North
Acknowledgements
The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the American Irish Foundation during 1973/4 when he was recipient of their annual Literary Award.
Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following where some of these poems appeared for the first time: Antaeus, The Arts in Ireland, Causeway (BBC Radio 3), Encounter, Exile, Hibernia, The Irish Press, The Irish Times, Irish University Review, James Joyce Quarterly, The Listener, The New Review, Phoenix, The Times Literary Supplement; and to the editors of the following anthologies: The Faber Book of Irish Verse, New Poems 1972–1973 and New Poems 1973–1974 (Hutchinson), and Soundings ’72 (Blackstaff, Belfast).
Eight of the poems appeared in a limited edition entitled Bog Poems (Rainbow Press).
Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication
for Mary Heaney
I. SUNLIGHT
There was a sunlit absence.
The helmeted pump in the yard
heated its iron,
water honeyed
in the slung bucket
and the sun stood
like a griddle cooling
against the wall
of each long afternoon.
So, her hands scuffled
over the bakeboard,
the reddening stove
sent its plaque of heat
against her where she stood
in a floury apron
by the window.
Now she dusts the board
with a goose’s wing,
now sits, broad-lapped,
with whitened nails
and measling shins:
here is a space
again, the scone rising
to the tick of two clocks.
And here is love
like a tinsmith’s scoop
sunk past its gleam
in the meal-bin.
2. THE SEED CUTTERS
They seem hundreds of years away. Breughel,
You’ll know them if I can get them true.
They kneel under the hedge in a half-circle
Behind a windbreak wind is breaking through.
They are the seed cutters. The tuck and frill
Of leaf-sprout is on the seed .potatoes
Buried under that straw. With time to kill,
They are taking their time. Each sharp knife goes
Lazily halving each root that falls apart
In the palm of the hand: a milky gleam,
And, at the centre, a dark watermark.
Oh, calendar customs! Under the broom
Yellowing over them, compose the frieze
With all of us there, our anonymities.
PART I
Antaeus
When I lie on the ground
I rise flushed as a rose in the morning.
In fights I arrange a fall on the ring
To rub myself with sand
That is operative
As an elixir. I cannot be weaned
Off the earth's long contour, her river-veins.
Down here in my cave,
Girded with root and rock,
I am cradled in the dark that wombed me
And nurtured in every artery
Like a small hillock.
Let each new hero come
Seeking the golden apples and Atlas.
He must wrestle with me before he pass
Into that realm of fame
Among sky-born and royal:
He may well throw me and renew my birth
But let him not plan, lifting me off the earth,
My elevation, my fall.
1966
Belderg
'They just kept turning up
And were thought of as foreign'---
One-eyed and benign
They lie about his house,
Quernstones out of a bog.
To lift the lid of the peat
And find this pupil dreaming
Of neolithic wheat!
When he stripped off blanket bog
The soft-piled centuries
Fell open like a glib:
There were the first plough-marks,
The stone-age fields, the tomb
Corbelled, turfed and chambered,
Floored with dry turf-coomb.
A landscape fossilized,
Its stone-wall patternings
Repeated before our eyes
In the stone walls of Mayo.
Before I turned to go
He talked about persistence,
A congruence of lives,
How, stubbed and cleared of stones,
His home accrued growth rings
Of iron, flint and bronze.
So I talked of Mossbawn,
A bogland name. 'But moss?'
He crossed my old home's music
With older strains of Norse.
I'd told how its foundation
Was mutable as sound
And how I could derive
A forked root from that ground
And make bawn an English fort,
A planter's walled-in mound,
Or else find sanctuary
And think of it as Irish,
Persistent if outworn.
'But the Norse ring on your tree?'
I passed through the eye of the quern,
Grist to an ancient mill,
And in my mind's eye saw
A world-tree of balanced stones,
Querns piled like vertebrae,
The marrow crushed to grounds.
Funeral Rites
I
I shouldered a kind of manhood,
stepping in to lift the coffins
of dead relations.
They had been laid out
in tainted rooms,
their eyelids glistening,
their dough-white hands
shackled in rosary beads.
Their puffed knuckles
had unwrinkled, the nails
were darkened, the wrists
obediently sloped.
The dulse-brown shroud,
the quilted satin cribs:
I knelt courteously,
admiring it all,
as wax melted down
and veined the candles,
the flames hovering
to the women hovering
behind me.
And always, in a corner,
the coffin lid,
its nail-heads dressed
with little gleaming crosses.
Dear soapstone masks,
kissing their igloo brows
had to suffice
before the nails were sunk
and the black glacier
of each funeral
pushed away.
II
Now as news comes in
of each neighbourly murder
we pine for ceremony,
customary rhythms:
the temperate footsteps
of a cortège, winding past
each blinded home.
I would restore
the great chambers of Boyne,
prepare a sepulchre
under the cupmarked stones.
Out of side-streets and bye-roads
purring family cars
nose into line,
the whole country tunes
to the muffled drumming
of ten thousand engines.
Somnambulant women,
left behind, move
through emptied kitchens
imagining our slow triumph
towards the mounds.
Quiet as a serpent
in its grassy boulevard,
the procession drags its tail
out of the Gap of the North
as it
s head already enters
the megalithic doorway.
III
When they have put the stone
back in its mouth
we will drive north again
past Strang and Carling fjords,
the cud of memory
allayed for once, arbitration
of the feud placated,
imagining those under the hill
disposed like Gunnar
who lay beautiful
inside his burial mound,
though dead by violence
and unavenged.
Men said that he was chanting
verses about honour
and that four lights burned
in corners of the chamber:
which opened then, as he turned
with a joyful face
to look at the moon.
North
I returned to a long strand,
the hammered shod of a bay,
and found only the secular
powers of the Atlantic thundering.
I faced the unmagical
invitations of Iceland,
of Greenland, and suddenly
those fabulous raiders,
those lying in Orkney and Dublin
measured against
their long swords rusting,
those in the solid
belly of stone ships,
those hacked and glinting
in the gravel of thawed streams
were ocean-deafened voices
warning me, lifted again
in violence and epiphany.
The longship's swimming tongue
was buoyant with hindsight---
it said Thor's hammer swung
to geography and trade,
thick-witted couplings and revenges,
the hatreds and behindbacks
of the althing, lies and women,
exhaustions nominated peace,
memory incubating the spilled blood.
It said, 'Lie down
in the word-hoard, burrow
the coil and gleam
of your furrowed brain.
Compose in darkness.
Expect aurora borealis
in the long foray
but no cascade of light.
Keep your eye clear
as the bleb of the icicle,
trust the feel of what nubbed treasure
your hands have known.'
Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces
I
It could be a jaw-bone
or a rib or a portion cut
from something sturdier:
anyhow, a small outline
was incised, a cage
or trellis to conjure in.
Like a child's tongue
following the toils
of his calligraphy,
like an eel swallowed
in a basket of eels,
the line amazes itself,
eluding the hand
that fed it,
a bill in flight,
a swimming nostril.
II
These are trial pieces,
the craft's mystery
improvised on bone:
foliage, bestiaries,
interlacings elaborate
as the netted routes
of ancestry and trade.
That have to be
magnified on display
so that the nostril
is a migrant prow
sniffing the Liffey,
swanning it up to the ford,
dissembling itself
in antler combs, bone pins,
coins, weights, scale-pans.
III
Like a long sword
sheathed in its moisting
burial clays,
the keel stuck fast
in the slip of the bank,
its clinker-built hull
spined and plosive
as Dublin.
And now we reach in
for shards of the vertebrae,
the ribs of hurdle,
the mother-wet caches---
and for this trial piece
incised by a child,
a longship, a buoyant
migrant line.
IV
That enters my longhand,
turns cursive, unscarfing
a zoomorphic wake,
a worm of thought
I follow into the mud.
I am Hamlet the Dane,
skull-handler, parablist,
smeller of rot
in the state, infused
with its poisons,
pinioned by ghosts
and affections,
murders and pieties,
coming to consciousness
by jumping in graves,
dithering, blathering.
V
Come fly with me,
come sniff the wind
of the Vikings---
neighbourly, scoretaking
killers, haggers
and hagglers, gombeen-men,
hoarders of grudges and gain.
With a butcher's aplomb
they spread out your lungs
and made you warm wings
for your shoulders.
Old fathers, be with us.
Old cunning assessors
of feuds and of sites
for ambush or town.
VI
'Did you ever hear tell,'
said Jimmy Farrell,
'of the skulls they have
in the city of Dublin?
White skulls and black skulls
and yellow skulls, and some
with full teeth, and some
haven't only but one,'
and compounded history
in the pan of 'an old Dane,
maybe, was drowned
in the Flood.'
My words lick around
cobbled quays, go hunting
lightly as pampooties
over the skull-capped ground.
The Digging Skeleton
After Baudelaire
I
You find anatomical plates
Buried along these dusty quays
Among books yellowed like mummies
Slumbering in forgotten crates,
Drawings touched with an odd beauty
As if the illustrator had
Responded gravely to the sad
Mementoes of anatomy---
Mysterious candid studies
Of red slobland around the bones.
Like this one: flayed men and skeletons
Digging the earth like navvies.
II
Sad gang of apparitions,
Your skinned muscles like plaited sedge
And your spines hooped towards the sunk edge
Of the spade, my patient ones,
Tell me, as you labour hard
To break this unrelenting soil,
What barns are there for you to fill?
What farmer dragged you from the boneyard?
Or are you emblems of the truth,
Death's lifers, hauled from the narrow cell
And stripped of night-shirt shrouds, to tell:
'This is the reward of faith
In rest eternal. Even death
Lies. The void deceives.
We do not fall like autumn leaves
To sleep in peace. Some traitor breath
Revives our clay, sends us abroad
And by the sweat of our stripped brows
We earn our deaths; our one repose
When the bleeding instep finds its spade.'
Bone Dreams
I
White bone found
on the grazing:
the rough, porous
language of touch
and its yellowing, ribbed
impression in the grass---
a small ship-burial.
As dead as stone,
flint-find, nugget
of chalk,
I touch it again,
I wind it in
the sling of mind
to pitch it at England
and follow its drop
to strange fields.
II
Bone-house:
a skeleton
in the tongue's
old dungeons.
I push back
through dictions,
Elizabethan canopies.
Norman devices,
the erotic mayflowers
of Provence
and the ivied latins
of churchmen
to the scop's
twang, the iron
flash of consonants
cleaving the line.
III