Human Chain

by Seamus Heaney

  Drip-paint it in blood,

  The Wood Road as is and was,

  Resurfaced, never widened,

  The milk-churn deck and the sign

  For the bus-stop overgrown.

  The Baler

  All day the clunk of a baler

  Ongoing, cardiac-dull,

  So taken for granted

  It was evening before I came to

  To what I was hearing

  And missing: summer’s richest hours

  As they had been to begin with,

  Fork-lifted, sweated-through

  And nearly rewarded enough

  By the giddied-up race of a tractor

  At the end of the day

  Last-lapping a hayfield.

  But what I also remembered

  As woodpigeons sued at the edge

  Of thirty gleaned acres

  And I stood inhaling the cool

  In a dusk eldorado

  Of mighty cylindrical bales

  Was Derek Hill’s saying,

  The last time he sat at our table,

  He could bear no longer to watch

  The sun going down

  And asking please to be put

  With his back to the window.

  Derry Derry Down

  I

  The lush

  Sunset blush

  On a big ripe

  Gooseberry:

  I scratched my hand

  Reaching in

  To gather it

  Off the bush,

  Unforbidden,

  In Annie Devlin’s

  Overgrown

  Back garden.

  II

  In the storybook

  Back kitchen

  Of The Lodge

  The full of a white

  Enamel bucket

  Of little pears:

  Still life

  On the red tiles

  Of that floor.

  Sleeping beauty

  I came on

  By the scullion’s door.

  Eelworks

  I

  To win the hand of the princess

  What tasks the youngest son

  Had to perform!

  For me, the first to come a-courting

  In the fish factor’s house,

  It was to eat with them

  An eel supper.

  II

  Cut of diesel oil in evening air,

  Tractor engines in the clinker-built

  Deep-bellied boats,

  Landlubbers’ craft,

  Heavy in water

  As a cow down in a drain,

  The men straight-backed,

  Standing firm

  At stern and bow –

  Horse-and-cart men, really,

  Glad when the adze-dressed keel

  Cleaved to the mud.

  Rum-and-peppermint men too

  At the counter later on

  In her father’s pub.

  III

  That skin Alfie Kirkwood wore

  At school, sweaty-lustrous, supple

  And bisected into tails

  For the tying of itself around itself –

  For strength, according to Alfie.

  Who would ease his lapped wrist

  From the flap-mouthed cuff

  Of a jerkin rank with eel oil,

  The abounding reek of it

  Among our summer desks

  My first encounter with the up close

  That had to be put up with.

  IV

  Sweaty-lustrous too

  The butt of the freckled

  Elderberry shoot

  I made a rod of,

  A-fluster when I felt

  Not tugging but a trailing

  On the line, not the utter

  Flip-stream frolic-fish

  But a foot-long

  Slither of a fellow,

  A young eel, greasy grey

  And rightly wriggle-spined,

  Not yet the blueblack

  Slick-backed waterwork

  I’d live to reckon with,

  My old familiar

  Pearl-purl

  Selkie-streaker.

  V

  ‘That tree,’ said Walter de la Mare

  (Summer in his rare, recorded voice

  So I could imagine

  A lawn beyond French windows

  And downs in the middle distance)

  ‘That tree, saw it once

  Struck by lightning … The bark –’

  In his accent the ba-aak –

  ‘The bark came off it

  Like a girl taking off her petticoat.’

  White linen éblouissante

  In a breath of air,

  Sylph-flash made flesh,

  Eelwork, sea-salt and dish cloth

  Getting a first hold,

  Then purchase for the thumb nail

  And the thumb

  Under a v-nick in the neck,

  The skinpeel drawing down

  Like silk

  At a practised touch.

  VI

  On the hoarding and the signposts

  ‘Lough Neagh Fishermen’s Co-operative’,

  But ever on our lips and at the weir

  ‘The eelworks’.

  Slack

  I

  Not coal dust, more the weighty grounds of coal

  The lorryman would lug in open bags

  And vent into a corner,

  A sullen pile

  But soft to the shovel, accommodating

  As the clattering coal was not.

  In days when life prepared for rainy days

  It lay there, slumped and waiting

  To dampen down and lengthen out

  The fire, a check on mammon

  And in its own way

  Keeper of the flame.

  II

  The sound it made

  More to me

  Than any allegory.

  Slack schlock.

  Scuttle scuffle.

  Shak-shak.

  And those words –

  ‘Bank the fire’ –

  Every bit as solid as

  The cindery skull

  Formed when its tarry

  Coral cooled.

  III

  Out in the rain,

  Sent out for it

  Again

  Stand in the unlit

  Coalhouse door

  And take in

  Its violet blet,

  Its wet sand weight,

  Remembering it

  Tipped and slushed

  Catharsis

  From the bag.

  A Herbal

  after Guillevic’s ‘Herbier de Bretagne’

  Everywhere plants

  Flourish among graves,

  Sinking their roots

  In all the dynasties

  Of the dead.

  *

  Was graveyard grass

  In our place

  Any different?

  Different from ordinary

  Field grass?

  Remember how you wanted

  The sound recordist

  To make a loop,

  Wildtrack of your feet

  Through the wet

  At the foot of a field?

  *

  Yet for all their lush

  Compliant dialect

  No way have plants here

  Arrived at a settlement.

  Not the mare’s tail,

  Not the broom or whins.

  It must have to do

  With the wind.

  *

  Not that the grass itself

  Ever rests in peace.

  It too takes issue,

  Now sets its face

  To the wind,

  Now turns its back.

  *

  ‘See me?’ it says,

  ‘The wind

  Has me well rehearsed

  In the ways of the world.

  Unstable is good.

&nbs
p; Permission granted!

  Go then, citizen

  Of the wind.

  Go with the flow.’

  *

  The bracken

  Is less boastful.

  It closes and curls back

  On its secrets,

  The best kept

  Upon earth.

  *

  And, to be fair,

  There is sun as well.

  Nowhere else

  Is there sun like here,

  Morning sunshine

  All day long.

  Which is why the plants,

  Even the bracken,

  Are sometimes tempted

  Into trust.

  *

  On sunlit tarmac,

  On memories of the hearse

  At walking pace

  Between overgrown verges,

  The dead here are borne

  Towards the future.

  *

  When the funeral bell tolls

  The grass is all a-tremble.

  But only then.

  Not every time any old bell

  Rings.

  *

  Broom

  Is like the disregarded

  And company for them,

  Shows them

  They have to keep going,

  That the whole thing’s worth

  The effort.

  And sometimes

  Like those same characters

  When the weather’s very good

  Broom sings.

  *

  Never, in later days,

  Would fruit

  So taste of earth.

  There was slate

  In the blackberries,

  A slatey sap.

  *

  Run your hand into

  The ditchback growth

  And you’d grope roots,

  Thick and thin.

  But roots of what?

  Once, one that we saw

  Gave itself away,

  The tail of a rat

  We killed.

  *

  We had enemies,

  Though why we never knew.

  Among them,

  Nettles,

  Malignant things, letting on

  To be asleep.

  *

  Enemies –

  Part of a world

  Nobody seemed able to explain

  But that had to be

  Put up with.

  There would always be dock leaves

  To cure the vicious stings.

  *

  There were leaves on the trees

  And growth on the headrigs

  You could confess

  Everything to.

  Even your fears

  Of the night,

  Of people

  Even.

  *

  What was better then

  Than to crush a leaf or a herb

  Between your palms,

  Then wave it slowly, soothingly

  Past your mouth and nose

  And breathe?

  *

  If you know a bit

  About the universe

  It’s because you’ve taken it in

  Like that,

  Looked as hard

  As you look into yourself,

  Into the rat hole,

  Through the vetch and dock

  That mantled it.

  Because you’ve laid your cheek

  Against the rush clump

  And known soft stone to break

  On the quarry floor.

  *

  Between heather and marigold,

  Between sphagnum and buttercup,

  Between dandelion and broom,

  Between forget-me-not and honeysuckle,

  As between clear blue and cloud,

  Between haystack and sunset sky,

  Between oak tree and slated roof,

  I had my existence. I was there.

  Me in place and the place in me.

  *

  Where can it be found again,

  An elsewhere world, beyond

  Maps and atlases,

  Where all is woven into

  And of itself, like a nest

  Of crosshatched grass blades?

  Canopy

  It was the month of May.

  Trees in Harvard Yard

  Were turning a young green.

  There was whispering everywhere.

  David Ward had installed

  Voice-boxes in the branches,

  Speakers wrapped in sacking

  Looking like old wasps’ nests

  Or bat-fruit in the gloaming –

  Shadow Adam’s apples

  That made sibilant ebb and flow,

  Speech-gutterings, desultory

  Hush and backwash and echo.

  It was like a recording

  Of antiphonal responses

  In the congregation of leaves.

  Or a wood that talked in its sleep.

  Reeds on a riverbank

  Going over and over their secret.

  People were cocking their ears,

  Gathering, quietening,

  Stepping on to the grass,

  Stopping and holding hands.

  Earth was replaying its tapes,

  Words being given new airs:

  Dante’s whispering wood –

  The wood of the suicides –

  Had been magicked to lover’s lane.

  If a twig had been broken off there

  It would have curled itself like a finger

  Around the fingers that broke it

  And then refused to let go

  As if it were mistletoe

  Taking tightening hold.

  Or so I thought as the fairy

  Lights in the boughs came on.

  1994

  The Riverbank Field

  Ask me to translate what Loeb gives as

  ‘In a retired vale … a sequestered grove’

  And I’ll confound the Lethe in Moyola

  By coming through Back Park down from Grove Hill

  Across Long Rigs on to the riverbank –

  Which way, by happy chance, will take me past

  The domos placidas, ‘those peaceful homes’

  Of Upper Broagh. Moths then on evening water

  It would have to be, not bees in sunlight,

  Midge veils instead of lily beds; but stet

  To all the rest: the willow leaves

  Elysian-silvered, the grass so fully fledged

  And unimprinted it can’t not conjure thoughts

  Of passing spirit-troops, animae, quibus altera fato

  Corpora debentur, ‘spirits,’ that is,

  ‘To whom second bodies are owed by fate’.

  And now to continue, as enjoined to often,

  ‘In my own words’:

  ‘All these presences

  Once they have rolled time’s wheel a thousand years

  Are summoned here to drink the river water

  So that memories of this underworld are shed

  And soul is longing to dwell in flesh and blood

  Under the dome of the sky.’

  after Aeneid VI, 704–15, 748–51

  Route 110

  for Anna Rose

  I

  In a stained front-buttoned shopcoat –

  Sere brown piped with crimson –

  Out of the Classics bay into an aisle

  Smelling of dry rot and disinfectant

  She emerges, absorbed in her coin-count,

  Eyes front, right hand at work

  In the slack marsupial vent

  Of her change-pocket, thinking what to charge

  For a used copy of Aeneid VI.

  Dustbreath bestirred in the cubicle mouth

  I inhaled as she slid my purchase

  Into a deckle-edged brown paper bag.

  II

  Smithfield Market Saturdays. The pet shop

  Fetid with droppings in the rab
bit cages,

  Melodious with canaries, green and gold,

  But silent now as birdless Lake Avernus.

  I hurried on, shortcutting to the buses,