what seemed deserved and promised passed me by?’
I could not speak. I saw a hoard of black
basalt axe heads, smooth as a beetle’s back,
a cairn of stone force that might detonate,
the eggs of danger. And then I saw a face
he had once given me, a plaster cast
of an abbess, done by the Gowran master,
mild-mouthed and cowled, a character of grace.
‘Your gift will be a candle in our house.’
But he had gone when I looked to meet his eyes
and hunkering instead there in his place
was a bleeding, pale-faced boy, plastered in mud.
‘The red-hot pokers blazed a lovely red
in Jerpoint the Sunday I was murdered,’
he said quietly. ‘Now do you remember?
You were there with poets when you got the word
and stayed there with them, while your own flesh and blood
was carted to Bellaghy from the Fews.
They showed more agitation at the news
than you did.’
‘But they were getting crisis
first-hand, Colum, they had happened in on
live sectarian assassination.
I was dumb, encountering what was destined.’
And so I pleaded with my second cousin.
‘I kept seeing a grey stretch of Lough Beg
and the strand empty at daybreak.
I felt like the bottom of a dried-up lake.’
‘You saw that, and you wrote that—not the fact.
You confused evasion and artistic tact.
The Protestant who shot me through the head
I accuse directly, but indirectly, you
who now atone perhaps upon this bed
for the way you whitewashed ugliness and drew
the lovely blinds of the Purgatorio
and saccharined my death with morning dew.’
Then I seemed to waken out of sleep
among more pilgrims whom I did not know
drifting to the hostel for the night.
IX
‘My brain dried like spread turf, my stomach
Shrank to a cinder and tightened and cracked.
Often I was dogs on my own track
Of blood on wet grass that I could have licked.
Under the prison blanket, an ambush
Stillness I felt safe in settled round me.
Streetlights came on in small towns, the bomb flash
Came before the sound, I saw country
I knew from Glenshane down to Toome
And heard a car I could make out years away
With me in the back of it like a white-faced groom,
A hit-man on the brink, emptied and deadly.
When the police yielded my coffin, I was light
As my head when I took aim.’
This voice from blight
And hunger died through the black dorm:
There he was, laid out with a drift of Mass cards
At his shrouded feet. Then the firing party’s
Volley in the yard. I saw woodworm
In gate posts and door jambs, smelt mildew
From the byre loft where he watched and hid
From fields his draped coffin would raft through.
Unquiet soul, they should have buried you
In the bog where you threw your first grenade,
Where only helicopters and curlews
Make their maimed music, and sphagnum moss
Could teach you its medicinal repose
Until, when the weasel whistles on its tail,
No other weasel will obey its call.
I dreamt and drifted. All seemed to run to waste
As down a swirl of mucky, glittering flood
Strange polyp floated like a huge corrupt
Magnolia bloom, surreal as a shed breast,
My softly awash and blanching self-disgust.
And I cried among night waters, ‘I repent
My unweaned life that kept me competent
To sleepwalk with connivance and mistrust.’
Then, like a pistil growing from the polyp,
A lighted candle rose and steadied up
Until the whole bright-masted thing retrieved
A course and the currents it had gone with
Were what it rode and showed. No more adrift,
My feet touched bottom and my heart revived.
Then something round and clear
And mildly turbulent, like a bubbleskin
Or a moon in smoothly rippled lough water
Rose in a cobwebbed space: the molten
Inside-sheen of an instrument
Revolved its polished convexes full
Upon me, so close and brilliant
I seemed to pitch back in a headlong fall.
And then it was the clarity of waking
To sunlight and a bell and gushing taps
In the next cubicle. Still there for the taking!
The old brass trumpet with its valves and stops
I found once in loft thatch, a mystery
I shied from then, for I thought such trove beyond me.
‘I hate how quick I was to know my place.
I hate where I was born, hate everything
That made me biddable and unforthcoming,’
I mouthed at my half-composed face
In the shaving mirror, like somebody
Drunk in the bathroom during a party,
Lulled and repelled by his own reflection.
As if the cairnstone could defy the cairn.
As if the eddy could reform the pool.
As if a stone swirled under a cascade,
Eroded and eroding in its bed,
Could grind itself down to a different core.
Then I thought of the tribe whose dances never fail
For they keep dancing till they sight the deer.
X
Morning stir in the hostel. A pot
hooked on forged links. Soot flakes. Plumping water.
The open door brilliant with sunlight.
Hearthsmoke rambling and a thud of earthenware
drumming me back until I saw the mug
beyond my reach on its high shelf, the one
patterned with blue cornflowers, sprig after sprig
repeating round it, as quiet as a milestone …
When had it not been there? There was one night
when fit-up actors used it for a prop
and I sat in the dark hall estranged from it
as a couple vowed and called it their loving cup
and held it in our gaze until the curtain
jerked shut with an ordinary noise.
Dipped and glamoured then by this translation,
it was restored to its old haircracked doze
on the mantelpiece, its parchment glazes fast—
as the otter surfaced once with Ronan’s psalter
miraculously unharmed, that had been lost
a day and a night under lough water.
And so the saint praised God on the lough shore
for that dazzle of impossibility
I credited again in the sun-filled door,
so absolutely light it could put out fire.
XI
As if the prisms of the kaleidoscope
I plunged once in a butt of muddied water
surfaced like a marvellous lightship
and out of its silted crystals a monk’s face
that had spoken years ago from behind a grille
spoke again about the need and chance
to salvage everything, to re-envisage
the zenith and glimpsed jewels of any gift
mistakenly abased …
What came to nothing could always be replenished.
‘Read poems as prayers,’ he said, ‘and for your penance
translate me something by Juan de la Cruz.’
> Returned from Spain to our chapped wilderness,
his consonants aspirate, his forehead shining,
he had made me feel there was nothing to confess.
Now his sandalled passage stirred me on to this:
How well I know that fountain, filling, running,
although it is the night.
That eternal fountain, hidden away,
I know its haven and its secrecy
although it is the night.
But not its source because it does not have one,
which is all sources’ source and origin
although it is the night.
No other thing can be so beautiful.
Here the earth and heaven drink their fill
although it is the night.
So pellucid it never can be muddied,
and I know that all light radiates from it
although it is the night.
I know no sounding-line can find its bottom,
nobody ford or plumb its deepest fathom
although it is the night.
And its current so in flood it overspills
to water hell and heaven and all peoples
although it is the night.
And the current that is generated there,
as far as it wills to, it can flow that far
although it is the night.
And from these two a third current proceeds
which neither of these two, I know, precedes
although it is the night.
This eternal fountain hides and splashes
within this living bread that is life to us
although it is the night.
Hear it calling out to every creature.
And they drink these waters, although it is dark here
because it is the night.
I am repining for this living fountain.
Within this bread of life I see it plain
although it is the night.
XII
Like a convalescent, I took the hand
stretched down from the jetty, sensed again
an alien comfort as I stepped on ground
to find the helping hand still gripping mine,
fish-cold and bony, but whether to guide
or to be guided I could not be certain
for the tall man in step at my side
seemed blind, though he walked straight as a rush
upon his ash plant, his eyes fixed straight ahead.
Then I knew him in the flesh
out there on the tarmac among the cars,
wintered hard and sharp as a blackthorn bush.
His voice eddying with the vowels of all rivers
came back to me, though he did not speak yet,
a voice like a prosecutor’s or a singer’s,
cunning, narcotic, mimic, definite
as a steel nib’s downstroke, quick and clean,
and suddenly he hit a litter basket
with his stick, saying, ‘Your obligation
is not discharged by any common rite.
What you do you must do on your own.
The main thing is to write
for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust
that imagines its haven like your hands at night
dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.
You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.
Take off from here. And don’t be so earnest,
so ready for the sackcloth and the ashes.
Let go, let fly, forget.
You’ve listened long enough. Now strike your note.’
It was as if I had stepped free into space
alone with nothing that I had not known
already. Raindrops blew in my face
as I came to and heard the harangue and jeers
going on and on: ‘The English language
belongs to us. You are raking at dead fires,
rehearsing the old whinges at your age.
That subject people stuff is a cod’s game,
infantile, like this peasant pilgrimage.
You lose more of yourself than you redeem
doing the decent thing. Keep at a tangent.
When they make the circle wide, it’s time to swim
out on your own and fill the element
with signatures on your own frequency,
echo-soundings, searches, probes, allurements,
elver-gleams in the dark of the whole sea.’
The shower broke in a cloudburst, the tarmac
fumed and sizzled. As he moved off quickly
the downpour loosed its screens round his straight walk.
From Sweeney Redivivus
In the Beech
I was a lookout posted and forgotten.
On one side under me, the concrete road.
On the other, the bullocks’ covert,
the breath and plaster of a drinking place
where the school-leaver discovered peace
to touch himself in the reek of churned-up mud.
And the tree itself a strangeness and a comfort,
as much a column as a bole. The very ivy
puzzled its milk-tooth frills and tapers
over the grain: was it bark or masonry?
I watched the red-brick chimney rear
its stamen course by course,
and the steeplejacks up there at their antics
like flies against the mountain.
I felt the tanks’ advance beginning
at the cynosure of the growth rings,
then winced at their imperium refreshed
in each powdered bolt mark on the concrete.
And the pilot with his goggles back came in
so low I could see the cockpit rivets.
My hidebound boundary tree. My tree of knowledge.
My thick-tapped, soft-fledged, airy listening post.
The First Kingdom
The royal roads were cow paths.
The queen mother hunkered on a stool
and played the harpstrings of milk
into a wooden pail.
With seasoned sticks the nobles
lorded it over the hindquarters of cattle.
Units of measurement were pondered
by the cartful, barrowful and bucketful.
Time was a backward rote of names and mishaps,
bad harvests, fires, unfair settlements,
deaths in floods, murders and miscarriages.
And if my rights to it all came only
by their acclamation, what was it worth?
I blew hot and blew cold.
They were two-faced and accommodating.
And seed, breed and generation still
they are holding on, every bit
as pious and exacting and demeaned.
The First Flight
It was more sleepwalk than spasm
yet that was a time when the times
were also in spasm—
the ties and the knots running through us
split open
down the lines of the grain.
As I drew close to pebbles and berries,
the smell of wild garlic, relearning
the acoustic of frost
and the meaning of woodnote,
my shadow over the field
was only a spin-off,
my empty place an excuse
for shifts in the camp, old rehearsals
of debts and betrayal.
Singly they came to the tree
with a stone in each pocket
to whistle and bill me back in
and I would collide and cascade
through leaves when they left,
my point of repose knocked askew.
I was mired in attachment
until they began to pronounce me
a feeder off battlefields
so I mastered new rungs of the air
to survey out of reach
their bonfires on
hills, their hosting
and fasting, the levies from Scotland
as always, and the people of art
diverting their rhythmical chants
to fend off the onslaught of winds
I would welcome and climb
at the top of my bent.
Drifting Off
The guttersnipe and the albatross
gliding for days without a single wingbeat
were equally beyond me.
I yearned for the gannet’s strike,
the unbegrudging concentration
of the heron.
In the camaraderie of rookeries,
in the spiteful vigilance of colonies
I was at home.
I learned to distrust
the allure of the cuckoo
and the gossip of starlings,
kept faith with doughty bullfinches,
levelled my wit too often
to the small-minded wren
and too often caved in
to the pathos of waterhens
and panicky corncrakes.
I gave much credence to stragglers,
overrated the composure of blackbirds
and the folklore of magpies.
But when goldfinch or kingfisher rent
the veil of the usual,
pinions whispered and braced
as I stooped, unwieldy
and brimming,
my spurs at the ready.
The Cleric
I heard new words prayed at cows
in the byre, found his sign
on the crock and the hidden still,
smelled fumes from his censer
in the first smokes of morning.
Next thing he was making a progress
through gaps, stepping out sites,
sinking his crozier deep
in the fort-hearth.
If he had stuck to his own
cramp-jawed abbesses and intoners
dibbling round the enclosure,
his Latin and blather of love,
his parchments and scheming
in letters shipped over water—
but no, he overbore
with his unctions and orders,
he had to get in on the ground.
History that planted its standards
on his gables and spires
ousted me to the marches
of skulking and whingeing.
Or did I desert?
Give him his due, in the end
he opened my path to a kingdom
of such scope and neuter allegiance
my emptiness reigns at its whim.
The Master
He dwelt in himself
like a rook in an unroofed tower.
To get close I had to maintain
a climb up deserted ramparts
Selected Poems 1966-1987 Page 10
