New and Selected Poems (11 page)

When the badger glimmered away

into another garden

you stood, half-lit with whiskey,

sensing you had disturbed

some soft returning.

   

 

The murdered dead,

you thought.

But could it not have been

some violent shattered boy

nosing out what got mislaid

between the cradle and the explosion,

evenings when windows stood open

and the compost smoked down the backs?

   

 

Visitations are taken for signs.

At a second house I listened

for duntings under the laurels

and heard intimations whispered

about being vaguely honoured.

   

 

And to read even by carcasses

the badgers have come back.

One that grew notorious

lay untouched in the roadside.

Last night one had me braking

but more in fear than in honour.

   

 

Cool from the sett and redolent

of his runs under the night,

the bogey of fern country

broke cover in me

for what he is:

pig family

and not at all what he’s painted.

   

 

How perilous is it to choose

not to love the life we’re shown?

His sturdy dirty body

and interloping grovel.

The intelligence in his bone.

The unquestionable houseboy’s shoulders

that could have been my own.

When they said
Carrickfergus
I could hear

the frosty echo of saltminers’ picks.

I imagined it, chambered and glinting,

a township built of light.

   

 

What do we say any more

to conjure the salt of our earth?

So much comes and is gone

that should be crystal and kept

   

 

and amicable weathers

that bring up the grain of things,

their tang of season and store,

are all the packing we’ll get.

   

 

So I say to myself
Gweebarra

and its music hits off the place

like water hitting off granite.

I see the glittering sound

   

 

framed in your window,

knives and forks set on oilcloth,

and the seals’ heads, suddenly outlined,

scanning everything.

   

 

People here used to believe

that drowned souls lived in the seals.

At spring tides they might change shape.

They loved music and swam in for a singer

   

 

who might stand at the end of summer

in the mouth of a whitewashed turf-shed,

his shoulder to the jamb, his song

a rowboat far out in evening.

   

 

When I came here first you were always singing,

a hint of the clip of the pick

in your winnowing climb and attack.

Raise it again, man. We still believe what we hear.

Late summer, and at midnight

I smelt the heat of the day:

At my window over the hotel car park

I breathed the muddied night airs off the lake

And watched a young crowd leave the discothèque.

   

 

Their voices rose up thick and comforting

As oily bubbles the feeding tench sent up

That evening at dusk – the slimy tench

Once called the ‘doctor fish’ because his slime

Was said to heal the wounds of fish that touched it.

   

 

A girl in a white dress

Was being courted out among the cars:

As her voice swarmed and puddled into laughs

I felt like some old pike all badged with sores

Wanting to swim in touch with soft-mouthed life.

For Ann Saddlemyer
our heartiest welcomer

I

 

Vowels ploughed into other: opened ground.

The mildest February for twenty years

Is mist bands over furrows, a deep no sound

Vulnerable to distant gargling tractors.

Our road is steaming, the turned-up acres breathe.

Now the good life could be to cross a field

And art a paradigm of earth new from the lathe

Of ploughs. My lea is deeply tilled.

Old ploughsocks gorge the subsoil of each sense

And I am quickened with a redolence

Of farmland as a dark unblown rose.

Wait then … Breasting the mist, in sowers’ aprons,

My ghosts come striding into their spring stations.

The dream grain whirls like freakish Easter snows.

II

 

Sensings, mountings from the hiding places,

Words entering almost the sense of touch,

Ferreting themselves out of their dark hutch –

‘These things are not secrets but mysteries,’

Oisin Kelly told me years ago

In Belfast, hankering after stone

That connived with the chisel, as if the grain

Remembered what the mallet tapped to know.

Then I landed in the hedge-school of Glanmore

And from the backs of ditches hoped to raise

A voice caught back off slug-horn and slow chanter

That might continue, hold, dispel, appease:

Vowels ploughed into other, opened ground,

Each verse returning like the plough turned round.

III

 

This evening the cuckoo and the corncrake

(So much, too much) consorted at twilight.

It was all crepuscular and iambic.

Out on the field a baby rabbit

Took his bearings, and I knew the deer

(I’ve seen them too from the window of the house,

Like connoisseurs, inquisitive of air)

Were careful under larch and May-green spruce.

I had said earlier, ‘I won’t relapse

From this strange loneliness I’ve brought us to.

Dorothy and William – ’ She interrupts:

‘You’re not going to compare us two …?’

Outside a rustling and twig-combing breeze

Refreshes and relents. Is cadences.

IV

 

I use to lie with an ear to the line

For that way, they said, there should come a sound

Escaping ahead, an iron tune

Of flange and piston pitched along the ground,

But I never heard that. Always, instead,

Struck couplings and shuntings two miles away

Lifted over the woods. The head

Of a horse swirled back from a gate, a grey

Turnover of haunch and mane, and I’d look

Up to the cutting where she’d soon appear.

Two fields back, in the house, small ripples shook

Silently across our drinking water

(As they are shaking now across my heart)

And vanished into where they seemed to start.

V

 

Soft corrugations in the boortree’s trunk,

Its green young shoots, its rods like freckled solder:

It was our bower as children, a greenish, dank

And snapping memory as I get older.

And elderberry I have learned to call it.

I love its blooms like saucers brimmed with meal,

Its berries a swart caviar of shot,

A buoyant spawn, a light bruised out of purple.

Elderberry? It is shires dreaming wine.

Boortree is bower tree, where I played ‘touching tongues’

And felt another’s texture quick on mine.

So, etymologist of roots and graftings,

I fall back to my tree-house and would crouch

Where small buds shoot and flourish in the hush.

VI

 

He lived there in the unsayable lights.

He saw the fuchsia in a drizzling noon,

The elderflower at dusk like a risen moon

And green fields greying on the windswept heights.

‘I will break through,’ he said, ‘what I glazed over

With perfect mist and peaceful absences …’

Sudden and sure as the man who dared the ice

And raced his bike across the Moyola River.

A man we never saw. But in that winter

Of nineteen forty-seven, when the snow

Kept the country bright as a studio,

In a cold where things might crystallize or founder

His story quickened us, a wild white goose

Heard after dark above the drifted house.

VII

 

Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Irish Sea:

Green, swift upsurges, North Atlantic flux

Conjured by that strong gale-warning voice

Collapse into a sibilant penumbra,

Midnight and closedown. Sirens of the tundra,

Of eel-road, seal-road, keel-road, whale-road, raise

Their wind-compounded keen behind the baize

And drive the trawlers to the lee of Wicklow.

L’Etoile, Le Guillemot, La Belle Hélène

Nursed their bright names this morning in the bay

That toiled like mortar. It was marvellous

And actual, I said out loud, ‘A haven,’

The word deepening, clearing, like the sky

Elsewhere on Minches, Cromarty, The Faroes.