In fear and sadness and celebration.
The ocean’s mouth opens forty feet wide
And closes on a morsel of their rock.
Swayed by the thrust and backfall of the tide,
A dappled grey bull and a brindled cow
Copulate in the green water of a cove.
I watch from a cliff-top, trying not to move.
Sometimes they sink and merge into black shoals;
Then rise for air, his muzzle on her neck,
Their winged feet intertwined as a fishtail.
She opens her fierce mouth like a scarlet flower
Full of white seeds; she holds it open long
At the sunburst in the music of their loving;
And cries a little. But I must remember
How far their feelings are from mine marooned.
If there are tears at this holy ceremony
Theirs are caused by brine and mine by breeze.
When the great bull withdraws his rod, it glows
Like a carnelian candle set in jade.
The cow ripples ashore to feed her calf;
While an old rival, eyeing the deed with hate,
Swims to attack the tired triumphant god.
They rear their heads above the boiling surf,
Their terrible jaws open, jetting blood.
At nightfall they haul out, and mourn the drowned,
Playing to the sea sadly their last quartet,
An improvised requiem that ravishes
Reason, while ripping scale up like a net:
Brings pity trembling down the rocky spine
Of headlands, till the bitter ocean’s tongue
Swells in their cove, and smothers their sweet song.
Stormpetrel
Gypsy of the sea
In winter wambling over scurvy whaleroads,
Jooking in the wake of ships,
A sailor hooks you
And carves his girl’s name on your beak.
Guest of the storm
Who sweeps you off to party after party,
You flit in a sooty grey coat
Smelling of must
Barefoot across a sea of broken glass.
Waif of the afterglow
On summer nights to meet your mate you jink
Over sea-cliff and graveyard,
Creeping underground
To hatch an egg in a hermit’s skull.
Pulse of the rock
You throb till daybreak on your cryptic nest
A song older than fossils,
Ephemeral as thrift.
It ends with a gasp.
Morning Call
Up from trawlers in the fishdock they walk to my house
On high-soled clogs, stepping like fillies back from a forge
Newly shod, to wake me at sunrise from a single bed
With laughter peeling skin from a dream ripening on mossy
Branches of my head – ‘Let us in quick!’ – and half naked
I stumble over books on the floor to open my glass door
To a flood that crosses the threshold, little blue waves
Nudging each other, dodging rocks they’ve got to leap over,
Freshening my brackish pools, to tell me of ‘O such a night
Below in the boats!’ ‘We can’t go home! What will they say?’
Can I think of a lie to protect them from God only knows
What trouble this will cause, what rows? ‘We’ll run away
And never come back!’ – till they flop into black armchairs,
Two beautiful teenage girls from a tribe of tinkers,
Lovely as seals wet from fishing, hauled out on a rock
To dry their dark brown fur glinting with scales of salmon
When the spring tide ebbs. This is their everlasting day
Of being young. They bring to my room the sea’s iodine odour
On a breeze of voices ruffling my calm as they comb their long
Hair tangled as weed in a rockpool beginning to settle clear.
Give me the sea-breath from your mouths to breathe a while!
THOMAS KINSELLA
38 Phoenix Street
Look.
I was lifted up
past rotten bricks weeds
to look over the wall.
A mammy lifted up a baby on the other side.
Dusty smells. Cat. Flower bells
hanging down purple red.
Look.
The other. Looking.
My finger picked at a bit of dirt
on top of the wall and a quick
wiry redgolden thing
ran back down a little hole.
*
We knelt up on our chairs in the lamplight
and leaned on the brown plush, watching the gramophone.
The turning record shone and hissed
under the needle, liftfalling, liftfalling.
John McCormack chattered in his box.
Two little tongues of flame burned
in the lamp chimney, wavering
their tips. On the glass belly
little drawnout images quivered.
Jimmy’s mammy was drying the delph in the shadows.
*
Mister Cummins always hunched down
sad and still beside the stove,
with his face turned away toward the bars.
His mouth so calm, and always set so sadly.
A black rubbery scar stuck on his white forehead.
Sealed in his sad cave. Hisshorror erecting
slowly out of its rock nests, nosing the air.
He was buried for three days under a hill of dead,
the faces congested down all round him
grinning Dardanelles! in the dark.
They noticed him by a thread of blood
glistening among the black crusts on his forehead.
His heart gathered all its weakness, to beat.
A worm hanging down, its little round
black mouth open. Sad father.
*
I spent the night there once
in a strange room, tucked in against the wallpaper
on the other side of our own bedroom wall.
Up in the corner of the darkness the Sacred Heart
leaned down in his long clothes over a red oil lamp
with his women’s black hair and his eyes lit up in red,
hurt and blaming. He held out the Heart
with his women’s fingers, like a toy.
The lamp-wick, with a tiny head
of red fire, wriggled in its pool.
The shadows flickered: the Heart beat!
His Father’s Hands
I drank firmly
and set the glass down between us firmly.
You were saying.
My father
Was saying.
His finger prodded and prodded,
marring his point. Emphas-
emphasemphasis.
I have watched
his father’s hands before him
cupped, and tightening the black Plug
between knife and thumb,
carving off little curlicues
to rub them in the dark of his palms,
or cutting into new leather at his bench,
levering a groove open with his thumb,
insinuating wet sprigs for the hammer.
He kept the sprigs in mouthfuls
and brought them out in silvery
units between his lips.
I took a pinch out of their hole
and knocked them one by one into the wood,
bright points among hundreds gone black,
other children’s – cousins and others, grown up.
Or his bow hand scarcely moving,
scraping in the dark corner near the fire,
his plump fingers shifting on the strings.
To his deaf, inclined head
he hugged the fiddle’s body
> whispering with the tune
with breaking heart
whene’er I hear
in privacy, across a blocked void,
the wind that shakes the barley.
The wind …
round her grave …
on my breast in blood she died …
But blood for blood without remorse
I’ve ta’en …
Beyond that.
*
Your family, Thomas, met with and helped
many of the Croppies in hiding from the Yeos
or on their way home after the defeat
in south Wexford. They sheltered the Laceys
who were later hanged on the Bridge in Ballinglen
between Tinahely and Anacorra.
From hearsay, as far as I can tell
the Men Folk were either Stone Cutters
or masons or probably both.
In the 18
and late 1700s even the farmers
had some other trade to make a living.
They lived in Farnese among a Colony
of North of Ireland or Scotch settlers left there
in some of the dispersals or migrations
which occurred in this Area of Wicklow and Wexford
and Carlow. And some years before that time
the Family came from somewhere around Tullow.
Beyond that.
*
Littered uplands. Dense grass. Rocks everywhere,
wet underneath, retaining memory of the long cold.
First, a prow of land
chosen, and wedged with tracks;
then boulders chosen
and sloped together, stabilized in menace.
I do not like this place.
I do not think the people who lived here
were ever happy. It feels evil.
Terrible things happened.
I feel afraid here when I am on my own.
*
Dispersals or migrations.
Through what evolutions or accidents
toward that peace and patience
by the fireside, that blocked gentleness …
That serene pause, with the slashing knife,
in kindly mockery,
as I busy myself with my little nails
at the rude block, his bench.
The blood advancing
– gorging vessel after vessel –
and altering in them
one by one.
Behold, that gentleness already
modulated twice, in others:
to earnestness and iteration;
to an offhandedness, repressing various impulses.
*
Extraordinary … The big block – I found it
years afterward in a corner of the yard
in sunlight after rain
and stood it up, wet and black:
it turned under my hands, an axis
of light flashing down its length,
and the wood’s soft flesh broke open,
countless little nails
squirming and dropping out of it.
Tao and Unfitness at Inistiogue on the River Nore
Noon
The black flies kept nagging in the heat.
Swarms of them, at every step, snarled
off pats of cow dung spattered in the grass.
Move, if you move, like water.
The punts were knocking by the boathouse, at full tide.
Volumes of water turned the river curve
hushed under an insect haze.
Slips of white,
trout bellies, flicked in the corner of the eye
and dropped back onto the deep mirror.
Respond. Do not interfere. Echo.
Thick green woods along the opposite bank
climbed up from a root-dark recess
eaved with mud-whitened leaves.
*
In a matter of hours all that water is gone,
except for a channel near the far side.
Muck and shingle and pools where the children
wade, stabbing flatfish.
Afternoon
Inistiogue itself is perfectly lovely,
like a typical English village, but a bit sullen.
Our voices echoed in sunny corners
among the old houses; we admired
the stonework and gateways, the interplay
of roofs and angled streets.
The square, with its ‘village green’, lay empty.
The little shops had hardly anything.
The Protestant church was guarded by a woman
of about forty, a retainer, spastic
and indistinct, who drove us out.
An obelisk to the Brownsfoords and a Victorian
Celto-Gothic drinking fountain, erected
by a Tighe widow for the villagers,
‘erected’ in the centre. An astronomical-looking
sundial stood sentry on a platform
on the corner where High Street went up out of the square.
We drove up, past a long-handled water pump
placed at the turn, with an eye to the effect,
then out of the town for a quarter of a mile
above the valley, and came to the dead gate
of Woodstock, once home of the Tighes.
*
The great ruin presented its flat front
at us, sunstruck. The children disappeared.
Eleanor picked her way around a big fallen branch
and away along the face toward the outbuildings.
I took the grassy front steps and was gathered up
in a brick-red stillness. A rook clattered out of the dining room.
A sapling, hooked thirty feet up
in a cracked corner, held out a ghost-green
cirrus of leaves. Cavities
of collapsed fireplaces connected silently
about the walls. Deserted spaces, complicated
by door-openings everywhere.
There was a path up among bushes and nettles
over the beaten debris, then a drop, where bricks
and plaster and rafters had fallen into the kitchens.
A line of small choked arches … The pantries, possibly.
Be still, as though pure.
A brick, and its dust, fell.
Nightfall
The trees we drove under in the dusk
as we threaded back along the river through the woods
were no mere dark growth, but a flitting-place
for ragged feeling, old angers and rumours.
Black and Tan ghosts up there, at home
on the Woodstock heights: an iron mouth
scanning the Kilkenny road: the house
gutted by the townspeople and burned to ruins.
The little Ford we met, and inched past, full of men
we had noticed along the river bank during the week,
disappeared behind us into a fifty-year-old night.
Even their caps and raincoats …
Sons, or grandsons. Poachers.
Mud-tasted salmon
slithering in a plastic bag around the boot,
bloodied muscles, disputed since King John.
The ghosts of daughters of the family
waited in the uncut grass as we drove
down to our mock-Austrian lodge and stopped.
*
We untied the punt in the half-light, and pushed out
to take a last hour on the river, until night.
We drifted, but stayed almost still.
The current underneath us
and the tide coming back to the full
cancelled in a gleaming calm, punctuated
by the plop of fish.
Down on the water … at eye level … in the little light
remaining overhead … the mayfly passed in a loose drift,
thick and frail, a hatch slow with sex,
separate mo
rsels trailing their slack filaments,
olive, pale evening dun, imagoes, unseen eggs
dropping from the air, subimagoes, the river filled
with their nymphs ascending and excited trout.
Be subtle, as though not there.
We were near the island – no more than a dark mass
on a sheet of silver – when a man appeared in mid-river
quickly and with scarcely a sound, his paddle touching
left and right of the prow, with a sack behind him.
The flat cot’s long body slid past effortless
as a fish, sinewing from side to side,
as he passed us and vanished.
At the Western Ocean’s Edge
Hero as liberator. There is also
the warrior marked by Fate, who overmasters
every enemy in the known world
until the elements reveal themselves.
And one, finding the foe inside his head,
who turned the struggle outward, against the sea.
Yeats discovered him through Lady Gregory,
and found him helpful as a second shadow
in his own sour duel with the middle classes.
He grew to know him well in his own right
– mental strife; renewal in reverse;
emotional response; the revelation.
Aogan O Rathaille felt their forces meeting
at the Western ocean’s edge
– the energy of chaos and a shaping
counter-energy in throes of balance;
the gale wailing inland off the water
arousing a voice responding in his head,
storming back at the waves with their own force
in a posture of refusal, beggar rags
in tatters in a tempest of particulars.
A battered figure. Setting his face
beyond the ninth shadow, into dead calm.
The stranger waiting on the steel horizon.
The Design
Goodness is required.
It is part of the design.
Badness is understood.
It is a lapse, and part of the design.
Acknowledgment of the good
and condemnation of the bad
are required. Lapses
are not understood.
JOHN MONTAGUE
Windharp
for Patrick Collins
The sounds of Ireland,
that restless whispering
you never get away
from, seeping out of
low bushes and grass,
heatherbells and fern,
wrinkling bog pools,
scraping tree branches,
light hunting cloud,
sound hounding sight,
a hand ceaselessly
The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry Page 62
