We neither sleep nor sing nor talk,
But look to the land where the men are mowing.
What will the islanders think of our folly?
The whispering spontaneous reception committee
Nods and smokes by the calm jetty.
Am I jealous of these courteous fishermen
Who hand us ashore, for knowing the sea
Intimately, for respecting the storm
That took nine of their men on one bad night
And five from Rossadillisk in this very boat?
Their harbour is sheltered. They are slow to tell
The story again. There is local pride
In their home-built ships.
We are advised to return next day by the mail.
But tonight we stay, drinking with people
Happy in the monotony of boats,
Bringing the catch to the Cleggan market,
Cultivating fields, or retiring from America
With enough to soak till morning or old age.
The bench below my knees lifts, and the floor
Drops, and words depart, depart, with faces
Blurred by the smoke. An old man grips my arm,
His shot eyes twitch, quietly dissatisfied.
He has lost his watch, an American gold
From Boston gas-works. He treats the company
To the secretive surge, the sea of his sadness.
I slip outside, fall among stones and nettles,
Crackling dry twigs on an elder tree,
While an accordion drones above the hill.
Later, I reach a room, where the moon stares
Through a cobwebbed window. The tide has ebbed,
Boats are careened in the harbour. Here is a bed.
Girl at the Seaside
I lean on a lighthouse rock
Where the seagowns flow,
A trawler slips from the dock
Sailing years ago.
Wine, tobacco and seamen
Cloud the green air,
A head of snakes in the rain
Talks away desire.
A sailor kisses me
Tasting of mackerel,
I analyse misery
Till Mass bells peal.
I wait for clogs on the cobbles,
Dead feet at night,
Only a tempest blows
Darkness on sealight.
I’ve argued myself here
To the blue cliff-tops:
I’ll drop through the sea-air
Till everything stops.
THOMAS KINSELLA
(b.1928)
Chrysalides
Our last free summer we mooned about at odd hours
Pedalling slowly through country towns, stopping to eat
Chocolate and fruit, tracing our vagaries on the map.
At night we watched in the barn, to the lurch of melodeon music,
The crunching boots of countrymen – huge and weightless
As their shadows – twirling and leaping over the yellow concrete.
Sleeping too little or too much, we awoke at noon
And were received with womanly mockery into the kitchen,
Like calves poking our faces in with enormous hunger.
Daily we strapped our saddlebags and went to experience
A tolerance we shall never know again, confusing
For the last time, for example, the licit and the familiar.
Our instincts blurred with change; a strange wakefulness
Sapped our energies and dulled our slow-beating hearts
To the extremes of feeling – insensitive alike
To the unique succession of our youthful midnights,
When by a window ablaze softly with the virgin moon
Dry scones and jugs of milk awaited us in the dark,
Or to lasting horror, a wedding flight of ants
Spawning to its death, a mute perspiration
Glistening like drops of copper, agonized, in our path.
First Light
A prone couple still sleeps.
Light ascends like a pale gas
Out of the sea: dawn-light
Reaching across the hill
To the dark garden. The grass
Emerges, soaking with grey dew.
Inside, in silence, an empty
Kitchen takes form, tidied and swept,
Blank with marriage – where shrill
Lover and beloved have kept
Another vigil far
Into the night, and raved and wept.
Upstairs a whimper or sigh
Comes from an open bedroom door
And lengthens to an ugly wail
– A child enduring a dream
That grows, at the first touch of day,
Unendurable.
from Nightwalker
2
The human taste grows faint, leaving a taste
Of self and laurel leaves and rotted salt.
And gardens smelling of half-stripped rocks in the dark.
A cast-iron lamp standard on the sea wall
Sheds yellow light on a page of the day’s paper
Turning in the gutter:
Our new young minister
Glares in his hunting suit, white haunch on haunch.
Other lamps are lighting along a terrace
Of high Victorian houses, toward the tower
Rising into the dark at the Forty Foot.
The tide drawing back from the promenade
Far as the lamplight can reach, into a dark
Alive with signals. Little bells clonk in the channel
Beyond the rocks; Howth twinkling across the Bay;
Ships’ lights moving along invisible sea lanes;
The Bailey light sweeping the middle distance,
Flickering on something.
*
Watcher in the tower,
Be with me now. Turn your milky spectacles
On the sea, unblinking.
A dripping cylinder
Pokes up into sight, picked out by the moon.
Two blazing eyes. Two tough shoulders of muscle
Lit from within by joints and bones of light.
Another head: animal, with nostrils
Straining open, red as embers. Google eyes.
A phantom whinny. Forehooves scrape at the night.
A spectral stink of horse and rider’s sweat.
The rider grunts and urges.
Father of Authors!
It is himself! In silk hat, accoutred
In stern jodhpurs. The Sonhusband
Coming in his power, climbing the dark
To his mansion in the sky, to take his place
In the influential circle, mounting to glory
On his big white harse!
A new sign: Foxhunter.
Subjects will find the going hard but rewarding.
You may give offence, but this should pass.
Marry the Boss’s daughter.
*
The soiled paper settles back in the gutter.
THE NEW IRELAND …
Awkward in the saddle
But able and willing for the foul ditch,
And sitting as well as any at the kill,
Whatever iron Faust opens the gate.
It is begun: curs mill and yelp at your heel,
Backsnapping and grinning. They eye your back.
Beware the smile of the dog.
But you know the breed,
And all it takes to turn them
To a pack of lickspittles running as one.
5
A pulse hisses in my ear.
I am an arrow piercing the void, unevenly
As I correct and correct. But swift as thought.
I arrive enveloped in quiet.
A true desert,
Sterile and odourless. Naked to every peril.
A bluish light beats down,
To kill every bodily thing.
; But the shadows are alive.
They scuttle and flicker across the surface,
Searching for any sick spirits,
To suck at the dry juices.
If I stoop down and touch the dust
It has a human taste:
massed human wills.
I believe
I have heard of this place. I think
This is the Sea of Disappointment.
*
It is time I turned for home.
Her dear shadow on the blind.
The breadknife. She was slicing and buttering
A loaf of bread. My heart stopped. I starved for speech.
I believe now that love is half persistence,
A medium in which from change to change
Understanding may be gathered.
Hesitant, cogitating, exit.
JOHN MONTAGUE
(b.1929)
The Trout
for Barrie Cooke
Flat on the bank I parted
Rushes to ease my hands
In the water without a ripple
And tilt them slowly downstream
To where he lay, tendril-light,
In his fluid sensual dream.
Bodiless lord of creation,
I hung briefly above him
Savouring my own absence,
Senses expanding in the slow
Motion, the photographic calm
That grows before action.
As the curve of my hands
Swung under his body
He surged, with visible pleasure.
I was so preternaturally close
I could count every stipple
But still cast no shadow, until
The two palms crossed in a cage
Under the lightly pulsing gills.
Then (entering my own enlarged
Shape, which rode on the water)
I gripped. To this day I can
Taste his terror on my hands.
All Legendary Obstacles
All legendary obstacles lay between
Us, the long imaginary plain,
The monstrous ruck of mountains
And, swinging across the night,
Flooding the Sacramento, San Joaquin,
The hissing drift of winter rain.
All day I waited, shifting
Nervously from station to bar
As I saw another train sail
By, the San Francisco Chief or
Golden Gate, water dripping
From great flanged wheels.
At midnight you came, pale
Above the negro porter’s lamp.
I was too blind with rain
And doubt to speak, but
Reached from the platform
Until our chilled hands met.
You had been travelling for days
With an old lady, who marked
A neat circle on the glass
With her glove, to watch us
Move into the wet darkness
Kissing, still unable to speak.
What a View
What a view he has
of our town, riding
inland, the seagull!
Rows of shining roofs
and cars, the dome of
a church, or a bald-
headed farmer, and
a thousand gutters
flowing under the
black assembly
of chimneys! If
he misses anything
it might be history
(the ivy-strangled
O’Neill Tower only
a warm shelter to
come to roost if
crows don’t land
first, squabbling;
and a Planter’s
late Georgian house
with its artificial
lake, and avenue of
poplars, less than
the green cloth of
our golf-course where
fat worms hide from
the sensible shoes
of lady golfers).
Or religion. He may
not recognize who
is driving to Mass
with his army of
freckled children –
my second brother –
or hear Eustace
hammer and plane
a new coffin for
an old citizen,
swearing there is
no one God as the
chips fly downward!
He would be lost,
my seagull, to see
why the names on
one side of the street
(MacAteer, Carney)
are Irish and ours
and the names across
(Carnew, MacCrea)
are British and theirs
but he would understand
the charred, sad stump
of the factory chimney
which will never burn
his tail feathers as
he perches on it
and if a procession,
Orange or Hibernian,
came stepping through
he would hear the
same thin, scrannel
note, under the drums.
And when my mother
pokes her nose out
once, up and down
the narrow street,
and retires inside,
like the lady in
the weather clock,
he might well see
her point. There are
few pickings here,
for a seagull, so
far inland. A last
salute on the flag
pole of the British
Legion hut, and he
flaps away, the
small town sinking
into its caul
of wet, too well-
hedged, hillocky
Tyrone grassland.
SEAMUS HEANEY
(b.1939)
Death of a Naturalist
All year the flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland; green and heavy-headed
Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.
Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles
Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.
There were dragonflies, spotted butterflies,
But best of all was the warm thick slobber
Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water
In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring
I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied
Specks to range on window-sills at home,
On shelves at school, and wait and watch until
The fattening dots burst into nimble-
Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how
The daddy frog was called a bullfrog
And how he croaked and how the mammy frog
Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was
Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too
For they were yellow in the sun and brown
In rain.
Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.
The Peninsula
When you have nothing more to say, just drive
For a day all round the penins
ula.
The sky is tall as over a runway,
The land without marks, so you will not arrive
But pass through, though always skirting landfall.
At dusk, horizons drink down sea and hill,
The ploughed field swallows the whitewashed gable
And you’re in the dark again. Now recall
The glazed foreshore and silhouetted log,
That rock where breakers shredded into rags,
The leggy birds stilted on their own legs,
Islands riding themselves out into the fog,
And drive back home, still with nothing to say
Except that now you will uncode all landscapes
By this: things founded clean on their own shapes,
Water and ground in their extremity.
Requiem for the Croppies
The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley –
No kitchens on the run, no striking camp –
We moved quick and sudden in our own country.
The priest lay behind ditches with the tramp.
A people, hardly marching – on the hike –
We found new tactics happening each day:
We’d cut through reins and rider with the pike
And stampede cattle into infantry,
Then retreat through hedges where cavalry must be thrown.
Until, on Vinegar Hill, the fatal conclave.
Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.
The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.
They buried us without shroud or coffin
And in August the barley grew up out of the grave.
Bogland
for T. P. Flanagan
We have no prairies
To slice a big sun at evening –
Everywhere the eye concedes to
Encroaching horizon,
Is wooed into the cyclops’ eye
Of a tarn. Our unfenced country
Is bog that keeps crusting
Between the sights of the sun.
They’ve taken the skeleton
Of the Great Irish Elk
Out of the peat, set it up,
An astounding crate full of air.
Butter sunk under
More than a hundred years
Was recovered salty and white.
The ground itself is kind, black butter
Melting and opening underfoot,
Missing its last definition
By millions of years.
They’ll never dig coal here,
Only the waterlogged trunks
Of great firs, soft as pulp.
Our pioneers keep striking
Inwards and downwards,
Every layer they strip
The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry Page 60
