I knew that same dead weight in joint and sinew
Until a spade-plate slid and soughed and plied
At my buried ear, and the levered sod
Got lifted up; then once I felt the air
I was like turned turf in the breath of God,
Bog-bodied on the sixth day, brown and bare,
And on the last, all told, unatrophied.
*
My heavy head. Bronze-buffed. Ear to the ground.
My eye at turf level. Its snailskin lid.
My cushioned cheek and brow. My phantom hand
And arm and leg and shoulder that felt pillowed
As fleshily as when the bog pith weighed
To mould me to itself and it to me
Between when I was buried and unburied.
Between what happened and was meant to be.
On show for years while all that lay in wait
Still waited. Disembodied. Far renowned.
Faith placed in me, me faithless as a stone
The harrow turned up when the crop was sown.
Out in the Danish night I’d hear soft wind
And remember moony water in a rut.
*
‘The soul exceeds its circumstances.’ Yes.
History not to be granted the last word
Or the first claim … In the end I gathered
From the display-case peat my staying powers,
Told my webbed wrists to be like silver birches,
My old uncallused hands to be young sward,
The spade-cut skin to heal, and got restored
By telling myself this. Late as it was,
The early bird still sang, the meadow hay
Still buttercupped and daisied, sky was new.
I smelled the air, exhaust fumes, silage reek,
Heard from my heather bed the thickened traffic
Swarm at a roundabout five fields away
And transatlantic flights stacked in the blue.
*
Cattle out in rain, their knowledgeable
Solid standing and readiness to wait,
These I learned from. My study was the wet,
My head as washy as a head of kale,
Shedding water like the flanks and tail
Of every dumb beast sunk above the cloot
In trampled gaps, bringing their heavyweight
Silence to bear on nosed-at sludge and puddle.
Of another world, unlearnable, and so
To be lived by, whatever it was I knew
Came back to me. Newfound contrariness.
In check-out lines, at cash-points, in those queues
Of wired, far-faced smilers, I stood off,
Bulrush, head in air, far from its lough.
*
Through every check and scan I carried with me
A bunch of Tollund rushes – roots and all –
Bagged in their own bog-damp. In an old stairwell
Broom cupboard where I had hoped they’d stay
Damp until transplanted, they went musty.
Every green-skinned stalk turned friable,
The drowned-mouse fibres withered and the whole
Limp, soggy cluster lost its frank bouquet
Of weed leaf and turf mould. Dust in my palm
And in my nostrils dust, should I shake it off
Or mix it in with spit in pollen’s name
And my own? As a man would, cutting turf,
I straightened, spat on my hands, felt benefit
And spirited myself into the street.
Planting the Alder
For the bark, dulled argent, roundly wrapped
And pigeon-collared.
For the splitter-splatter, guttering
Rain-flirt leaves.
For the snub and clot of the first green cones,
Smelted emerald, chlorophyll.
For the scut and scat of cones in winter,
So rattle-skinned, so fossil-brittle.
For the alder-wood, flame-red when torn
Branch from branch.
But mostly for the swinging locks
Of yellow catkins,
Plant it, plant it,
Streel-head in the rain.
Tate’s Avenue
Not the brown and fawn car rug, that first one
Spread on sand by the sea but breathing land-breaths,
Its vestal folds unfolded, its comfort zone
Edged with a fringe of sepia-coloured wool tails.
Not the one scraggy with crusts and eggshells
And olive stones and cheese and salami rinds
Laid out by the torrents of the Guadalquivir
Where we got drunk before the corrida.
Instead, again, it’s locked-park Sunday Belfast,
A walled back yard, the dust-bins high and silent
As a page is turned, a finger twirls warm hair
And nothing gives on the rug or the ground beneath it.
I lay at my length and felt the lumpy earth,
Keen-sensed more than ever through discomfort,
But never shifted off the plaid square once.
When we moved I had your measure and you had mine.
Fiddleheads
Fiddlehead ferns are a delicacy where? Japan? Estonia? Ireland long ago?
I say Japan because when I think of those delicious things I think of my friend Toraiwa, and the surprise I felt when he asked me about the erotic. He said it belonged in poetry and he wanted more of
So here they are, Toraiwa, frilled, infolded, tenderized, in a little steaming basket, just for you.
Quitting Time
The hosed-down chamfered concrete pleases him.
He’ll wait a while before he kills the light
On the cleaned-up yard, its pails and farrowing crate,
And the cast-iron pump immobile as a herm
Upstanding elsewhere, in another time.
More and more this last look at the wet
Shine of the place is what means most to him –
And to repeat the phrase, ‘My head is light’,
Because it often is as he reaches back
And switches off, a home-based man at home
In the end with little. Except this same
Night after nightness, redding up the work,
The song of a tubular steel gate in the dark
As he pulls it to and starts his uphill trek.
The Blackbird of Glanmore
On the grass when I arrive,
Filling the stillness with life,
But ready to scare off
At the very first wrong move.
In the ivy when I leave.
It’s you, blackbird, I love.
I park, pause, take heed.
Breathe. Just breathe and sit
And lines I once translated
Come back: ‘I want away
To the house of death, to my father
Under the low clay roof.’
And I think of one gone to him,
A little stillness dancer –
Haunter-son, lost brother –
Cavorting through the yard,
So glad to see me home,
My homesick first term over.
And think of a neighbour’s words
Long after the accident:
‘Yon bird on the shed roof,
Up on the ridge for weeks –
I said nothing at the time
But I never liked yon bird.’
The automatic lock
Clunks shut, the blackbird’s panic
Is shortlived, for a second
I’ve a bird’s eye view of myself,
A shadow on raked gravel
In front of my house of life.
Hedge-hop, I am absolute
For you, your ready talkback,
Your each stand-offish comeback,
Your picky, nervy goldbeak –
On the grass when I arrive,
In the
ivy when I leave.
‘Had I not been awake’
Had I not been awake I would have missed it,
A wind that rose and whirled until the roof
Pattered with quick leaves off the sycamore
And got me up, the whole of me a-patter,
Alive and ticking like an electric fence:
Had I not been awake I would have missed it,
It came and went so unexpectedly
And almost it seemed dangerously,
Returning like an animal to the house,
A courier blast that there and then
Lapsed ordinary. But not ever
After. And not now.
Album
I
Now the oil-fired heating boiler comes to life
Abruptly, drowsily, like the timed collapse
Of a sawn down tree, I imagine them
In summer season, as it must have been,
And the place, it dawns on me,
Could have been Grove Hill before the oaks were cut,
Where I’d often stand with them on airy Sundays
Shin-deep in hilltop bluebells, looking out
At Magherafelt’s four spires in the distance.
Too late, alas, now for the apt quotation
About a love that’s proved by steady gazing
Not at each other but in the same direction.
II
Quercus, the oak. And Quaerite, Seek ye.
Among green leaves and acorns in mosaic
(Our college arms surmounted by columba,
Dove of the church, of Derry’s sainted grove)
The footworn motto stayed indelible:
Seek ye first the Kingdom … Fair and square
I stood on in the Junior House hallway
A grey eye will look back
Seeing them as a couple, I now see,
For the first time, all the more together
For having had to turn and walk away, as close
In the leaving (or closer) as in the getting.
III
It’s winter at the seaside where they’ve gone
For the wedding meal. And I am at the table,
Uninvited, ineluctable.
A skirl of gulls. A smell of cooking fish.
Plump dormant silver. Stranded silence. Tears.
Their bibbed waitress unlids a clinking dish
And leaves them to it, under chandeliers.
And to all the anniversaries of this
They are not ever going to observe
Or mention even in the years to come.
And now the man who drove them here will drive
Them back, and by evening we’ll be home.
IV
Were I to have embraced him anywhere
It would have been on the riverbank
That summer before college, him in his prime,
Me at the time not thinking how he must
Keep coming with me because I’d soon be leaving.
That should have been the first, but it didn’t happen.
The second did, at New Ferry one night
When he was very drunk and needed help
To do up trouser buttons. And the third
Was on the landing during his last week,
Helping him to the bathroom, my right arm
Taking the webby weight of his underarm.
V
It took a grandson to do it properly,
To rush him in the armchair
With a snatch raid on his neck,
Proving him thus vulnerable to delight,
Coming as great proofs often come
Of a sudden, one-off, then the steady dawning
Of whatever erat demonstrandum.
Just as a moment back a son’s three tries
At an embrace in Elysium
Swam up into my very arms, and in and out
Of the Latin stem itself, the phantom
Verus that has slipped from ‘very’.
The Conway Stewart
‘Medium’, 14-carat nib,
Three gold bands in the clip-on screw-top,
In the mottled barrel a spatulate, thin
Pump-action lever
The shopkeeper
Demonstrated,
The nib uncapped,
Treating it to its first deep snorkel
In a newly opened ink-bottle,
Guttery, snottery,
Letting it rest then at an angle
To ingest,
Giving us time
To look together and away
From our parting, due that evening,
To my longhand
‘Dear’
To them, next day.
Uncoupled
I
Who is this coming to the ash-pit
Walking tall, as if in a procession,
Bearing in front of her a slender pan
Withdrawn just now from underneath
The firebox, weighty, full to the brim
With whitish dust and flakes still sparking hot
That the wind is blowing into her apron bib,
Unwavering, keeping her burden horizontal still,
Hands in a tight, sore grip round the metal knob,
Proceeds until we have lost sight of her
Where the worn path turns behind the henhouse.
II
Who is this, not much higher than the cattle,
Working his way towards me through the pen,
His ashplant in one hand
Lifted and pointing, a stick of keel
In the other, calling to where I’m perched
On top of a shaky gate,
Waving and calling something I cannot hear
With all the lowing and roaring, lorries revving
At the far end of the yard, the dealers
Shouting among themselves, and now to him
So that his eyes leave mine and I know
The pain of loss before I know the term.
The Butts
His suits hung in the wardrobe, broad
And short
And slightly bandy-sleeved,
Flattened back
Against themselves,
A bit stand-offish.
Stale smoke and oxter-sweat
Came at you in a stirred-up brew
When you reached in,
A whole rake of thornproof and blue serge
Swung heavily
Like waterweed disturbed. I sniffed
Tonic unfreshness,
Then delved past flap and lining
For the forbidden handfuls.
But a kind of empty-handedness
Transpired … Out of suit-cloth
Pressed against my face,
Out of those layered stuffs
That surged and gave,
Out of the cold smooth pocket-lining
Nothing but chaff cocoons,
A paperiness not known again
Until the last days came
And we must learn to reach well in beneath
Each meagre armpit
To lift and sponge him,
One on either side,
Feeling his lightness,
Having to dab and work
Closer than anybody liked
But having, for all that,
To keep working.
Chanson d’Aventure
Love’s mysteries in souls do grow,
But yet the body is his book.
I
Strapped on, wheeled out, forklifted, locked
In position for the drive,
Bone-shaken, bumped at speed,
The nurse a passenger in front, you ensconced
In her vacated corner seat, me flat on my back –
Our postures all the journey still the same,
Everything and nothing spoken,
Our eyebeams threaded laser-fast, no transport
Ever like it until then,
in the sunlit cold
Of a Sunday morning ambulance
When we might, O my love, have quoted Donne
On love on hold, body and soul apart.
II
Apart: the very word is like a bell
That the sexton Malachy Boyle outrolled
In illo tempore in Bellaghy
Or the one I tolled in Derry in my turn
As college bellman, the haul of it there still
In the heel of my once capable
Warm hand, hand that I could not feel you lift
And lag in yours throughout that journey
When it lay flop-heavy as a bellpull
And we careered at speed through Dungloe,
Glendoan, our gaze ecstatic and bisected
By a hooked-up drip-feed to the cannula.
III
The charioteer at Delphi holds his own,
His six horses and chariot gone,
His left hand lopped
From a wrist protruding like an open spout,