runs
WELCOME HOME YE LADS OF THE EIGHTH ARMY. There must be some defiance in it because it was painted along the demesne wall, a banner headline over the old news of REMEMBER 1690 and NO SURRENDER, a great wingspan of lettering I hurried under with the messages.
In a khaki shirt and brass-buckled belt, a demobbed neighbour leaned against our jamb. My father jingled silver deep in both pockets and laughed when the big clicking rosary beads were produced.
‘Did they make a papish of you over there?’
‘O damn the fear! I stole them for you, Paddy, off the pope’s dresser when his back was turned.’
‘You could harness a donkey with them.’
Their laughter sailed above my head, a hoarse clamour, two big nervous birds dipping and lifting, making trial runs over a territory.
Cloistered
Light was calloused in the leaded panes of the college chapel and shafted into the terrazzo rink of the sanctuary. The duty priest tested his diction against pillar and plaster, we tested our elbows on the hard bevel of the benches or split the gold-barred thickness of our missals.
I could make a book of hours of those six years, a Flemish calendar of rite and pastime set on a walled hill. Look: there is a hillside cemetery behind us and across the river the plough going in a field and in between, the gated town. Here, an obedient clerk kissing a bishop’s ring, here a frieze of seasonal games, and here the assiduous illuminator himself, bowed to his desk in a corner.
In the study hall my hand was cold as a scribe’s in winter. The supervisor rustled past, sibilant, vapouring into his breviary, his welted brogues unexpectedly secular under the soutane. Now I bisected the line AB, now found my foothold in a main verb in Livy. From my dormer after lights out I revised the constellations and in the morning broke the ice on an enamelled water-jug with exhilarated self-regard.
The Stations of the West
On my first night in the Gaeltacht the old woman spoke to me in English: ‘You will be all right.’ I sat on a twilit bedside listening through the wall to fluent Irish, homesick for a speech I was to extirpate.
I had come west to inhale the absolute weather. The visionaries breathed on my face a smell of soup- kitchens, they mixed the dust of croppies’ graves with the fasting spittle of our creed and anointed my lips. Ephete, they urged. I blushed but only managed a few words.
Neither did any gift of tongues descend in my days in that upper room when all around me seemed to prophesy. But still I would recall the stations of the west, white sand, hard rock, light ascending like its definition over Rannafast and Errigal, Annaghry and Kincasslagh: names portable as altar stones, unleavened elements.
Incertus
I went disguised in it, pronouncing it with a soft church-Latin c, tagging it under my efforts like a damp fuse. Uncertain. A shy soul fretting and all that. Expert obeisance.
Oh yes, I crept before I walked. The old pseudonym lies there like a mouldering tegument.
Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication
For Mary Heaney
New and Selected Poems Page 3
