New and Selected Poems (9 page)

His bicycle stood at the window-sill,

The rubber cowl of a mud-splasher

Skirting the front mudguard,

Its fat black handlegrips

   

 

Heating in sunlight, the ‘spud’

Of the dynamo gleaming and cocked back,

The pedal treads hanging relieved

Of the boot of the law.

   

 

His cap was upside down

On the floor, next his chair.

The line of its pressure ran like a bevel

In his slightly sweating hair.

   

 

He had unstrapped

The heavy ledger, and my father

Was making tillage returns

In acres, roods, and perches.

   

 

Arithmetic and fear.

I sat staring at the polished holster

With its buttoned flap, the braid cord

Looped into the revolver butt.

   

 

‘Any other root crops?

Mangolds? Marrowstems? Anything like that?’

‘No.’ But was there not a line

Of turnips where the seed ran out

   

 

In the potato field? I assumed

Small guilts and sat

Imagining the black hole in the barracks.

He stood up, shifted the baton-case

   

 

Further round on his belt,

Closed the domesday book,

Fitted his cap back with two hands,

And looked at me as he said goodbye.

   

 

A shadow bobbed in the window.

He was snapping the carrier spring

Over the ledger. His boot pushed off

And the bicycle ticked, ticked, ticked.

While the Constabulary covered the mob

Firing into the Falls, I was suffering

Only the bullying sun of Madrid.

Each afternoon, in the casserole heat

Of the flat, as I sweated my way through

The life of Joyce, stinks from the fishmarket

Rose like the reek off a flax-dam.

At night on the balcony, gules of wine,

A sense of children in their dark corners,

Old women in black shawls near open windows,

The air a canyon rivering in Spanish.

We talked our way home over starlit plains

Where patent leather of the Guardia Civil

Gleamed like fish-bellies in flax-poisoned waters.

   

 

‘Go back,’ one said, ‘try to touch the people.’

Another conjured Lorca from his hill.

We sat through death counts and bullfight reports

On the television, celebrities

Arrived from where the real thing still happened.

   

 

I retreated to the cool of the Prado.

Goya’s ‘Shootings of the Third of May’

Covered a wall – the thrown-up arms

And spasm of the rebel, the helmeted

And knapsacked military, the efficient

Rake of the fusillade. In the next room

His nightmares, grafted to the palace wall –

Dark cyclones, hosting, breaking; Saturn

Jewelled in the blood of his own children,

Gigantic Chaos turning his brute hips

Over the world. Also, that holmgang

Where two berserks club each other to death

For honour’s sake, greaved in a bog, and sinking.

   

 

He painted with his fists and elbows, flourished

The stained cape of his heart as history charged.

‘Description is revelation!’ Royal

Avenue, Belfast, 1962,

A Saturday afternoon, glad to meet

Me, newly cubbed in language, he gripped

My elbow. ‘Listen. Go your own way.

Do your own work. Remember

Katherine Mansfield –
I will tell

How the laundry basket squeaked
… that note of exile.’

But to hell with overstating it:

‘Don’t have the veins bulging in your biro.’

And then, ‘Poor Hopkins!’ I have the
Journals

He gave me, underlined, his buckled self

Obeisant to their pain. He discerned

The lineaments of patience everywhere

And fostered me and sent me out, with words

Imposing on my tongue like obols.

It is December in Wicklow:

Alders dripping, birches

Inheriting the last light,

The ash tree cold to look at.

   

 

A comet that was lost

Should be visible at sunset,

Those million tons of light

Like a glimmer of haws and rose-hips,

   

 

And I sometimes see a falling star.

If I could come on meteorite!

Instead I walk through damp leaves,

Husks, the spent flukes of autumn,

   

 

Imagining a hero

On some muddy compound,

His gift like a slingstone

Whirled for the desperate.

   

 

How did I end up like this?

I often think of my friends’

Beautiful prismatic counselling

And the anvil brains of some who hate me

   

 

As I sit weighing and weighing

My responsible
tristia
.

For what? For the ear? For the people?

For what is said behind-backs?

   

 

Rain comes down through the alders,

Its low conducive voices

Mutter about let-downs and erosions

And yet each drop recalls

   

 

The diamond absolutes.

I am neither internee nor informer;

An inner émigré, grown long-haired

And thoughtful; a wood-kerne

   

 

Escaped from the massacre,

Taking protective colouring

From bole and bark, feeling

Every wind that blows;

   

 

Who, blowing up these sparks

For their meagre heat, have missed

The once-in-a-lifetime portent,

The comet’s pulsing rose.

Our shells clacked on the plates.

My tongue was a filling estuary,

My palate hung with starlight:

As I tasted the salty Pleiades

Orion dipped his foot into the water.

   

 

Alive and violated,

They lay on their beds of ice:

Bivalves: the split bulb

And philandering sigh of ocean.

Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered.

   

 

We had driven to that coast

Through flowers and limestone

And there we were, toasting friendship,

Laying down a perfect memory

In the cool of thatch and crockery.

   

 

Over the Alps, packed deep in hay and snow,

The Romans hauled their oysters south to Rome:

I saw damp panniers disgorge

The frond-lipped, brine-stung

Glut of privilege

   

 

And was angry that my trust could not repose

In the clear light, like poetry or freedom

Leaning in from sea. I ate the day

Deliberately, that its tang

Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.

I
After a Killing

 

There they were, as if our memory hatched them,

As if the unquiet founders walked again:

Two young men with rifles on the hill,

Profane and bracing as their instruments.

   

 

Who’s sorry for our trouble?

Who dreamt that we might dwell among ourselves

In rain and scoured light and wind-dried stones?

Basalt, blood, water, headstones, leeches.

   

 

In that neuter original loneliness

From Brandon to Dunseverick

I think of small-eyed survivor flowers,

The pined-for, unmolested orchid.

   

 

I see a stone house by a pier.

Elbow room. Broad window light.

The heart lifts. You walk twenty yards

To the boats and buy mackerel.

   

 

And today a girl walks in home to us

Carrying a basket full of new potatoes,

Three tight green cabbages, and carrots

With the tops and mould still fresh on them.

II
Sibyl

 

My tongue moved, a swung relaxing hinge.

I said to her, ‘What will become of us?’

And as forgotten water in a well might shake

At an explosion under morning

   

 

Or a crack run up a gable,

She began to speak.

‘I think our very form is bound to change.

Dogs in a siege. Saurian relapses. Pismires.

   

 

Unless forgiveness finds its nerve and voice,

Unless the helmeted and bleeding tree

Can green and open buds like infants’ fists

And the fouled magma incubate

   

 

Bright nymphs … My people think money

And talk weather. Oil-rigs lull their future

On single acquisitive stems. Silence

Has shoaled into the trawlers’ echo-sounders.

   

 

The ground we kept our ear to for so long

Is flayed or calloused, and its entrails

Tented by an impious augury.

Our island is full of comfortless noises.’