Blaris Moor
Blaris Moor
Medbh McGuckian
Wake Forest University Press
Winston-Salem, North Carolina
First North American edition
© Medbh McGuckian, 2016
Edited by Peter Fallon and first published by
The Gallery Press in Ireland in 2015
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced
in any form without prior permission
in writing from the publishers.
For permission, write to
Wake Forest University Press
Post Office Box 7333
Winston-Salem, NC 27109
wfupress.wfu.edu
[email protected]
ISBN 978-1-930630-78-9 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-916390-00-6 (ebook)
Library of Congress Control Number 2016938997
Designed and typeset by Quemadura
Publication of this book was generously supported
by the Boyle Family Fund.
for the Jade-maidens,
Ruth, Mabel and Rosemary
In 1797 four young militiamen were tried by Court Martial in Belfast for connexion with the United Irishmen, convicted, and immediately afterwards shot at a place called Blaris or Blaris Moor in the County Down, near Lisburn; in an event that caused intense and widespread indignation in Ulster. To commemorate this, a spirited ballad of eight verses—of the characteristic peasant type—was composed, the author of which was believed to be Garland the ‘Lurgan Poet’.… That the ballad should have been sung to so many different airs and settings, in Munster as well as in Ulster, indicates its widespread popularity.
P W Joyce
Old Folk Music and Songs, 1909
Table of Contents
An Early Apocalypse
The Reading Fever
The Nymph Hay
The Stone-word
Trans-shipment Station
Musk
Animals of the Mind
The Contents of the Cupboard
Tavoletta
The Rainbow Division
How Despair May Be Transformed into a Diamond
The Migration of the Nobles, 1603
By the Entrails of Christ
Virginia Will Become Aughanure
Primrose Red Orchestra
Santo Spirito Lands on Mars
White Cortina Outside Stardust Ballroom
The Statement of My Right Honourable Friend
The Questioning of Soldier L
Note for Blind Therapists
A Novel About Patrick
Reading Before Stalin
Verses Unpublished in the Poet’s Lifetime Works and Days
Our Days
About That
Seasonal Mood Picture
Sketches for a Fantasy
Poem of a Kinsman
Sympathy for the Twilight
Muse of Cinema
The Black Goblet
Dream of a First Love’s Marriage
Revenge Against Music
Your Death
Synagogue Wedding
Red Cornfield
Rain-Spangled Poem
To the Demon’s Memory
The Courtyard
Lyre of Lyres
October’s Man of the Moment
Unextinguished Moon
Samson the Housecat
White Guardist Poetess
Attempt at a Room
Her Dislove of Love
The Heart Ghost
Days in Red Poland
So Warsaw’s Come to Wait on Us Now
Antipersonnel Mine
Skirt of a Thousand Triangles
Notice
District Behind the Lines
Black Re-partition
Rowe’s Fawn
Honeycross
At the Hand and Pen
Telltale
The Makeover
My Angelism
The Barns of Joseph
The Goddess of Smallpox
House Private
After Afterlude
Butterfly Memory Object
Black Stone Mantelpiece with Chimney Clock
The Chess Queen
Who Is Your City?
An Early Apocalypse
I see the skeleton of the year
poised in the cool moonspray,
trying to catch at the blemished
calendar of the next.
Embraced most of the day
by the low and slender rainbow,
the world-jewel sweeps on
with its morning, noon and night.
The nowhereness of the fifth-month grass
stayed for a moment only,
before the earthless mountain light
anointed without mountains.
The Reading Fever
The heart experiences systole,
small controlled doses of forgetfulness.
The intellect performs a full resolution
as though to a light by which
it went on being touched
on the continent’s northern fringe.
The world is like a ring from a spouse
not yet stabilized in glory,
a sacrament performed by an unworthy priest
whose superessential gleam is hidden
in an offering—the sensible, the coastal
grasses still in winter head, the apple.
The Nymph Hay
If the muse should choose a language
she would choose this flawless English
to fold her thought in that entire quasi-family
of words, as I filled the false pockets of your coat
with uncombed lavender blossoms.
Once familiar things are more naked
than your skin darkened with soorma,
a Russian word meaning destruction,
as in the first wartime colour photograph,
Zenana, true bed woman, Saint Quadphone.
The Stone-word
A finer-grained time lies thicker on the ground.
We take out the warm lining of overcoats,
replace one sleeve with a sleeve of a different colour.
Beyond the slower times the city dreams itself,
dreams of itself, its footprints, the nightwalk,
alarm all night becomes a kind of weather.
There was no walk, not for me, nothing to read,
sick without books, I wasted day,
the young, strong, demanding sun, the unwounded leaves.
Useless in the shadows of the sheds, I invented
a small abandoned notebook of doubts
concerning words, held it between my two heart fingers.
And the sight of the end of the platform
loosened a very long perfume that had ease
of gathering into my ceiling blue as an eyelid.
Trans-shipment Station
A cloud of down feathers hovers
about the city
like the nakedness of the right hand
touching the left.
Two letters on weather,
patterned in the form of kisses,
ushered in a moonlight that scalds
the shell-pocked Holiday Inn.
Someone agreeing to a kiss after death
is trying to stand up where mothers
taught their children to fall to the ground.
An acute memory of two kisses
situated between two other kisses
made a trench in my forehead.
Dustings of mud disintegrated
on the bed.
If a mountain is to appear
when we are willingly considering war
of an evening
he slowly raises
his open hand and holds it above his eyebrows,
light blue being the infantry colour.
Musk
With moorlike beauty the moon
that served in the autumn as a lamp
reappears and seems the one living
deserving thing already above
the horizon for much of the night.
The year is complete: each season has set
its sharp stamp on the land.
And after the easiest winter of the war
some of us who overlapped for six years
are born into that sanctuary, the lean spring.
The floor of last year’s ragged tent
is carpeted with reindeer moss and cranberry
blossoms, as if a heart, on whose shoulder
my tent was placed, had burst through
its sleeping skin, from the weight of the snow dome.
Snow-beaten, the snow floor of the double igloo
feels like rice. No scab of ice
forms on our weather-ravaged faces
as dawn greys the burning dry-ice window.
Snow falls thinly, and I can imagine them
crossing the empty white sea
in other winters, the long frosted feathers
worked into their rain clothing
like Egyptian eyes on a dress
always frozen in its vision.
His hand always warmer than my own,
his broad, peaceful arms bringing
two miracles into being at once,
with one knee pulled upward he anchors
his sled with a flourish and birdlike amen.
His name-soul has cried herself
completely dry, and offers her half-moon breast
for a flat-tongued kiss, which touches them
into words, a voiceless L.
The consonant is drawn out tenderly
as snow snakes and patches their fireplace
of three stones, which makes
the soot-greyed icicled walls in which
they stand a fictive chapel,
awkward, urgent as a photograph,
while the ground-wind dies
painlessly, under the shallow snow.
Animals of the Mind
Carrying bee bread, a healing
exudate from wounded plants,
the western honey bee in morning lows
passes through small flight holes
around each hanging combsheet
to a deeper part of the hive.
The crocodile, basking in the sun,
with jaws open, swallows stones,
but not the crocodile-bird spinning near.
A kneeling stag with distorted antlers
dies behind a friendly thornbush,
a lioness crouches among bronze leaves.
To be gifts, a border of walking lions
looks straight ahead in a guardian pose.
A gold and lapis lazuli ram is caught
on a tree where tiny silver frogs
play with lion pins. A team of four overlapping
yellow-glazed horses paws the raw evenings.
A camel with translucent eyelids
breathes the dead airspace next its skin,
exhaled veins returning to the heart.
A leaf is arrayed across the face
of a leaf-nosed bat, or nose-leaf bat,
the notch-eared, long-fingered, tomb or horseshoe bat.
When the moon dives, the moonfish, pufferfish,
spade fish, triggerfish and the upside down
catfish run after her like puppies.
Then a living blizzard of birds overflies:
the rose finch, shining sunbird,
the brown fish owl and the red-eyed dove,
the spectacled, Orphean warbler,
the mourning wheatear and the laughing thrush,
the dusky eyebrowed thrush, the rubythroat,
the slaty-headed parakeet, the sooty gull,
the plaintive cuckoo, the harlequin quail,
the see-see partridge and the ruddy shelduck;
the honey buzzard, the dark chanting goshawk,
the comb duck, the cotton pygmy goose,
the bean goose, the common goldeneye,
the shy albatross, the sociable lapwing,
the whale-headed stork, not the false killer whale,
the pond heron, the Indian blue robin …
Their airy eddies scatter juniper
for six miles of tongue-patterned serpents,
and Isabella gazelles, and marbled polecats,
and monk seals and harbour porpoises,
and naked-soled gerbils, and midday gerbils,
and click beetles and jewel beetles;
for the black-lipped pika and the white-toothed shrew,
for the junglefowl, the hinny or mule,
for the plain tiger butterfly and the mouse-like dormouse,
and the daughter the snake obtained by prayer
that was killed by a falling star, around the eye,
partly by the sure-lined way she holds her body,
partly by the ribbing on the wings she has acquired.
The Contents of the Cupboard
When she goes to the Paragon
someone stands treat, you know.
Her splendid salary of four shillings
is subject to deduction in the shape
of fines—a fine of three pence
if her feet are dirty, or the ground
under the bench is left untidy.
A fine is inflicted for talking,
if a girl is late she is shut out
for half the day, that is for the six
morning hours, and fourpence
is deducted from her day’s eightpence.
One girl was fined a shilling
for letting the web twist round
a machine to save her fingers being cut.
To contribute to the statue the foreman
stopped one shilling each out of their wages,
and further deprived them of half a day’s work
by closing the factory, giving them a ‘holiday’.
The husband can hear of no work
but evidently owing to bad temper
cannot keep a situation long.
The room has practically no furniture
except the bed, and when he has a fit on
he would not think twice of lifting it
and throwing it out of the window.
The baby is small, there is an old box
which does duty for a table. At the first visit
I got the husband to get a pennyworth
of coal, make up the fire, and wash the basin
they washed in for mixing the pudding in.
They were astonished that a suet pudding
could be so light, had never heard
of baking powder being used.
The mother stores milk in a jamjar
on the outside window ledge with a piece
of glass on top. The drinking water
is fetched up from the yard in a kettle.
The contents of the cupboard
have been noted down, as follows:
Lowest compartment—coals, splintered wood,
old newspapers, boots, potatoes, onions,
a stray carrot, and one or two cabbage leaves.
First shelf from the bottom—a frying pan,
back to the wall, cold pickles or jamjars,
empty tins, a paper of tin-tacks,
a penny bottle of ink (no cork),
a penny tin of vaseline (no lid),
a piece of soap, an old hairbrush and comb,
a few bent hairpins, bits of string,
a screwdriver and other tools,
a book or two, a magazine.
Second shelf from the bottom—a plate
with meatbones, cold potatoes and bacon rinds,
a bottle of vinegar,
a biscuit tin
with the King in scarlet uniform,
a paper of tea inside, a brown teapot,
white and gold cups and saucers (incomplete),
a blue glass sugar bowl with brown sugar,
condensed milk in an opened tin,
a yellow jug, several spoons, forks
and knives in various stages of use,
round tin trays, some loose jam
in a pie dish, some pickled red cabbage,
a reel of thread with a needle stuck in it,
a battered thimble, a box of baby powder
with a puff in it, some safety pins,
a paper of flower seeds and a little blue bag.
Top shelf—a bundle of old papers,
more tins, bottles, jars and pots,
an old black shawl rolled up,
an old black sailor hat standing
on its side, with hatpins in it,
a broken birdcage, a saucepan with a hole
in it, stuffed out of the way.
Tavoletta
Before the snow of the city
too soon after Christmas
had three times melted
under the tenderest sewing clouds
all that was audible
was the last island in motion
cascading like a slanting plate
or a discarded crinoline
in the buckled roof of the rain.
The mind does not know
it is counting caustic sands
rushed from solid rock.
The picture hanging over my stove
gradually deepens its bone brown
to a holding back of colour without end
such as prevails at dawn
to older colours where rose
bleaches out and blue suffers.
Dark violet bricks in feathers
on the weather side of a wall:
an airwell on the left wing—
golden crucifixion through which he slept—
which is enough protection in itself,
but emptier than the parish church.
The Rainbow Division
There does not seem to be any reason
why the hills should go where they do:
the land crouches like a badly broken
loaf of bread, the spoon-shaped ground
pretty as an English park
with larkspur and mustard flowers.
A corner of Thrace. Across the Hellespont
a high, straggling cliff upshoulders
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