New and Selected Poems (17 page)

IV

 

Blurred swimmings as I faced the sun, my back

to the stone pillar and the iron cross,

ready to say the dream words
I renounce
…

   

 

Blurred oval prints of newly ordained faces,

‘Father’ pronounced with a fawning relish,

the sunlit tears of parents being blessed.

   

 

I saw a young priest, glossy as a blackbird,

as if he had stepped from his anointing

a moment ago: his purple stole and cord

   

 

or cincture tied loosely, his polished shoes

unexpectedly secular beneath

a pleated, lace-hemmed alb of linen cloth.

   

 

His name had lain undisturbed for years

like an old bicycle wheel in a ditch

ripped at last from under jungling briars,

   

 

wet and perished. My arms were open wide

but I could not say the words. ‘The rain forest,’ he said,

‘you’ve never seen the like of it. I lasted

   

 

only a couple of years. Bare-breasted

women and rat-ribbed men. Everything wasted.

I rotted like a pear. I sweated masses …’

   

 

His breath came short and shorter. ‘In long houses

I raised the chalice above headdresses.

In hoc signo
… On that abandoned

   

 

mission compound, my vocation

is a steam off drenched creepers.’

I had broken off from the renunciation

   

 

while he was speaking, to clear the way

for other pilgrims queueing to get started.

‘I’m older now than you when you went away,’

   

 

I ventured, feeling a strange reversal.

‘I never could see you on the foreign missions.

I could only see you on a bicycle,

   

 

a clerical student home for the summer

doomed to the decent thing. Visiting neighbours.

Drinking tea and praising home-made bread.

   

 

Something in them would be ratified

when they saw you at the door in your black suit,

arriving like some sort of holy mascot.

   

 

You gave too much relief, you raised a siege

the world had laid against their kitchen grottoes

hung with holy pictures and crucifixes.’

   

 

‘And you,’ he faltered, ‘what are you doing here

but the same thing? What possessed you?

I at least was young and unaware

   

 

that what I thought was chosen was convention.

But all this you were clear of you walked into

over again. And the god has, as they say, withdrawn.

   

 

What are you doing, going through these motions?

Unless … Unless …’ Again he was short of breath

and his whole fevered body yellowed and shook.

   

 

‘Unless you are here taking the last look.’

Then where he stood was empty as the roads

we both grew up beside, where the sick man

   

 

had taken his last look one drizzly evening

when the tarmac steamed with first breath of spring,

a knee-deep mist I waded silently

   

 

behind him, on his circuits, visiting.

V

 

An old man’s hands, like soft paws rowing forward,

groped for and warded off the air ahead.

Barney Murphy shuffled on the concrete.

Master Murphy
. I heard the weakened voice

bulling in sudden rage all over again

and fell in behind, my eyes fixed on his heels

like a man lifting swathes at a mower’s heels.

His sockless feet were like the dried broad bean

that split its stitches in the display jar

high on a window in the old classroom,

white as shy faces in the classroom door.

‘Master,’ those elders whispered, ‘I wonder, master …’,

rustling envelopes, proffering them, withdrawing,

waiting for him to sign beside their mark,

and ‘Master’ I repeated to myself

so that he stopped but did not turn or move,

gone quiet in the shoulders, his small head

vigilant in the cold gusts off the lough.

I moved ahead and faced him, shook his hand.

   

 

Above the winged collar, his mottled face

went distant in a smile as the voice

readied itself and husked and scraped, ‘Good man,

good man yourself,’ before it lapsed again

in the limbo and dry urn of the larynx.

The adam’s apple in its weathered sac

worked like the plunger of a pump in drought

but yielded nothing to help the helpless smile.

Morning field smells came past on the wind,

the sex-cut of sweetbriar after rain,

new-mown meadow hay, bird’s nests filled with leaves.

   

 

‘You’d have thought that Anahorish School

was purgatory enough for any man,’

I said. ‘You have done your station.’

Then a little trembling happened and his breath

rushed the air softly as scythes in his lost meadows.

‘Birch trees have overgrown Leitrim Moss,

dairy herds are grazing where the school was

and the school garden’s loose black mould is grass.’

He was gone with that and I was faced wrong way

into more pilgrims absorbed in this exercise.

As I stood among their whispers and bare feet

the mists of all the mornings I set out

for Latin classes with him, face to face,

refreshed me.
Mensa, mensa, mensam

sang on the air like a busy sharping-stone.

   

 

‘We’ll go some day to my uncle’s farm at Toome – ’

Another master spoke. ‘
For what is the great

moving power and spring of verse? Feeling, and

in particular, love
. When I went last year

I drank three cups of water from the well.

It was very cold. It stung me in the ears.

You should have met him – ’ Coming in as usual

with the rubbed quotation and his cocked bird’s eye

dabbing for detail.
When you’re on the road

give lifts to people, you’ll always learn something
.

There he went, in his belted gaberdine,

and after him, a third fosterer,

slack-shouldered and clear-eyed: ‘Sure I might have known

once I had made the pad, you’d be after me

sooner or later. Forty-two years on

and you’ve got no farther! But after that again,

where else would you go? Iceland, maybe? Maybe the Dordogne?’

And then the parting shot. ‘In my own day

the odd one came here on the hunt for women.’

VI

 

Freckle-face, fox-head, pod of the broom,

Catkin-pixie, little fern-swish:

Where did she arrive from?

Like a wish wished

And gone, her I chose at ‘secrets’

And whispered to. When we were playing houses.

I was sunstruck at the basilica door –

A stillness far away, a space, a dish,

A blackened tin and knocked over stool –

Like a tramped neolithic floor

Uncovered among dunes where the bent grass

Whispers on like reeds about Midas’s

Secrets, secrets
. I shut my ears to the bell.

Head hugged. Eyes shut. Leaf ears.
Don’t tell. Don’t tell
.

   

 

A stream of pilgrims answering the bell

Trailed up the steps as I went down them

Towards the bottle-green, still

Shade of an oak. Shades of the Sabine farm

On the beds of Saint Patrick’s Purgatory.

Late summer, country distance, not an air:

Loosen the toga for wine and poetry

Till Phoebus returning routs the morning star
.

As a somnolent hymn to Mary rose

I felt an old pang that bags of grain

And the sloped shafts of forks and hoes

Once mocked me with, at my own long virgin

Fasts and thirsts, my nightly shadow feasts,

Haunting the granaries of words like
breasts
.

   

 

As if I knelt for years at a keyhole

Mad for it, and all that ever opened

Was the breathed-on grille of a confessional

Until that night I saw her honey-skinned

Shoulder-blades and the wheatlands of her back

Through the wide keyhole of her keyhole dress

And a window facing the deep south of luck

Opened and I inhaled the land of kindness.

As little flowers that were all bowed and shut

By the night chills rise on their stems and open

As soon as they have felt the touch of sunlight
,

So I revived in my own wilting powers

And my heart flushed, like somebody set free
.

Translated, given, under the oak tree.

VII

 

I had come to the edge of the water,

soothed by just looking, idling over it

as if it were a clear barometer

   

 

or a mirror, when his reflection

did not appear but I sensed a presence

entering into my concentration

   

 

on not being concentrated as he spoke

my name. And though I was reluctant

I turned to meet his face and the shock

   

 

is still in me at what I saw. His brow

was blown open above the eye and blood

had dried on his neck and cheek. ‘Easy now,’

   

 

he said, ‘it’s only me. You’ve seen men as raw

after a football match … What time it was

when I was wakened up I still don’t know

   

 

but I heard this knocking, knocking, and it

scared me, like the phone in the small hours,

so I had the sense not to put on the light

   

 

but looked out from behind the curtain.

I saw two customers on the doorstep

and an old landrover with the doors open

   

 

parked on the street so I let the curtain drop;

but they must have been waiting for it to move

for they shouted to come down into the shop.

   

 

She started to cry then and roll round the bed,

lamenting and lamenting to herself,

not even asking who it was. “Is your head

   

 

astray, or what’s come over you?” I roared, more

to bring myself to my senses

than out of any real anger at her

   

 

for the knocking shook me, the way they kept it up,

and her whingeing and half-screeching made it worse.

All the time they were shouting, “Shop!

   

 

Shop!” so I pulled on my shoes and a sportscoat

and went back to the window and called out,

“What do you want? Could you quieten the racket

   

 

or I’ll not come down at all.” “There’s a child not well.

Open up and see what you have got – pills

or a powder or something in a bottle,”

   

 

one of them said. He stepped back off the footpath

so I could see his face in the street lamp

and when the other moved I knew them both.

   

 

But bad and all as the knocking was, the quiet

hit me worse. She was quiet herself now,

lying dead still, whispering to watch out.

   

 

At the bedroom door I switched on the light.

“It’s odd they didn’t look for a chemist.

Who are they anyway at this time of the night?”

   

 

she asked me, with the eyes standing in her head.

“I know them to see,” I said, but something

made me reach and squeeze her hand across the bed

   

 

before I went downstairs into the aisle

of the shop. I stood there, going weak

in the legs. I remember the stale smell

   

 

of cooked meat or something coming through

as I went to open up. From then on

you know as much about it as I do.’

   

 

‘Did they say nothing?’ ‘Nothing. What would they say?’

‘Were they in uniform? Not masked in any way?’

‘They were barefaced as they would be in the day,

   

 

shites thinking they were the be-all and the end-all.’

‘Not that it is any consolation

but they were caught,’ I told him, ‘and got jail.’

   

 

Big-limbed, decent, open-faced, he stood

forgetful of everything now except

whatever was welling up in his spoiled head,

   

 

beginning to smile. ‘You’ve put on weight

since you did your courting in that big Austin

you got the loan of on a Sunday night.’

   

 

Through life and death he had hardly aged.

There always was an athlete’s cleanliness

shining off him and except for the ravaged

   

 

forehead and the blood, he was still that same

rangy midfielder in a blue jersey

and starched pants, the one stylist on the team,

   

 

the perfect, clean, unthinkable victim.

‘Forgive the way I have lived indifferent –

forgive my timid circumspect involvement,’

   

 

I surprised myself by saying. ‘Forgive

my eye,’ he said, ‘all that’s above my head.’

And then a stun of pain seemed to go through him

   

 

and he trembled like a heatwave and faded.