Who had our chance to be mud-men, convinced and estranged,
Figure in our own eyes for the eyes of the world.
The Disappearing Island
Once we presumed to found ourselves for good
Between its blue hills and those sandless shores
Where we spent our desperate night in prayer and vigil,
Once we had gathered driftwood, made a hearth
And hung our cauldron in its firmament,
The island broke beneath us like a wave.
The land sustaining us seemed to hold firm
Only when we embraced it in extremis.
All I believe that happened there was vision.
The Riddle
You never saw it used but still can hear
The sift and fall of stuff hopped on the mesh,
Clods and buds in a little dust-up,
The dribbled pile accruing under it.
Which would be better, what sticks or what falls through?
Or does the choice itself create the value?
Legs apart, deft-handed, start a mime
To sift the sense of things from what’s imagined
And work out what was happening in that story
Of the man who carried water in a riddle.
Was it culpable ignorance, or was it rather
A via negativa through drops and let-downs?
from THE CURE AT TROY (1990)
Voices from Lemnos
I
CHORUS
Philoctetes.
Hercules.
Odysseus.
Heroes. Victims. Gods and human beings.
All throwing shapes, every one of them
Convinced he’s in the right, all of them glad
To repeat themselves and their every last mistake,
No matter what.
People so deep into
Their own self-pity self-pity buoys them up.
People so staunch and true, they are pillars of truth,
Shining with self-regard like polished stones.
And their whole life spent admiring themselves
For their own long-suffering.
Highlighting old scars
And flashing them around like decorations.
I hate it, I always hated it, I am
A part of it myself.
II
PHILOCTETES TO NEOPTOLEMUS
Gods curse it!
But it’s me the gods have cursed.
They’ve let my name and story be wiped out.
The real offenders got away with it
And I am still here, rotting like a leper.
Tell me, son. Achilles was your father.
Did you ever maybe hear him mentioning
A man who had inherited a bow –
The actual bow and arrows that belonged
To Hercules, and that Hercules gave him?
Did you never hear, son, about Philoctetes?
About the snake-bite he got at a shrine
When the first fleet was voyaging to Troy?
And then the way he broke out with a sore
And was marooned on the commanders’ orders?
Let me tell you, son, the way they deserted me.
The sea and the sea-swell had me all worn out
So I dozed and fell asleep under a rock
Down on the shore.
And there and then, like that,
They headed off.
And they were delighted.
And the only thing
They left me was a bundle of old rags.
Some day I want them all to waken up
The way I did that day. Imagine, son.
The bay all empty. The ships all disappeared.
Absolute loneliness. Nothing there except
The beat of the waves and the beat of my raw wound …
This island is a nowhere. Nobody
Would ever put in here. There’s nothing.
Nothing to attract a lookout’s eye.
Nobody in his right mind would come near it.
And the rare ones that ever did turn up
Landed by accident, against their will.
They would take pity on me, naturally.
Share out their supplies and give me clothes.
But not a one of them would ever, ever
Take me on board with them to ship me home.
Every day has been a weeping wound
For ten years now. Ten years of misery –
That’s all my service ever got for me.
That’s what I’ve got to thank Odysseus for
And Menelaus and Agamemnon.
Gods curse them all!
I ask for the retribution I deserve.
III
PHILOCTETES
Have you not a sword for me? Or an axe? Or something?
CHORUS
What for?
PHILOCTETES
What for? What do you think for?
For foot and head and hand. For the relief
Of cutting myself off. I want away.
CHORUS
Away where?
PHILOCTETES
Away to the house of death.
To my father, sitting waiting
Under the clay roof. I’ll come back in to him
Out of the light, out of his memory
Of the day I left.
We’ll be on the riverbank
Again, and see the Greeks arriving
And me setting out for Troy, in all good faith.
IV
CHORUS
Human beings suffer.
They torture one another.
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.
History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave,
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that a farther shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.
Call miracle self-healing,
The utter self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
And lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky
That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.
It means once in a lifetime
That justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.
PHILOCTETES
Hercules:
I saw him in the fire.
Hercules
was shining in the air.
I heard the voice of Hercules in my head.
CHORUS
I have opened the closed road
Between the living and the dead
To make the right road clear to you.
I am the voice of Hercules now.
Here on earth my labours were
The stepping stones to upper air.
Lives that suffer and come right
Are backlit by immortal light.
Go, Philoctetes, with this boy,
Go and be cured and capture Troy.
Asclepius will make you whole,
Relieve your body and your soul.
Go, with your bow. Conclude the sore
And cruel stalemate of our war.
Win by fair combat. But know to shun
Reprisal killings when that’s done.
Then take just spoils and sail at last
Out of the bad dream of your past.
Make sacrifice. Burn spoils to me.
Shoot arrows in my memory.
But when the city’s being sacked
Pr
eserve the shrines. Show gods respect.
Reverence for gods survives
Our individual mortal lives.
V
CHORUS
Now it’s high watermark
And floodtide in the heart
And time to go.
The sea-nymphs in the spray
Will be the chorus now.
What’s left to say?
Suspect too much sweet talk
But never close your mind.
It was a fortunate wind
That blew me here. I leave
Half-ready to believe
That a crippled trust might walk
And the half-true rhyme is love.
from SEEING THINGS (1991)
The Golden Bough
(from Virgil, Aeneid, Book VI)
Aeneas was praying and holding on the altar
When the prophetess started to speak: ‘Blood relation of gods,
Trojan, son of Anchises, the way down to Avernus is easy.
Day and night black Pluto’s door stands open.
But to retrace your steps and get back to upper air,
This is the real task and the real undertaking.
A few have been able to do it, sons of the gods
Favoured by Jupiter Justus, or exalted to heaven
In a blaze of heroic glory. Forests spread half-way down
And Cocytus winds through the dark, licking its banks.
Still, if love torments you so much and you so much desire
To sail the Stygian lake twice and twice to inspect
The underworld dark, if you must go beyond what’s permitted,
Understand what you must do beforehand.
Hidden in the thick of a tree is a bough made of gold
And its leaves and pliable twigs are made of it too.
It is sacred to underworld Juno, who is its patron,
And overtopped by a grove where deep shadows mass
Along far wooded valleys. No one is ever permitted
To go down into earth’s hidden places unless he has first
Plucked this golden-fledged tree-branch out of its tree
And bestowed it on fair Proserpina, to whom it belongs
By decree, her own special gift. And when it is plucked
A second one grows in its place, golden once more,
And the foliage growing upon it glimmers the same.
Therefore look up and search deep and when you have found it
Take hold of it boldly and duly. If fate has called you
The bough will come away easily, of its own sweet accord.
Otherwise, no matter how much strength you muster, you won’t
Ever manage to quell it or fell it with the toughest of blades.’
Markings
I
We marked the pitch: four jackets for four goalposts,
That was all. The corners and the squares
Were there like longitude and latitude
Under the bumpy ground, to be
Agreed about or disagreed about
When the time came. And then we picked the teams
And crossed the line our called names drew between us.
Youngsters shouting their heads off in a field
As the light died and they kept on playing
Because by then they were playing in their heads
And the actual kicked ball came to them
Like a dream heaviness, and their own hard
Breathing in the dark and skids on grass
Sounded like effort in another world …
It was quick and constant, a game that never need
Be played out. Some limit had been passed,
There was fleetness, furtherance, untiredness
In time that was extra, unforeseen and free.
II
You also loved lines pegged out in the garden,
The spade nicking the first straight edge along
The tight white string. Or string stretched perfectly
To make the outline of a house foundation,
Pale timber battens set at right angles
For every corner, each freshly sawn new board
Spick and span in the oddly passive grass.
Or the imaginary line straight down
A field of grazing, to be ploughed open
From the rod stuck in one headrig to the rod
Stuck in the other.
III
All these things entered you
As if they were both the door and what came through it.
They marked the spot, marked time and held it open.
A mower parted the bronze sea of corn.
A windlass hauled the centre out of water.
Two men with a cross-cut kept it swimming
Into a felled beech backwards and forwards
So that they seemed to row the steady earth.
Man and Boy
I
‘Catch the old one first,’
(My father’s joke was also old, and heavy
And predictable). ‘Then the young ones
Will all follow, and Bob’s your uncle.’
On slow bright river evenings, the sweet time
Made him afraid we’d take too much for granted
And so our spirits must be lightly checked.
Blessed be down-to-earth! Blessed be highs!
Blessed be the detachment of dumb love
In that broad-backed, low-set man
Who feared debt all his life, but now and then
Could make a splash like the salmon he said was
‘As big as a wee pork pig by the sound of it’.
II
In earshot of the pool where the salmon jumped
Back through its own unheard concentric soundwaves
A mower leans forever on his scythe.
He has mown himself to the centre of the field
And stands in a final perfect ring
Of sunlit stubble.
‘Go and tell your father,’ the mower says
(He said it to my father who told me),
‘I have it mowed as clean as a new sixpence.’
My father is a barefoot boy with news,
Running at eye-level with weeds and stooks
On the afternoon of his own father’s death.
The open, black half of the half-door waits.
I feel much heat and hurry in the air.
I feel his legs and quick heels far away
And strange as my own – when he will piggyback me
At a great height, light-headed and thin-boned,
Like a witless elder rescued from the fire.
Seeing Things
I
Inishbofin on a Sunday morning.
Sunlight, turfsmoke, seagulls, boatslip, diesel.
One by one we were being handed down
Into a boat that dipped and shilly-shallied
Scaresomely every time. We sat tight
On short cross-benches, in nervous twos and threes,
Obedient, newly close, nobody speaking
Except the boatmen, as the gunwales sank
And seemed they might ship water any minute.
The sea was very calm but even so,
When the engine kicked and our ferryman
Swayed for balance, reaching for the tiller,
I panicked at the shiftiness and heft
Of the craft itself. What guaranteed us –
That quick response and buoyancy and swim –
Kept me in agony. All the time
As we went sailing evenly across
The deep, still, seeable-down-into water,
It was as if I looked from another boat
Sailing through air, far up, and could see
How riskily we fared into the morning,
And loved in vain our bare, bowed, numbered heads.
II
Claritas. The dry-eyed Latin word
Is perfect for the carved stone of the wat
er
Where Jesus stands up to his unwet knees
And John the Baptist pours out more water
Over his head: all this in bright sunlight
On the façade of a cathedral. Lines
Hard and thin and sinuous represent
The flowing river. Down between the lines
Little antic fish are all go. Nothing else.
And yet in that utter visibility
The stone’s alive with what’s invisible:
Waterweed, stirred sand-grains hurrying off,
The shadowy, unshadowed stream itself.
All afternoon, heat wavered on the steps
And the air we stood up to our eyes in wavered
Like the zig-zag hieroglyph for life itself.
III
Once upon a time my undrowned father
Walked into our yard. He had gone to spray
Potatoes in a field on the riverbank
And wouldn’t bring me with him. The horse-sprayer
Was too big and new-fangled, bluestone might
Burn me in the eyes, the horse was fresh, I
Might scare the horse, and so on. I threw stones
At a bird on the shed roof, as much for
The clatter of the stones as anything,
But when he came back, I was inside the house
And saw him out the window, scatter-eyed
And daunted, strange without his hat,
His step unguided, his ghosthood immanent.
When he was turning on the riverbank,
The horse had rusted and reared up and pitched
Cart and sprayer and everything off balance
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