Human Chain

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Human Chain Page 3

by Seamus Heaney


  Parrying the crush with my bagged Virgil,

  Past booths and the jambs of booths with their displays

  Of canvas schoolbags, maps, prints, plaster plaques,

  Feather dusters, artificial flowers,

  Then racks of suits and overcoats that swayed

  When one was tugged from its overcrowded frame

  Like their owners’ shades close-packed on Charon’s barge.

  III

  Once the driver wound a little handle

  The destination names began to roll

  Fast-forward in their panel, and everything

  Came to life. Passengers

  Flocked to the kerb like agitated rooks

  Around a rookery, all go

  But undecided. At which point the inspector

  Who ruled the roost in bus station and bus

  Separated and directed everybody

  By calling not the names but the route numbers,

  And so we scattered as instructed, me

  For Route 110, Cookstown via Toome and Magherafelt.

  IV

  Tarpaulin-stiff, coal-black, sharp-cuffed as slate,

  The standard-issue railway guard’s long coat

  I bought once second-hand: suffering its scourge

  At the neck and wrists was worth it even so

  For the dismay I caused by doorstep night arrivals,

  A creature of cold blasts and flap-winged rain.

  And then, come finer weather, up and away

  To Italy, in a wedding guest’s bargain suit

  Of finest weave, loose-fitting, summery, grey

  As Venus’ doves, hotfooting it with the tanned expats

  Up their Etruscan slopes to a small brick chapel

  To find myself the one there most at home.

  V

  Venus’ doves? Why not McNicholls’ pigeons

  Out of their pigeon holes but homing still?

  They lead unerringly to McNicholls’ kitchen

  And a votive jampot on the dresser shelf.

  So reach me not a gentian but stalks

  From the bunch that stood in it, each head of oats

  A silvered smattering, each individual grain

  Wrapped in a second husk of glittering foil

  They’d saved from chocolate bars, then pinched and cinched

  ‘To give the wee altar a bit of shine.’

  The night old Mrs Nick, as she was to us,

  Handed me one it as good as lit me home.

  VI

  It was the age of ghosts. Of hand-held flashlamps.

  Lights moving at a distance scried for who

  And why: whose wake, say, in which house on the road

  In that direction – Michael Mulholland’s the first

  I attended as a full participant,

  Sitting up until the family rose

  Like strangers to themselves and us. A wake

  Without the corpse of their own dear ill-advised

  Sonbrother swimmer, lost in the Bristol Channel.

  For three nights we kept conversation going

  Around the waiting trestles. By the fourth

  His coffin, with the lid on, was in place.

  VII

  The corpse house then a house of hospitalities

  Right through the small hours, the ongoing card game

  Interrupted constantly by rounds

  Of cigarettes on plates, biscuits, cups of tea,

  The antiphonal recital of known events

  And others rare, clandestine, undertoned.

  Apt pupil in their night school, I walked home

  On the last morning, my clothes as smoke-imbued

  As if I’d fed a pyre, accompanied to the gable

  By the mother, to point out a right of way

  Across their fields, into our own back lane,

  And absolve me thus formally of trespass.

  VIII

  As one when the month is young sees a new moon

  Fading into daytime, again it is her face

  At the dormer window, her hurt still new,

  My look behind me hurried as I unlock,

  Switch on, rev up, pull out and drive away

  In the car she’ll not have taken her eyes off,

  The brakelights flicker-flushing at the corner

  Like red lamps swung by RUC patrols

  In the small hours on pre-Troubles roads

  After dances, after our holdings on

  And holdings back, the necking

  And nay-saying age of impurity.

  IX

  And what in the end was there left to bury

  Of Mr Lavery, blown up in his own pub

  As he bore the primed device and bears it still

  Mid-morning towards the sun-admitting door

  Of Ashley House? Or of Louis O’Neill

  In the wrong place the Wednesday they buried

  Thirteen who’d been shot in Derry? Or of bodies

  Unglorified, accounted for and bagged

  Behind the grief cordons: not to be laid

  In war graves with full honours, nor in a separate plot

  Fired over on anniversaries

  By units drilled and spruce and unreconciled.

  X

  Virgil’s happy shades in pure blanched raiment

  Contend on their green meadows, while Orpheus

  Weaves among them, sweeping strings, aswerve

  To the pulse of his own playing and to avoid

  The wrestlers, dancers, runners on the grass.

  Not unlike a sports day in Bellaghy,

  Slim Whitman’s wavering tenor amplified

  Above sparking dodgems, flying chair-o-planes,

  A mile of road with parked cars in the twilight

  And teams of grown men stripped for action

  Going hell for leather until the final whistle,

  Leaving stud-scrapes on the pitch and on each other.

  XI

  Those evenings when we’d just wait and watch

  And fish. Then the evening the otter’s head

  Appeared in the flow, or was it only

  A surface-ruck and gleam we took for

  An otter’s head? No doubting, all the same,

  The gleam, a turnover warp in the black

  Quick water. Or doubting the solid ground

  Of the riverbank field, twilit and a-hover

  With midge-drifts, as if we had commingled

  Among shades and shadows stirring on the brink

  And stood there waiting, watching,

  Needy and ever needier for translation.

  XII

  And now the age of births. As when once

  At dawn from the foot of our back garden

  The last to leave came with fresh-plucked flowers

  To quell whatever smells of drink and smoke

  Would linger on where mother and child were due

  Later that morning from the nursing home,

  So now, as a thank-offering for one

  Whose long wait on the shaded bank has ended,

  I arrive with my bunch of stalks and silvered heads

  Like tapers that won’t dim

  As her earthlight breaks and we gather round

  Talking baby talk.

  Death of a Painter

  i.m. Nancy Wynne Jones

  Not a tent of blue but a peek of gold

  From her coign of vantage in the studio,

  A Wicklow cornfield in the gable window.

  Long gazing at the hill – but not Cézanne,

  More Thomas Hardy working to the end

  In his crocheted old heirloom of a shawl.

  And now not Hardy but a butterfly,

  One of the multitude he imagined airborne

  Through Casterbridge, down the summer thoroughfare.

  And now not a butterfly but Jonah entering

  The whale’s mouth, as the Old English says,

  Like a mote through a minster door.

/>   Loughanure

  i.m. Colin Middleton

  I

  Smoke might have been already in his eyes

  The way he’d narrow them to size you up

  As if you were a canvas, all the while

  Licking and sealing a hand-rolled cigarette,

  Each small ash increment flicked off

  As white as flecks on the horizon line

  Of his painting of Loughanure, thirty guineas

  Forty-odd years ago. Whitewashed gables

  Like petals stripped from hawthorn, heather ground

  A pother of Gaeltacht turf smoke. Every time

  He came to the house, he would go and stand

  Gazing at it, grunting a bit and nodding.

  II

  So this is what an afterlife can come to?

  A cloud-boil of grey weather on the wall

  Like murky crystal, a remembered stare –

  This for an answer to Alighieri

  And Plato’s Er? Who watched immortal souls

  Choose lives to come according as they were

  Fulfilled or repelled by existences they’d known

  Or suffered first time round. Saw great far-seeing

  Odysseus in the end choose for himself

  The destiny of a private man. Saw Orpheus

  Because he’d perished at the women’s hands

  Choose rebirth as a swan.

  III

  And did I seek the Kingdom? Will the Kingdom

  Come? The idea of it there,

  Behind its scrim since font and fontanel,

  Breaks like light or water,

  Like giddiness I felt at the old story

  Of how he’d turn away from the motif,

  Spread his legs, bend low, then look between them

  For the mystery of the hard and fast

  To be unveiled, his inverted face contorting

  Like an arse-kisser’s in some vision of the damned

  Until he’d straighten, turn back, cock an eye

  And stand with the brush at arm’s length, readying.

  IV

  Had I had sufficient Irish in Rannafast

  In 1953 to understand

  The seanchas and dinnsheanchas,

  Had not been too young and too shy,

  Had even heard the story about Caoilte

  Hunting the fawn from Tory to a door

  In a fairy hill where he wasn’t turned away

  But led to a crystal chair on the hill floor

  While a girl with golden ringlets harped and sang,

  Language and longing might have made a leap

  Up through that cloud-swabbed air, the horizon lightened

  And the far ‘Lake of the Yew Tree’ gleamed.

  V

  Not all that far, as it turns out,

  Now that I can cover those few miles

  In almost as few minutes, Mount Errigal

  On the skyline the one constant thing

  As I drive unhomesick, unbelieving, through

  A grant-aided, renovated scene, trying

  To remember the Greek word signifying

  A world restored completely: that would include

  Hannah Mhór’s turkey-chortle of Irish,

  The swan at evening over Loch an Iubhair,

  Clarnico Murray’s hard iced caramels

  A penny an ounce over Sharkey’s counter.

  Wraiths

  for Ciaran Carson

  I Sidhe

  She took me into the ground, the spade-marked

  Clean-cut inside of a dugout

  Meant for calves.

  Dung on the floor, a damp gleam

  And seam of sand like white gold

  In the earth wall, nicked fibres in the roof.

  We stood under the hill, out of the day

  But faced towards the daylight, holding hands,

  Inhaling the excavated bank.

  Zoom in over our shoulders,

  A tunnelling shot that accelerates and flares.

  Discover us against weird brightness. Cut.

  II Parking Lot

  We were wraiths in the afternoon.

  The bus had stopped. There was neither waiting room

  Nor booth nor bench, only a parking lot

  Above the town, open as a hillfort,

  A panned sky and a light wind blowing.

  We were on our way to the Gaeltacht,

  Between languages, half in thrall to desire,

  Half shy of it, when a flit of the foreknown

  Blinked off a sunlit lake near the horizon

  And passed into us, climbing and clunking up

  Those fretted metal steps, as we reboarded

  And were reincarnated seat by seat.

  III White Nights

  Furrow-plodders in spats and bright clasped brogues

  Are cradling bags and hoisting beribboned drones

  As their skilled neck-pullers’ fingers force the chanters

  And the whole band starts rehearsing

  Its stupendous, swaggering march

  Inside the hall. Meanwhile

  One twilit field and summer hedge away

  We wait for the learner who will stay behind

  Piping by stops and starts,

  Making an injured music for us alone,

  Early-to-beds, white-night absentees

  Open-eared to this day.

  Sweeney Out-Takes

  for Gregory of Corkus

  I Otterboy

  ‘Eorann writes with news of our two otters

  Courting yesterday morning by the turnhole.

  I can see them at their shiny romps

  And imagine myself an otterboy

  Kneeling where Ronan stands in cleric’s vestment,

  His hand outstretched to turn the bordered page

  Of a massbook I hold high for his perusal,

  My brow inclined to those big thong-tied feet

  Protruding from the alb. Then shake myself

  Like a waterdog that bounds out on the bank

  To drop whatever he’s retrieved and gambol

  In pelt-sluice and unruly riverbreath.’

  II He Remembers Lynchechaun

  ‘That three-leggèd, round-bellied, cast-iron pot

  Deep in the nettle clump, cobweb-mouthed

  And black-frost cold

  After its cauldron life of plump and boil,

  Reminds me of the cool consideration

  Behind the busy warmth

  Of Lynchechaun; and its heaviness

  When I’d lift it off the crane,

  Its lightening once I’d tilt and drain it

  I now see as premonitions

  Of my seeing through him, the dizziness

  As scales fell from my eyes.’

  III The Pattern

  ‘Full face, foursquare, eyelevel, carved in stone,

  An ecclesiastic on the low-set lintel

  Vested and unavoidable as the one

  I approached head-on the full length of an aisle –

  Unready as I was if much rehearsed

  In the art of first confession.

  What transpired next was meltwater,

  A little trickle on the patterned tiles,

  Truthfunk and walkaway, but then

  In the nick of time, heelturn, comeback

  And a clean breast made

  Manfully if late. The pattern set.’

  Colum Cille Cecinit

  I Is scíth mo chrob ón scríbainn

  My hand is cramped from penwork.

  My quill has a tapered point.

  Its bird-mouth issues a blue-dark

  Beetle-sparkle of ink.

  Wisdom keeps welling in streams

  From my fine-drawn sallow hand:

  Riverrun on the vellum

  Of ink from green-skinned holly.

  My small runny pen keeps going

  Through books, through thick and thin,

  To enrich the scholars’ holdings –
/>   Penwork that cramps my hand.

  II Is aire charaim Doire

  Derry I cherish ever.

  It is calm, it is clear.

  Crowds of white angels on their rounds

  At every corner.

  III Fil súil nglais

  Towards Ireland a grey eye

  Will look back but not see

  Ever again

  The men of Ireland or her women.

  11th–12th CENTURY

  Hermit Songs

  for Helen Vendler

  Above the ruled quires of my book

  I hear the wild birds jubilant.

  I

  With cut-offs of black calico,

  Remnants of old blackout blinds

  Ironed, tacked with criss-cross threads,

  We jacketed the issued books.

 

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