New and Selected Poems

by Seamus Heaney

  the length and breadth of Ireland

  I remember bedding down

  above the wood in Glen Bolcain.

  To you, Christ, I give thanks

  for your Body in communion.

  Whatever evil I have done

  in this world, I repent.

  The Underground

  There we were in the vaulted tunnel running,

  You in your going-away coat speeding ahead

  And me, me then like a fleet god gaining

  Upon you before you turned to a reed

  Or some new white flower japped with crimson

  As the coat flapped wild and button after button

  Sprang off and fell in a trail

  Between the Underground and the Albert Hall.

  Honeymooning, mooning around, late for the Proms,

  Our echoes die in that corridor and now

  I come as Hansel came on the moonlit stones

  Retracing the path back, lifting the buttons

  To end up in a draughty lamplit station

  After the trains have gone, the wet track

  Bared and tensed as I am, all attention

  For your step following and damned if I look back.

  Sloe Gin

  The clear weather of juniper

  darkened into winter.

  She fed gin to sloes

  and sealed the glass container.

  When I unscrewed it

  I smelled the disturbed

  tart stillness of a bush

  rising through the pantry.

  When I poured it

  it had a cutting edge

  and flamed

  like Betelgeuse.

  I drink to you

  in smoke-mirled, blue-black,

  polished sloes, bitter

  and dependable.

  Chekhov on Sakhalin

  For Derek Mahon

  So, he would pay his ‘debt to medicine’.

  But first he drank cognac by the ocean

  With his back to all he travelled there to face.

  His head was swimming free as the troikas

  Of Tyumin, he looked down from the rail

  Of his thirty years and saw a mile

  Into himself as if he were clear water:

  Lake Baikhal from the deckrail of the steamer.

  So far away, Moscow was like lost youth.

  And who was he, to savour in his mouth

  Fine spirits that the puzzled literati

  Packed off with him to a penal colony –

  Him, born, you may say, under the counter?

  At least that meant he knew its worth. No cantor

  In full throat by the iconostasis

  Got holier joy than he got from that glass

  That shone and warmed like diamonds warming

  On some pert young cleavage in a salon,

  Inviolable and affronting.

  He felt the glass go cold in the midnight sun.

  When he staggered up and smashed it on the stones

  It rang as clearly as the convicts’ chains

  That haunted him. All through the months to come

  It rang on like the burden of his freedom

  To try for the right tone – not tract, not thesis –

  And walk away from floggings. He who thought to squeeze

  His slave’s blood out and waken the free man

  Shadowed a convict guide through Sakhalin.

  Sandstone Keepsake

  It is a kind of chalky russet

  solidified gourd, sedimentary

  and so reliably dense and bricky

  I often clasp it and throw it from hand to hand.

  It was ruddier, with an underwater

  hint of contusion, when I lifted it,

  wading a shingle beach on Inishowen.

  Across the estuary light after light

  came on silently round the perimeter

  of the camp. A stone from Phlegethon,

  bloodied on the bed of hell’s hot river?

  Evening frost and the salt water

  made my hand smoke, as if I’d plucked the heart

  that damned Guy de Montfort to the boiling flood –

  but not really, though I remembered

  his victim’s heart in its casket, long venerated.

  Anyhow, there I was with the wet red stone

  in my hand, staring across at the watch-towers

  from my free state of image and allusion,

  swooped on, then dropped by trained binoculars:

  a silhouette not worth bothering about,

  out for the evening in scarf and waders

  and not about to set times wrong or right,

  stooping along, one of the venerators.

  from Shelf Life

  Granite Chip

  Houndstooth stone. Aberdeen of the mind.

  Saying An union in the cup I’ll throw

  I have hurt my hand, pressing it hard around

  this bit hammered off Joyce’s Martello

  Tower, this flecked insoluble brilliant

  I keep but feel little in common with –

  a kind of stone age circumcising knife,

  a Calvin edge in my complaisant pith.

  Granite is jaggy, salty, punitive

  and exacting. Come to me, it says

  all you who labour and are burdened, I

  will not refresh you. And it adds, Seize

  the day. And, You can take me or leave me.

  Old Smoothing Iron

  Often I watched her lift it

  from where its compact wedge

  rode the back of the stove

  like a tug at anchor.

  To test its heat she’d stare

  and spit in its iron face

  or hold it up next her cheek

  to divine the stored danger.

  Soft thumps on the ironing board.

  Her dimpled angled elbow

  and intent stoop

  as she aimed the smoothing iron

  like a plane into linen,

  like the resentment of women.

  To work, her dumb lunge says,

  is to move a certain mass

  through a certain distance,

  is to pull your weight and feel

  exact and equal to it.

  Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.

  Stone from Delphi

  To be carried back to the shrine some dawn

  when the sea spreads its far sun-crops to the south

  and I make a morning offering again:

  that I may escape the miasma of spilled blood,

  govern the tongue, fear hybris, fear the god

  until he speaks in my untrammelled mouth.

  Making Strange

  I stood between them,

  the one with his travelled intelligence

  and tawny containment,

  his speech like the twang of a bowstring,

  and another, unshorn and bewildered

  in the tubs of his Wellingtons,

  smiling at me for help,

  faced with this stranger I’d brought him.

  Then a cunning middle voice

  came out of the field across the road

  saying, ‘Be adept and be dialect,

  tell of this wind coming past the zinc hut,

  call me sweetbriar after the rain

  or snowberries cooled in the fog.

  But love the cut of this travelled one

  and call me also the cornfield of Boaz.

  Go beyond what’s reliable

  in all that keeps pleading and pleading,

  these eyes and puddles and stones,

  and recollect how bold you were

  when I visited you first

  with departures you cannot go back on.’

  A chaffinch flicked from an ash and next thing

  I found myself driving the stranger

  through my own country, adept

  at dialect, reciting my pride

  in
all that I knew, that began to make strange

  at that same recitation.

  A Hazel Stick for Catherine Ann

  The living mother-of-pearl of a salmon

  just out of the water

  is gone just like that, but your stick

  is kept salmon-silver.

  Seasoned and bendy,

  it convinces the hand

  that what you have you hold

  to play with and pose with

  and lay about with.

  But then too it points back to cattle

  and spatter and beating

  the bars of a gate –

  the very stick we might cut

  from your family tree.

  The living cobalt of an afternoon

  dragonfly drew my eye to it first

  and the evening I trimmed it for you

  you saw your first glow-worm –

  all of us stood round in silence, even you

  gigantic enough to darken the sky

  for a glow-worm.

  And when I poked open the grass

  a tiny brightening den lit the eye

  in the blunt cut end of your stick.

  A Kite for Michael and Christopher

  All through that Sunday afternoon

  a kite flew above Sunday,

  a tightened drumhead, an armful of blown chaff.

  I’d seen it grey and slippy in the making,

  I’d tapped it when it dried out white and stiff,

  I’d tied the bows of newspaper

  along its six-foot tail.

  But now it was far up like a small black lark

  and now it dragged as if the bellied string

  were a wet rope hauled upon

  to lift a shoal.

  My friend says that the human soul

  is about the weight of a snipe

  yet the soul at anchor there,

  the string that sags and ascends,

  weighs like a furrow assumed into the heavens.

  Before the kite plunges down into the wood

  and this line goes useless

  take in your two hands, boys, and feel

  the strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief.

  You were born fit for it.

  Stand in here in front of me

  and take the strain.

  The Railway Children

  When we climbed the slopes of the cutting

  We were eye-level with the white cups

  Of the telegraph poles and the sizzling wires.

  Like lovely freehand they curved for miles

  East and miles west beyond us, sagging

  Under their burden of swallows.

  We were small and thought we knew nothing

  Worth knowing. We thought words travelled the wires

  In the shiny pouches of raindrops,

  Each one seeded full with the light

  Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves

  So infinitesimally scaled

  We could stream through the eye of a needle.

  The King of the Ditchbacks

  For John Montague

  I

  As if a trespasser

  unbolted a forgotten gate

  and ripped the growth

  tangling its lower bars –

  just beyond the hedge

  he has opened a dark morse

  along the bank,

  a crooked wounding

  of silent, cobwebbed

  grass. If I stop

  he stops

  like the moon.

  He lives in his feet

  and ears, weather-eyed,

  all pad and listening,

  a denless mover.

  Under the bridge

  his reflection shifts

  sideways to the current,

  mothy, alluring.

  I am haunted

  by his stealthy rustling,

  the unexpected spoor,

  the pollen settling.

  II

  I was sure I knew him. The time I’d spent obsessively in that upstairs room bringing myself close to him: each entranced hiatus as I chainsmoked and stared out the dormer into the grassy hillside I was laying myself open. He was depending on me as I hung out on the limb of a translated phrase like a youngster dared out on to an alder branch over the whirlpool. Small dreamself in the branches. Dream fears I inclined towards, interrogating:

  — Are you the one I ran upstairs to find drowned under running water in the bath?

  — The one the mowing machine severed like a hare in the stiff frieze of harvest?

  — Whose little bloody clothes we buried in the garden?

  — The one who lay awake in darkness a wall’s breadth from the troubled hoofs?

  After I had dared these invocations, I went back towards the gate to follow him. And my stealth was second nature to me, as if I were coming into my own. I remembered I had been vested for this calling.

  III

  When I was taken aside that day

  I had the sense of election:

  they dressed my head in a fishnet

  and plaited leafy twigs through meshes

  so my vision was a bird’s

  at the heart of a thicket

  and I spoke as I moved

  like a voice from a shaking bush.

  King of the ditchbacks,

  I went with them obediently

  to the edge of a pigeon wood –

  deciduous canopy, screened wain of evening

  we lay beneath in silence.

  No birds came, but I waited

  among briars and stones, or whispered

  or broke the watery gossamers

  if I moved a muscle.

  ‘Come back to us,’ they said, ‘in harvest,

  when we hide in the stooked corn,

  when the gundogs can hardly retrieve

  what’s brought down.’ And I saw myself

  rising to move in that dissimulation,

  top-knotted, masked in sheaves, noting

  the fall of birds: a rich young man

  leaving everything he had

  for a migrant solitude.

  Station Island

  I

  A hurry of bell-notes