New and Selected Poems (4 page)

I met a girl from Derrygarve

And the name, a lost potent musk,

Recalled the river’s long swerve,

A kingfisher’s blue bolt at dusk

   

 

And stepping stones like black molars

Sunk in the ford, the shifty glaze

Of the whirlpool, the Moyola

Pleasuring beneath alder trees.

   

 

And Derrygarve, I thought, was just:

Vanished music, twilit water –

A smooth libation of the past

Poured by this chance vestal daughter.

   

 

But now our river tongues must rise

From licking deep in native haunts

To flood, with vowelling embrace,

Demesnes staked out in consonants.

   

 

And Castledawson we’ll enlist

And Upperlands, each planted bawn –

Like bleaching-greens resumed by grass –

A vocable, as rath and bullaun.

I

 

Thigh-deep in sedge and marigolds

a neighbour laid his shadow

on the stream, vouching

  

 

‘It’s poor as Lazarus, that ground,’

and brushed away

among the shaken leafage.

   

 

I lay where his lea sloped

to meet our fallow,

nested on moss and rushes,

   

 

my ear swallowing

his fabulous, biblical dismissal,

that tongue of chosen people.

   

 

When he would stand like that

on the other side, white-haired,

swinging his blackthorn

   

 

at the marsh weeds,

he prophesied above our scraggy acres,

then turned away

   

 

towards his promised furrows

on the hill, a wake of pollen

drifting to our bank, next season’s tares.

II

 

For days we would rehearse

each patriarchal dictum:

Lazarus, the Pharaoh, Solomon

   

 

and David and Goliath rolled

magnificently, like loads of hay

too big for our small lanes,

   

 

or faltered on a rut –

‘Your side of the house, I believe,

hardly rule by the book at all.’

   

 

His brain was a whitewashed kitchen

hung with texts, swept tidy

as the body o’ the kirk.

III

 

Then sometimes when the rosary was dragging

mournfully on in the kitchen

we would hear his step round the gable

   

 

though not until after the litany

would the knock come to the door

and the casual whistle strike up

   

on the doorstep. ‘A right-looking night,’

he might say, ‘I was dandering by

and says I, I might as well call.’

  

 

But now I stand behind him

in the dark yard, in the moan of prayers.

He puts a hand in a pocket

   

 

or taps a little tune with the blackthorn

shyly, as if he were party to

lovemaking or a stranger’s weeping.

   

 

Should I slip away, I wonder,

or go up and touch his shoulder

and talk about the weather

   

 

or the price of grass-seed?

I

 

Some day I will go to Aarhus

To see his peat-brown head,

The mild pods of his eye-lids,

His pointed skin cap.

   

 

In the flat country near by

Where they dug him out,

His last gruel of winter seeds

Caked in his stomach,

   

 

Naked except for

The cap, noose and girdle,

I will stand a long time.

Bridegroom to the goddess,

   

 

She tightened her tore on him

And opened her fen,

Those dark juices working

Him to a saint’s kept body,

   

 

Trove of the turfcutters’

Honeycombed workings.

Now his stained face

Reposes at Aarhus.

II

 

I could risk blasphemy,

Consecrate the cauldron bog

Our holy ground and pray

Him to make germinate

   

 

The scattered, ambushed

Flesh of labourers,

Stockinged corpses

Laid out in the farmyards,

   

 

Tell-tale skin and teeth

Flecking the sleepers

Of four young brothers, trailed

For miles along the lines.

III

 

Something of his sad freedom

As he rode the tumbril

Should come to me, driving,

Saying the names

   

 

Tollund, Grabaulle, Nebelgard,

Watching the pointing hands

Of country people,

Not knowing their tongue.

   

 

Out there in Jutland

In the old man-killing parishes

I will feel lost,

Unhappy and at home.

I am afraid.

Sound has stopped in the day

And the images reel over

And over. Why all those tears,

   

 

The wild grief on his face

Outside the taxi? The sap

Of mourning rises

In our waving guests.

   

 

You sing behind the tall cake

Like a deserted bride

Who persists, demented,

And goes through the ritual.

   

 

When I went to the gents

There was a skewered heart

And a legend of love. Let me

Sleep on your breast to the airport.

I

 

Was it wind off the dumps

or something in heat

   

 

dogging us, the summer gone sour,

a fouled nest incubating somewhere?

   

 

Whose fault, I wondered, inquisitor

of the possessed air.

   

 

To realize suddenly,

whip off the mat

   

 

that was larval, moving –

and scald, scald, scald.

II

 

Bushing the door, my arms full

of wild cherry and rhododendron,

I hear her small lost weeping

through the hall, that bells and hoarsens

on my name, my name.

   

 

Ο love, here is the blame.

The loosened flowers between us

gather in, compose

for a May altar of sorts.

These frank and falling blooms

soon taint to a sweet chrism.

   

 

Attend. Anoint the wound.

III

 

Ο we tented our wound all right

under the homely sheet

   

 

and lay as if the cold flat of a blade

had winded us.

   

 

More and more I postulate

thick healings, like now

   

 

as you bend in the shower

water lives down the tilting stoups of your breasts.

IV

 

With a final

unmusical drive

long grains begin

to open and split

   

 

ahead and once more

we sap

the white, trodden

path to the heart.

V

 

My children weep out the hot foreign night.

We walk the floor, my foul mouth takes it out

On you and we lie stiff till dawn

Attends the pillow, and the maize, and vine

   

 

That holds its filling burden to the light.

Yesterday rocks sang when we tapped

Stalactites in the cave’s old, dripping dark –

Our love calls tiny as a tuning fork.

Fishermen at Ballyshannon

Netted an infant last night

Along with the salmon.

An illegitimate spawning,

   

 

A small one thrown back

To the waters. But I’m sure

As she stood in the shallows

Ducking him tenderly

   

 

Till the frozen knobs of her wrists

Were dead as the gravel,

He was a minnow with hooks

Tearing her open.

   

 

She waded in under

The sign of her cross.

He was hauled in with the fish.

Now limbo will be

   

 

A cold glitter of souls

Through some far briny zone.

Even Christ’s palms, unhealed,

Smart and cannot fish there.