New and Selected Poems (3 page)

The smells of ordinariness

Were new on the night drive through France:

Rain and hay and woods on the air

Made warm draughts in the open car.

   

 

Signposts whitened relentlessly.

Montreuil, Abbéville, Beauvais

Were promised, promised, came and went,

Each place granting its name’s fulfilment.

   

 

A combine groaning its way late

Bled seeds across its work-light.

A forest fire smouldered out.

One by one small cafés shut.

   

 

I thought of you continuously

A thousand miles south where Italy

Laid its loin to France on the darkened sphere.

Your ordinariness was renewed there.

The lough waters

Can petrify wood:

Old oars and posts

Over the years

Harden their grain,

Incarcerate ghosts

   

 

Of sap and season.

The shallows lap

And give and take:

Constant ablutions,

Such drowning love

Stun a stake

   

 

To stalagmite.

Dead lava,

The cooling star,

Coal and diamond

Or sudden birth

Of burnt meteor

   

 

Are too simple,

Without the lure

That relic stored –

A piece of stone

On the shelf at school,

Oatmeal coloured.

For T. P. Flanagan

We have no prairies

To slice a big sun at evening –

Everywhere the eye concedes to

Encroaching horizon,

   

 

Is wooed into the cyclops’ eye

Of a tarn. Our unfenced country

Is bog that keeps crusting

Between the sights of the sun.

   

 

They’ve taken the skeleton

Of the Great Irish Elk

Out of the peat, set it up

An astounding crate full of air.

   

 

Butter sunk under

More than a hundred years

Was recovered salty and white.

The ground itself is kind, black butter

   

 

Melting and opening underfoot,

Missing its last definition

By millions of years.

They’ll never dig coal here,

   

 

Only the waterlogged trunks

Of great firs, soft as pulp.

Our pioneers keep striking

Inwards and downwards,

   

 

Every layer they strip

Seems camped on before.

The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.

The wet centre is bottomless.

A carter’s trophy

split for rafters,

a cobwebbed, black,

long-seasoned rib

   

 

under the first thatch.

I might tarry

with the moustached

dead, the creel-fillers,

   

 

or eavesdrop on

their hopeless wisdom

as a blow-down of smoke

struggles over the half-door

   

 

and mizzling rain

blurs the far end

of the cart track.

The softening ruts

   

 

lead back to no

‘oak groves’, no

cutters of mistletoe

in the green clearings.

   

 

Perhaps I just make out

Edmund Spenser,

dreaming sunlight,

encroached upon by

   

 

geniuses who creep

‘out of every corner

of the woodes and glennes’

towards watercress and carrion.

My ‘place of clear water’,

the first hill in the world

where springs washed into

the shiny grass

   

 

and darkened cobbles

in the bed of the lane.

Anahorish
, soft gradient

of consonant, vowel-meadow,

   

 

after-image of lamps

swung through the yards

on winter evenings.

With pails and barrows

   

 

those mound-dwellers

go waist-deep in mist

to break the light ice

at wells and dunghills.

I

 

Cloudburst and steady downpour now

for days.

    Still mammal,

straw-footed on the mud,

he begins to sense weather

by his skin.

   

 

A nimble snout of flood

licks over stepping stones

and goes uprooting.

                                           He fords

his life by sounding.

                                           Soundings.

II

 

A man wading lost fields

breaks the pane of flood:

   

 

a flower of mud-

water blooms up to his reflection

   

 

like a cut swaying

its red spoors through a basin.

   

 

His hands grub

where the spade has uncastled

  

 

sunken drills, an atlantis

he depends on. So

   

 

he is hooped to where he planted

and sky and ground

   

 

are running naturally among his arms

that grope the cropping land.

III

 

When rains were gathering

there would be an all-night

roaring off the ford.

Their world-schooled ear

   

 

could monitor the usual

confabulations, the race

slabbering past the gable,

the Moyola harping on

   

 

its gravel beds:

all spouts by daylight

brimmed with their own airs

and overflowed each barrel

   

 

in long tresses.

I cock my ear

at an absence –

in the shared calling of blood

   

 

arrives my need

for antediluvian lore.

Soft voices of the dead

are whispering by the shore

   

 

that I would question

(and for my children’s sake)

about crops rotted, river mud

glazing the baked clay floor.

IV

 

The tawny guttural water

spells itself: Moyola

is its own score and consort,

   

 

bedding the locale

in the utterance,

reed music, an old chanter

   

 

breathing its mists

through vowels and history.

A swollen river,

   

 

a mating call of sound

rises to pleasure me, Dives,

hoarder of common ground.

Riverbank, the long rigs

ending in broad docken

and a canopied pad

down to the ford.

   

 

The garden mould

bruised easily, the shower

gathering in your heelmark

was the black Ο

   

 

in
Broagh
,

its low tattoo

among the windy boortrees

and rhubarb-blades

   

 

ended almost

suddenly, like that last

gh
the strangers found

difficult to manage.

Hide in the hollow trunk

of the willow tree,

its listening familiar,

until, as usual, they

cuckoo your name

across the fields.

You can hear them

draw the poles of stiles

as they approach

calling you out:

small mouth and ear

in a woody cleft,

lobe and larynx

of the mossy places.