New and Selected Poems

by Seamus Heaney

  For that way, they said, there should come a sound

  Escaping ahead, an iron tune

  Of flange and piston pitched along the ground,

  But I never heard that. Always, instead,

  Struck couplings and shuntings two miles away

  Lifted over the woods. The head

  Of a horse swirled back from a gate, a grey

  Turnover of haunch and mane, and I’d look

  Up to the cutting where she’d soon appear.

  Two fields back, in the house, small ripples shook

  Silently across our drinking water

  (As they are shaking now across my heart)

  And vanished into where they seemed to start.

  V

  Soft corrugations in the boortree’s trunk,

  Its green young shoots, its rods like freckled solder:

  It was our bower as children, a greenish, dank

  And snapping memory as I get older.

  And elderberry I have learned to call it.

  I love its blooms like saucers brimmed with meal,

  Its berries a swart caviar of shot,

  A buoyant spawn, a light bruised out of purple.

  Elderberry? It is shires dreaming wine.

  Boortree is bower tree, where I played ‘touching tongues’

  And felt another’s texture quick on mine.

  So, etymologist of roots and graftings,

  I fall back to my tree-house and would crouch

  Where small buds shoot and flourish in the hush.

  VI

  He lived there in the unsayable lights.

  He saw the fuchsia in a drizzling noon,

  The elderflower at dusk like a risen moon

  And green fields greying on the windswept heights.

  ‘I will break through,’ he said, ‘what I glazed over

  With perfect mist and peaceful absences …’

  Sudden and sure as the man who dared the ice

  And raced his bike across the Moyola River.

  A man we never saw. But in that winter

  Of nineteen forty-seven, when the snow

  Kept the country bright as a studio,

  In a cold where things might crystallize or founder

  His story quickened us, a wild white goose

  Heard after dark above the drifted house.

  VII

  Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Irish Sea:

  Green, swift upsurges, North Atlantic flux

  Conjured by that strong gale-warning voice

  Collapse into a sibilant penumbra,

  Midnight and closedown. Sirens of the tundra,

  Of eel-road, seal-road, keel-road, whale-road, raise

  Their wind-compounded keen behind the baize

  And drive the trawlers to the lee of Wicklow.

  L’Etoile, Le Guillemot, La Belle Hélène

  Nursed their bright names this morning in the bay

  That toiled like mortar. It was marvellous

  And actual, I said out loud, ‘A haven,’

  The word deepening, clearing, like the sky

  Elsewhere on Minches, Cromarty, The Faroes.

  VIII

  Thunderlight on the split logs: big raindrops

  At body heat and lush with omen

  Spattering dark on the hatchet iron.

  This morning when a magpie with jerky steps

  Inspected a horse asleep beside the wood

  I thought of dew on armour and carrion.

  What would I meet, blood-boltered, on the road?

  How deep into the woodpile sat the toad?

  What welters through this dark hush on the crops?

  Do you remember that pension in Les Landes

  Where the old one rocked and rocked and rocked

  A mongol in her lap, to little songs?

  Come to me quick, I am upstairs shaking.

  My all of you birchwood in lightning.

  IX

  Outside the kitchen window a black rat

  Sways on the briar like infected fruit:

  ‘It looked me through, it stared me out, I’m not

  Imagining things. Go you out to it.’

  Did we come to the wilderness for this?

  We have our burnished bay tree at the gate,

  Classical, hung with the reek of silage

  From the next farm, tart-leafed as inwit.

  Blood on a pitch-fork, blood on chaff and hay,

  Rats speared in the sweat and dust of threshing –

  What is my apology for poetry?

  The empty briar is swishing

  When I come down, and beyond, inside, your face

  Haunts like a new moon glimpsed through tangled glass.

  X

  I dreamt we slept in a moss in Donegal

  On turf banks under blankets, with our faces

  Exposed all night in a wetting drizzle,

  Pallid as the dripping sapling birches.

  Lorenzo and Jessica in a cold climate.

  Diarmuid and Grainne waiting to be found.

  Darkly asperged and censed, we were laid out

  Like breathing effigies on a raised ground.

  And in that dream I dreamt – how like you this? –

  Our first night years ago in that hotel

  When you came with your deliberate kiss

  To raise us towards the lovely and painful

  Covenants of flesh; our separateness;

  The respite in our dewy dreaming faces.

  An Afterwards

  She would plunge all poets in the ninth circle

  And fix them, tooth in skull, tonguing for brain;

  For backbiting in life she’d make their hell

  A rabid egotistical daisy-chain.

  Unyielding, spurred, ambitious, unblunted,

  Lockjawed, mantrapped, each a fastened badger

  Jockeying for position, hasped and mounted

  Like Ugolino on Archbishop Roger.

  And when she’d make her circuit of the ice,

  Aided and abetted by Virgil’s wife,

  I would cry out, ‘My sweet, who wears the bays

  In our green land above, whose is the life

  Most dedicated and exemplary?’

  And she: ‘I have closed my widowed ears

  To the sulphurous news of poets and poetry.

  Why could you not have, oftener, in our years

  Unclenched, and come down laughing from your room

  And walked the twilight with me and your children –

  Like that one evening of elder bloom

  And hay, when the wild roses were fading?’

  And (as some maker gaffs me in the neck)

  ‘You weren’t the worst. You aspired to a kind,

  Indifferent, faults-on-both-sides tact.

  You left us first, and then those books, behind.’

  The Otter

  When you plunged

  The light of Tuscany wavered

  And swung through the pool

  From top to bottom.

  I loved your wet head and smashing crawl,

  Your fine swimmer’s back and shoulders

  Surfacing and surfacing again

  This year and every year since.

  I sat dry-throated on the warm stones.

  You were beyond me.

  The mellowed clarities, the grape-deep air

  Thinned and disappointed.

  Thank God for the slow loadening,

  When I hold you now

  We are close and deep

  As the atmosphere on water.

  My two hands are plumbed water.

  You are my palpable, lithe

  Otter of memory

  In the pool of the moment,

  Turning to swim on your back,

  Each silent, thigh-shaking kick

  Re-tilting the light,

  Heaving the cool at your neck.

  And suddenly you’re out,

  Back again, intent as ever,

&nbs
p; Heavy and frisky in your freshened pelt,

  Printing the stones.

  The Skunk

  Up, black, striped and damasked like the chasuble

  At a funeral mass, the skunk’s tail

  Paraded the skunk. Night after night

  I expected her like a visitor.

  The refrigerator whinnied into silence.

  My desk light softened beyond the veranda.

  Small oranges loomed in the orange tree.

  I began to be tense as a voyeur.

  After eleven years I was composing

  Love-letters again, broaching the word ‘wife’

  Like a stored cask, as if its slender vowel

  Had mutated into the night earth and air

  Of California. The beautiful, useless

  Tang of eucalyptus spelt your absence.

  The aftermath of a mouthful of wine

  Was like inhaling you off a cold pillow.

  And there she was, the intent and glamorous,

  Ordinary, mysterious skunk,

  Mythologized, demythologized,

  Snuffing the boards five feet beyond me.

  It all came back to me last night, stirred

  By the sootfall of your things at bedtime,

  Your head-down, tail-up hunt in a bottom drawer

  For the black plunge-line nightdress.

  A Dream of Jealousy

  Walking with you and another lady

  In wooded parkland, the whispering grass

  Ran its fingers through our guessing silence

  And the trees opened into a shady

  Unexpected clearing where we sat down.

  I think the candour of the light dismayed us.

  We talked about desire and being jealous,

  Our conversation a loose single gown

  Or a white picnic tablecloth spread out

  Like a book of manners in the wilderness.

  ‘Show me,’ I said to our companion, ‘what

  I have much coveted, your breast’s mauve star.’

  And she consented. Ο neither these verses

  Nor my prudence, love, can heal your wounded stare.

  from Field Work

  I

  Where the sally tree went pale in every breeze,

  where the perfect eye of the nesting blackbird watched,

  where one fern was always green

  I was standing watching you

  take the pad from the gatehouse at the crossing

  and reach to lift a white wash off the whins.

  I could see the vaccination mark

  stretched on your upper arm, and smell the coal smell

  of the train that comes between us, a slow goods,

  waggon after waggon full of big-eyed cattle.

  III

  Not the mud slick,

  not the black weedy water

  full of alder cones and pock-marked leaves.

  Not the cow parsley in winter

  with its old whitened shins and wrists,

  its sibilance, its shaking.

  Not even the tart green shade of summer

  thick with butterflies

  and fungus plump as a leather saddle.

  No. But in a still corner,

  braced to its pebble-dashed wall,

  heavy, earth-drawn, all mouth and eye,

  the sunflower, dreaming umber.

  IV

  Catspiss smell,

  the pink bloom open:

  I press a leaf

  of the flowering currant

  on the back of your hand

  for the tight slow burn

  of its sticky juice

  to prime your skin,

  and your veins to be crossed

  criss-cross with leaf-veins.

  I lick my thumb

  and dip it in mould,

  I anoint the anointed

  leaf-shape. Mould

  blooms and pigments

  the back of your hand

  like a birthmark –

  my umber one,

  you are stained, stained

  to perfection.

  Song

  A rowan like a lipsticked girl.

  Between the by-road and the main road

  Alder trees at a wet and dripping distance

  Stand off among the rushes.

  There are the mud-flowers of dialect

  And the immortelles of perfect pitch

  And that moment when the bird sings very close

  To the music of what happens.

  The Harvest Bow

  As you plaited the harvest bow

  You implicated the mellowed silence in you

  In wheat that does not rust

  But brightens as it tightens twist by twist

  Into a knowable corona,

  A throwaway love-knot of straw.

  Hands that aged round ashplants and cane sticks

  And lapped the spurs on a lifetime of game cocks

  Harked to their gift and worked with fine intent

  Until your fingers moved somnambulant:

  I tell and finger it like braille,

  Gleaning the unsaid off the palpable.

  And if I spy into its golden loops

  I see us walk between the railway slopes

  Into an evening of long grass and midges,

  Blue smoke straight up, old beds and ploughs in hedges,

  An auction notice on an outhouse wall –

  You with a harvest bow in your lapel,

  Me with the fishing rod, already homesick

  For the big lift of these evenings, as your stick

  Whacking the tips off weeds and bushes

  Beats out of time, and beats, but flushes

  Nothing: that original townland

  Still tongue-tied in the straw tied by your hand.

  The end of art is peace

  Could be the motto of this frail device

  That I have pinned up on our deal dresser –

  Like a drawn snare

  Slipped lately by the spirit of the corn

  Yet burnished by its passage, and still warm.

  In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge

  Killed in France 31 July 1917

  The bronze soldier hitches a bronze cape

  That crumples stiffly in imagined wind

  No matter how the real winds buff and sweep

  His sudden hunkering run, forever craned