New and Selected Poems (16 page)

When I was taken aside that day

I had the sense of election:

   

 

they dressed my head in a fishnet

and plaited leafy twigs through meshes

   

 

so my vision was a bird’s

at the heart of a thicket

   

 

and I spoke as I moved

like a voice from a shaking bush.

   

 

King of the ditchbacks,

I went with them obediently

   

 

to the edge of a pigeon wood –

deciduous canopy, screened wain of evening

   

 

we lay beneath in silence.

No birds came, but I waited

   

 

among briars and stones, or whispered

or broke the watery gossamers

   

 

if I moved a muscle.

‘Come back to us,’ they said, ‘in harvest,

   

 

when we hide in the stooked corn,

when the gundogs can hardly retrieve

   

 

what’s brought down.’ And I saw myself

rising to move in that dissimulation,

   

 

top-knotted, masked in sheaves, noting

the fall of birds: a rich young man

   

 

leaving everything he had

for a migrant solitude.

I

 

A hurry of bell-notes

flew over morning hush

and water-blistered cornfields,

an escaped ringing

that stopped as quickly

   

 

as it started.
Sunday
,

the silence breathed

and could not settle back

for a man had appeared

at the side of the field

   

 

with a bow-saw, held

stiffly up like a lyre.

He moved and stopped to gaze

up into hazel bushes,

angled his saw in,

   

 

pulled back to gaze again

and move on to the next.

‘I know you, Simon Sweeney,

for an old Sabbath-breaker

who has been dead for years.’

   

 

‘Damn all you know,’ he said,

his eye still on the hedge

and not turning his head.

‘I was your mystery man

and am again this morning.

   

 

Through gaps in the bushes,

your First Communion face

would watch me cutting timber.

When cut or broken limbs

of trees went yellow, when

   

 

woodsmoke sharpened air

or ditches rustled

you sensed my trail there

as if it had been sprayed.

It left you half afraid.

   

 

When they bade you listen

in the bedroom dark

to wind and rain in the trees

and think of tinkers camped

under a heeled-up cart

   

 

you shut your eyes and saw

a wet axle and spokes

in moonlight, and me

streaming from the shower,

headed for your door.’

   

 

Sunlight broke in the hazels,

the quick bell-notes began

a second time. I turned

at another sound:

a crowd of shawled women

   

 

were wading the young corn,

their skirts brushing softly.

Their motion saddened morning.

It whispered to the silence,

‘Pray for us, pray for us,’

   

 

it conjured through the air

until the field was full

of half-remembered faces,

a loosed congregation

that straggled past and on.

   

 

As I drew behind them

I was a fasted pilgrim,

light-headed, leaving home

to face into my station.

‘Stay clear of all processions!’

   

 

Sweeney shouted at me

but the murmur of the crowd

and their feet slushing through

the tender, bladed growth

had opened a drugged path

   

 

I was set upon.

I trailed those early-risers

fallen into step

before the smokes were up.

The quick bell rang again.

II

 

I was parked on a high road, listening

to peewits and wind blowing round the car

when something came to life in the driving mirror,

   

 

someone walking fast in an overcoat

and boots, bareheaded, big, determined

in his sure haste along the crown of the road

   

 

so that I felt myself the challenged one.

The car door slammed. I was suddenly out

face to face with an aggravated man

   

 

raving on about nights spent listening for

gun butts to come cracking on the door,

yeomen on the rampage, and his neighbour

   

 

among them, hammering home the shape of things.

‘Round about here you overtook the women,’

I said, as the thing came clear. ‘Your
Lough Derg Pilgrim

   

 

haunts me every time I cross this mountain –

as if I am being followed, or following.

I’m on my road there now to do the station.’

   

 

‘O holy Jesus Christ, does nothing change?’

His head jerked sharply side to side and up

like a diver’s surfacing,

   

 

then with a look that said,
who is this cub

anyhow
, he took cognizance again

of where he was: the road, the mountain top,

   

 

and the air, softened by a shower of rain,

worked on his anger visibly until:

‘It is a road you travel on your own.

   

 

I who learned to read in the reek of flax

and smelled hanged bodies rotting on their gibbets

and saw their looped slime gleaming from the sacks –

   

 

hard-mouthed Ribbonmen and Orange bigots

made me into the old fork-tongued turncoat

who mucked the byre of their politics.

   

 

If times were hard, I could be hard too.

I made the traitor in me sink the knife.

And maybe there’s a lesson there for you,

   

 

whoever you are, wherever you come out of,

for though there’s something natural in your smile

there’s something in it strikes me as defensive.’

   

 

‘The angry role was never my vocation,’

I said. ‘I come from County Derry,

where the last marching bands of Ribbonmen

   

 

on Patrick’s Day still played their Hymn to Mary.

Obedient strains like theirs tuned me first

and not that harp of unforgiving iron

   

 

the Fenians strung. A lot of what you wrote

I heard and did: this Lough Derg station,

flax-pullings, dances, fair-days, crossroads chat

   

 

and the shaky local voice of education.

All that. And always, Orange drums.

And neighbours on the roads at night with guns.’

   

 

‘I know, I know, I know, I know,’ he said,

‘but you have to try to make sense of what comes.

Remember everything and keep your head.’

   

 

‘The alders in the hedge,’ I said, ‘mushrooms,

dark-clumped grass where cows or horses dunged,

the cluck when pith-lined chestnut shells split open

   

 

in your hand, the melt of shells corrupting,

old jampots in a drain clogged up with mud – ’

But now Carleton was interrupting:

   

 

‘All this is like a trout kept in a spring

or maggots sown in wounds –

another life that cleans our element.

   

 

We are earthworms of the earth, and all that

has gone through us is what will be our trace.’

He turned on his heel when he was saying this

   

 

and headed up the road at the same hard pace.

III

 

I knelt. Hiatus. Habit’s afterlife …

I was back among bead clicks and the murmurs

from inside confessionals, side altars

where candles died insinuating slight

   

 

intimate smells of wax at body heat.

There was an active, wind-stilled hush, as if

in a shell the listened-for ocean stopped

and a tide rested and sustained the roof.

   

 

A seaside trinket floated then and idled

in vision, like phosphorescent weed,

a toy grotto with seedling mussel shells

and cockles glued in patterns over it,

   

 

pearls condensed from a child invalid’s breath

into a shimmering ark, my house of gold

that housed the snowdrop weather of her death

long ago. I would stow away in the hold

   

 

of our big oak sideboard and forage for it

laid past in its tissue paper for good.

It was like touching birds’ eggs, robbing the nest

of the word
wreath
, as kept and dry and secret

   

 

as her name which they hardly ever spoke

but was a white bird trapped inside me

beating scared wings when
Health of the Sick

fluttered its
pray for us
in the litany.

   

 

A cold draught blew under the kneeling boards.

I thought of walking round

and round a space utterly empty,

utterly a source, like the idea of sound

   

 

or like the absence sensed in swamp-fed air

above a ring of walked-down grass and rushes

where we once found the bad carcass and scrags of hair

of our dog that had disappeared weeks before.