Seems camped on before.
The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.
The wet centre is bottomless.
MICHAEL LONGLEY
(b.1939)
In Memoriam
My father, let no similes eclipse
Where crosses like some forest simplified
Sink roots into my mind; the slow sands
Of your history delay till through your eyes
I read you like a book. Before you died,
Re-enlisting with all the broken soldiers
You bent beneath your rucksack, near collapse,
In anecdote rehearsed and summarized
These words I write in memory. Let yours
And other heartbreaks play into my hands.
Now I see in close-up, in my mind’s eye,
The cracked and splintered dead for pity’s sake
Each dismal evening predecease the sun,
You, looking death and nightmare in the face
With your kilt, harmonica and gun,
Grow older in a flash, but none the wiser
(Who, following the wrong queue at The Palace,
Have joined the London Scottish by mistake),
Your nineteen years uncertain if and why
Belgium put the kibosh on the Kaiser.
Between the corpses and the soup canteens
You swooned away, watching your future spill.
But, as it was, your proper funeral urn
Had mercifully smashed to smithereens,
To shrapnel shards that sliced your testicle.
That instant I, your most unlikely son,
In No Man’s Land was surely left for dead,
Blotted out from your far horizon.
As your voice now is locked inside my head,
I yet was held secure, waiting my turn.
Finally, that lousy war was over.
Stranded in France and in need of proof
You hunted down experimental lovers,
Persuading chorus girls and countesses:
This, father, the last confidence you spoke.
In my twentieth year your old wounds woke
As cancer. Lodging under the same roof
Death was a visitor who hung about,
Strewing the house with pills and bandages,
Till he chose to put your spirit out.
Though they overslept the sequence of events
Which ended with the ambulance outside,
You lingering in the hall, your bowels on fire,
Tears in your eyes, and all your medals spent,
I summon girls who packed at last and went
Underground with you. Their souls again on hire,
Now those lost wives as recreated brides
Take shape before me, materialize.
On the verge of light and happy legend
They lift their skirts like blinds across your eyes.
MICHAEL HARTNETT
(1941–99)
For My Grandmother, Bridget Halpin
Maybe morning lightens over
the coldest time in all the day,
but not for you. A bird’s hover,
seabird, blackbird, or bird of prey,
was rain, or death, or lost cattle.
The day’s warning, like red plovers
so etched and small the clouded sky,
was book to you, and true bible.
You died in utter loneliness,
your acres left to the childless.
You never saw the animals
of God, and the flower under
your feet; and the trees change a leaf;
and the red fur of a fox on
a quiet evening; and the long
birches falling down the hillside.
Bread
Her iron beats
the smell of bread
from damp linen,
silver, crystal,
and warm white things.
Whatever bird
I used to be,
hawk or lapwing,
tern, or something
wild, fierce or shy,
these birds are dead,
and I come here
on tiring wings.
Odours of bread …
from Notes on My Contemporaries
1 The Poet Down
for Patrick Kavanagh
He sits between the doctor and the law.
Neither can help. Barbiturate in paw
one, whiskey in paw two, a dying man:
the poet down, and his fell caravan.
They laugh and they mistake the lash that lurks
in his tongue for the honey of his works.
The poet is at bay, the hounds baying,
dig his grave with careful kindness, saying:
‘Another whiskey, and make it a large one!’
Priests within, acolytes at the margin
the red impaled bull’s roar must fascinate –
they love the dead, the living man they hate.
They were designing monuments – in case –
and making furtive sketches of his face,
and he could hear, above their straining laughs,
the rustling foolscap of their epitaphs.
DEREK MAHON
(b.1941)
Glengormley
Wonders are many and none is more wonderful than man
Who has tamed the terrier, trimmed the hedge
And grasped the principle of the watering can.
Clothes-pegs litter the window-ledge
And the long ships lie in clover; washing lines
Shake out white linen over the chalk thanes.
Now we are safe from monsters, and the giants
Who tore up sods twelve miles by six
And hurled them out to sea to become islands
Can worry us no more. The sticks
And stones that once broke bones will not now harm
A generation of such sense and charm.
Only words hurt us now. No saint or hero,
Landing at night from the conspiring seas,
Brings dangerous tokens to the new era –
Their sad names linger in the histories.
The unreconciled, in their metaphysical pain,
Dangle from lamp-posts in the dawn rain;
And much dies with them. I should rather praise
A worldly time under this worldly sky –
The terrier-taming, garden-watering days
Those heroes pictured as they struggled through
The quick noose of their finite being.
By Necessity, if not choice, I live here too.
Ecclesiastes
God, you could grow to love it, God-fearing, God-
chosen purist little puritan that,
for all your wiles and smiles, you are (the
dank churches, the empty streets,
the shipyard silence, the tied-up swings) and
shelter your cold heart from the heat
of the world, from woman-inquisition, from the
bright eyes of children. Yes, you could
wear black, drink water, nourish a fierce zeal
with locusts and wild honey, and not
feel called upon to understand and forgive
but only to speak with a bleak
afflatus, and love the January rains when they
darken the dark doors and sink hard
into the Antrim hills, the bog meadows, the heaped
graves of your fathers. Bury that red
bandana and stick, that banjo; this is your
country, close one eye and be king.
Your people await you, their heavy washing
flaps for you in the housing estates –
a credulous people. God, you could do it, God
help you, stand on a corner stiff
with rhetoric, promising nothing under the sun.
EAVAN BOLAND
(b.1944)
From the
Painting Back from Market by Chardin
Dressed in the colours of a country day –
Grey-blue, blue-grey, the white of seagulls’ bodies –
Chardin’s peasant woman
Is to be found at all times in her short delay
Of dreams, her eyes mixed
Between love and market, empty flagons of wine
At her feet, bread under her arm. He has fixed
Her limbs in colour and her heart in line.
In her right hand the hindlegs of a hare
Peep from a cloth sack. Through the door
Another woman moves
In painted daylight. Nothing in this bare
Closet has been lost
Or changed. I think of what great art removes:
Hazard and death. The future and the past.
A woman’s secret history and her loves –
And even the dawn market from whose bargaining
She has just come back, where men and women
Congregate and go
Among the produce, learning to live from morning
To next day, linked
By a common impulse to survive, although
In surging light they are single and distinct
Like birds in the accumulating snow.
VIII
* * *
TRANSFORMATIONS: 1971–2009
Another day when they were sitting on the headland in the Small Fields, the men discussed the changes they had seen and a debate arose about what was the greatest change had happened in their lifetime.
‘What do you think?’ my father asked Dan-Jo.
Maurice Riordan, ‘Idyll 2’
AUSTIN CLARKE
from Tiresias
from II
‘Strolling one day, beyond the Kalends, on Mount Cyllene,
What should I spy near the dusty track but a couple of sun-spotted
Snakes – writhen together – flashen as they copulated,
Dreamily! Curious about the origin of species, I touched them.
Tunic shrank. I felt in alarm two ugly tumours
Swell from my chest. Juno, our universal mother, you
Know how easily a child wets the bed at night. Pardon
Frankness in saying that my enlarged bladder let go.
“Gods,” it
Lamented, “has he become an unfortunate woman, humbled by
Fate, yes, forced twice a day, to crouch down on her hunkers?
Leaf-cutting bee affrights me, Ariadne within her web-rounds.”
Timidly hidden as hamadryad against her oak-bark,
I dared to pull up resisting tunic, expose my new breasts –
Saw they were beautiful. Lightly I fingered the nipples
And as they cherried, I felt below the burning answer;
Still drenched, I glanced down, but only a modesty of auburn
Curlets was there. If a man whose limb has been amputated
Still feels the throb of cut arteries, could I forget now
Prickle of pintel? Hour-long I grieved until full moonlight,
Entering the forestry, silvered my breasts. They rose up so calmly,
So proud, that peace – taking my hand in gladness – led me
Home, escorted by lucciole.
My mother wept loudly,
Crying, “Forgive me, Tiresias, the fault is
Mine alone for when I carried you in my womb, I
Prayed at the local temple that Our Lady Lucina
Might bestow on me a daughter.” Tear-in-smile, she hugged me,
Kissing my lips and breasts, stood back with little starts of
Admiration, hugged me again, spread out our late supper:
Cake, sweet resin’d wine, put me to bed, whispered:
“Twenty-five years ago, I chose the name of Pyrrha
For you. Now I can use it at last.” She tucked me in, murmured
“Pyrrha, my latecome Pyrrha, sleep better than I shall.”
Next morning
Gaily she said:
“I must instruct you in domestic
Economy, show you, dear daughter, how to make your own bed, lay
Table, wash up, tidy the house, cook every sort of
Meal, sew, darn, mend, do your hair, then find a well-off
Husband for you. As a young man you have spent too many
Hours in the study of history and science, never frequented
Dance-hall, bull-ring, hurried, I fear, too often to the stews.”
Laughter-in-sigh, she handed me a duster.
One fine day
During siesta I gazed in reverence at my naked
Body, slim as a nespoli tree, dared to place my shaving
Mirror of polished silver – a birthday gift from my mother –
Between my legs, inspected this way and that, the fleshy
Folds guarding the shortcut, red as my real lips, to Pleasure
Pass. Next day I awoke in alarm, felt a trickle of blood half-
Way down my thigh.
“Mother,” I sobbed.
“Our bold Penates
Pricked me during sleep.”
“Let me look at it, Pyrrha.”
She laughed, then
Said:
“Why it’s nothing to worry about, my pet, all women
Suffer this shame every month.”
“What does it mean?”
“That you are
Ready for nuptial bliss.”
And saying this, she cleansed, bandaged,
Bound my flowers.
When I recovered, a burning sensation
Stayed. Restless at night, lying on my belly, I longed for
Mortal or centaur to surprise me.
One day during
Siesta, I put on my tanagra dress, tightly
Belted, with flouncy skirt, and carrying a blue mantle,
Tiptoed from our home by shuttered window, barred shopfront,
Local temple, took the second turn at the trivium,
Reached a sultriness of hills.
I went up a mule-track
Through a high wood beyond the pasturage: a shepherd’s
Bothy was there before me. I peeped, saw a bed of bracken
Covered with a worn sheep-skin. I ventured in: listened,
Heard far away clink-clank, clink-clank as a bell-wether
Grazed with his flock while master and dog were myrtled
Somewhere in the coolness. By now I had almost forgotten
Much of my past, yet remembered the love-songs that shepherds
Piped among rock-roses to pretty boy or shy goat-girl.
Was it a pastoral air that had led me to this bothy?
Surely I was mistaken. Paper-knife, pumice, goose-quill,
Manuscripts, had been piled untidily together,
Inkstand, wax tablets, small paint-brushes on a rustic
Table.
“A student lives here,”
I thought,
and half-undressing,
Wearily spreading my cloak along the sheepskin,
Lay on blueness, wondered as I closed my eyelids,
“What will he do when he sees me in my déshabillé?”
Soon
Morpheus hid me in undreaming sleep until dusk. I woke up –
Not in the arms of softness but underneath the gentle
Weight of a naked youth.
Vainly I called out, “Almighty
Jove,” struggled against his rigid will-power.’
‘And yielded?’
‘Yes, for how could I stop him when I burned as he did?
In what seemed less than a minute, I had been deflowered
Without pleasure or pang. Once more, the young man mounted.
Determined by every goddess in high heaven to share his
Spilling, I twined, but just as I was about to …’
‘What happened?’
‘He spent.
O why should the spurren pleasure of expect
ant
Woman be snaffled within a yard of the grand stand?
While he was resting, I asked him:
“What is your name?”
“Chelos,
Third-year student in Egyptology. Later
I’ll show you rolled papyri, hieroglyphics,
Tinted lettering, sand-yellow, Nilus-brown, reed-green,
Outlined with hawk, horn, lotus-bud, sceptre, sun-circles,
Crescent.”
He told me of foreign wonders, the Colossus
Guarding the harbour of Rhodes, his cod bulkier than a
Well-filled freighter passing his shins, unfloodable
Temples beyond Assuan, rock-treasuries, the Mountains
Of the Moon, Alexandria and the Pharos –
Night-light of shipping.
Soon in a grotto-spring under fern-drip,
Knee-deep, we sponged one another, back and side, laughing.
Chelos faggoted, tricked the brazier from smoke to flame,
while I
Found in a cupboard cut of ibex, stewed it with carob
Beans, sliced apple, onion, thyme-sprig. And so we had supper,
Sharing a skin of Aetnian wine until the midnight
Hour, then tiptoed tipsily back to our mantled love-bed.
Drowsily entwined, we moved slowly, softly, withholding
Ourselves in sweet delays until at last we yielded,
Mingling our natural flow, feeling it almost linger
Into our sleep.
Stirred by the melilot daylight, I woke up.
Chelos lay asprawl and I knew that he must be dreaming of me
For he murmured “Pyrrha”. I fondled his ithyphallus, uncapped it,
Saw for the first time the knob, a purply-red plum, yet firmer.
Covering him like a man, I moved until he gripped:
Faster, yet faster, we sped, determined down-thrust rivalling
Up-thrust – succus glissading us – exquisite spasm
Contracting, dilating, changed into minute preparatory
Orgasms, a pleasure unknown to man, that culminated
Within their narrowing circles into the great orgasmos.’
RICHARD MURPHY
Seals at High Island
The calamity of seals begins with jaws.
Born in caverns that reverberate
With endless malice of the sea’s tongue
Clacking on shingle, they learn to bark back
The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry Page 61
