flew over morning hush
and water-blistered cornfields,
an escaped ringing
that stopped as quickly
as it started. Sunday,
the silence breathed
and could not settle back
for a man had appeared
at the side of the field
with a bow-saw, held
stiffly up like a lyre.
He moved and stopped to gaze
up into hazel bushes,
angled his saw in,
pulled back to gaze again
and move on to the next.
‘I know you, Simon Sweeney,
for an old Sabbath-breaker
who has been dead for years.’
‘Damn all you know,’ he said,
his eye still on the hedge
and not turning his head.
‘I was your mystery man
and am again this morning.
Through gaps in the bushes,
your First Communion face
would watch me cutting timber.
When cut or broken limbs
of trees went yellow, when
woodsmoke sharpened air
or ditches rustled
you sensed my trail there
as if it had been sprayed.
It left you half afraid.
When they bade you listen
in the bedroom dark
to wind and rain in the trees
and think of tinkers camped
under a heeled-up cart
you shut your eyes and saw
a wet axle and spokes
in moonlight, and me
streaming from the shower,
headed for your door.’
Sunlight broke in the hazels,
the quick bell-notes began
a second time. I turned
at another sound:
a crowd of shawled women
were wading the young corn,
their skirts brushing softly.
Their motion saddened morning.
It whispered to the silence,
‘Pray for us, pray for us,’
it conjured through the air
until the field was full
of half-remembered faces,
a loosed congregation
that straggled past and on.
As I drew behind them
I was a fasted pilgrim,
light-headed, leaving home
to face into my station.
‘Stay clear of all processions!’
Sweeney shouted at me
but the murmur of the crowd
and their feet slushing through
the tender, bladed growth
had opened a drugged path
I was set upon.
I trailed those early-risers
fallen into step
before the smokes were up.
The quick bell rang again.
II
I was parked on a high road, listening
to peewits and wind blowing round the car
when something came to life in the driving mirror,
someone walking fast in an overcoat
and boots, bareheaded, big, determined
in his sure haste along the crown of the road
so that I felt myself the challenged one.
The car door slammed. I was suddenly out
face to face with an aggravated man
raving on about nights spent listening for
gun butts to come cracking on the door,
yeomen on the rampage, and his neighbour
among them, hammering home the shape of things.
‘Round about here you overtook the women,’
I said, as the thing came clear. ‘Your Lough Derg Pilgrim
haunts me every time I cross this mountain –
as if I am being followed, or following.
I’m on my road there now to do the station.’
‘O holy Jesus Christ, does nothing change?’
His head jerked sharply side to side and up
like a diver’s surfacing,
then with a look that said, who is this cub
anyhow, he took cognizance again
of where he was: the road, the mountain top,
and the air, softened by a shower of rain,
worked on his anger visibly until:
‘It is a road you travel on your own.
I who learned to read in the reek of flax
and smelled hanged bodies rotting on their gibbets
and saw their looped slime gleaming from the sacks –
hard-mouthed Ribbonmen and Orange bigots
made me into the old fork-tongued turncoat
who mucked the byre of their politics.
If times were hard, I could be hard too.
I made the traitor in me sink the knife.
And maybe there’s a lesson there for you,
whoever you are, wherever you come out of,
for though there’s something natural in your smile
there’s something in it strikes me as defensive.’
‘The angry role was never my vocation,’
I said. ‘I come from County Derry,
where the last marching bands of Ribbonmen
on Patrick’s Day still played their Hymn to Mary.
Obedient strains like theirs tuned me first
and not that harp of unforgiving iron
the Fenians strung. A lot of what you wrote
I heard and did: this Lough Derg station,
flax-pullings, dances, fair-days, crossroads chat
and the shaky local voice of education.
All that. And always, Orange drums.
And neighbours on the roads at night with guns.’
‘I know, I know, I know, I know,’ he said,
‘but you have to try to make sense of what comes.
Remember everything and keep your head.’
‘The alders in the hedge,’ I said, ‘mushrooms,
dark-clumped grass where cows or horses dunged,
the cluck when pith-lined chestnut shells split open
in your hand, the melt of shells corrupting,
old jampots in a drain clogged up with mud – ’
But now Carleton was interrupting:
‘All this is like a trout kept in a spring
or maggots sown in wounds –
another life that cleans our element.
We are earthworms of the earth, and all that
has gone through us is what will be our trace.’
He turned on his heel when he was saying this
and headed up the road at the same hard pace.
III
I knelt. Hiatus. Habit’s afterlife …
I was back among bead clicks and the murmurs
where candles died insinuating slight
intimate smells of wax at body heat.
There was an active, wind-stilled hush, as if
in a shell the listened-for ocean stopped
and a tide rested and sustained the roof.
A seaside trinket floated then and idled
in vision, like phosphorescent weed,
a toy grotto with seedling mussel shells
and cockles glued in patterns over it,
pearls condensed from a child invalid’s breath
into a shimmering ark, my house of gold
that housed the snowdrop weather of her death
long ago. I would stow away in the hold
of our big oak sideboard and forage for it
laid past in its tissue paper for good.
It was like touching birds’ eggs, robbing the nest
of the word wreath, as kept and dry and secret
as her name which they hardly ever spoke
but was a white bird trapped inside me
beating scared wings when Health of the Sick
fluttered its pray for us in the litany.
A cold draught blew under the kneeling boards.
I thought of walking round
and round a space utterly empty,
utterly a source, like the idea of sound
or like the absence sensed in swamp-fed air
above a ring of walked-down grass and rushes
where we once found the bad carcass and scrags of hair
of our dog that had disappeared weeks before.
IV
Blurred swimmings as I faced the sun, my back
to the stone pillar and the iron cross,
ready to say the dream words I renounce …
Blurred oval prints of newly ordained faces,
‘Father’ pronounced with a fawning relish,
the sunlit tears of parents being blessed.
I saw a young priest, glossy as a blackbird,
as if he had stepped from his anointing
a moment ago: his purple stole and cord
or cincture tied loosely, his polished shoes
unexpectedly secular beneath
a pleated, lace-hemmed alb of linen cloth.
His name had lain undisturbed for years
like an old bicycle wheel in a ditch
ripped at last from under jungling briars,
wet and perished. My arms were open wide
but I could not say the words. ‘The rain forest,’ he said,
‘you’ve never seen the like of it. I lasted
only a couple of years. Bare-breasted
women and rat-ribbed men. Everything wasted.
I rotted like a pear. I sweated masses …’
His breath came short and shorter. ‘In long houses
I raised the chalice above headdresses.
In hoc signo … On that abandoned
mission compound, my vocation
is a steam off drenched creepers.’
I had broken off from the renunciation
while he was speaking, to clear the way
for other pilgrims queueing to get started.
‘I’m older now than you when you went away,’
I ventured, feeling a strange reversal.
‘I never could see you on the foreign missions.
I could only see you on a bicycle,
a clerical student home for the summer
doomed to the decent thing. Visiting neighbours.
Drinking tea and praising home-made bread.
Something in them would be ratified
when they saw you at the door in your black suit,
arriving like some sort of holy mascot.
You gave too much relief, you raised a siege
the world had laid against their kitchen grottoes
‘And you,’ he faltered, ‘what are you doing here
but the same thing? What possessed you?
I at least was young and unaware
that what I thought was chosen was convention.
But all this you were clear of you walked into
over again. And the god has, as they say, withdrawn.
What are you doing, going through these motions?
Unless … Unless …’ Again he was short of breath
and his whole fevered body yellowed and shook.
‘Unless you are here taking the last look.’
Then where he stood was empty as the roads
we both grew up beside, where the sick man
had taken his last look one drizzly evening
when the tarmac steamed with first breath of spring,
a knee-deep mist I waded silently
behind him, on his circuits, visiting.
V
An old man’s hands, like soft paws rowing forward,
groped for and warded off the air ahead.
Barney Murphy shuffled on the concrete.
Master Murphy. I heard the weakened voice
bulling in sudden rage all over again
and fell in behind, my eyes fixed on his heels
like a man lifting swathes at a mower’s heels.
His sockless feet were like the dried broad bean
that split its stitches in the display jar
high on a window in the old classroom,
white as shy faces in the classroom door.
‘Master,’ those elders whispered, ‘I wonder, master …’,
rustling envelopes, proffering them, withdrawing,
waiting for him to sign beside their mark,
and ‘Master’ I repeated to myself
so that he stopped but did not turn or move,
gone quiet in the shoulders, his small head
vigilant in the cold gusts off the lough.
I moved ahead and faced him, shook his hand.
Above the winged collar, his mottled face
went distant in a smile as the voice
readied itself and husked and scraped, ‘Good man,
good man yourself,’ before it lapsed again
in the limbo and dry urn of the larynx.
The adam’s apple in its weathered sac
worked like the plunger of a pump in drought
but yielded nothing to help the helpless smile.
Morning field smells came past on the wind,
the sex-cut of sweetbriar after rain,
new-mown meadow hay, bird’s nests filled with leaves.
‘You’d have thought that Anahorish School
was purgatory enough for any man,’
I said. ‘You have done your station.’
Then a little trembling happened and his breath
rushed the air softly as scythes in his lost meadows.
‘Birch trees have overgrown Leitrim Moss,
dairy herds are grazing where the school was
and the school garden’s loose black mould is grass.’
He was gone with that and I was faced wrong way
into more pilgrims absorbed in this exercise.
As I stood among their whispers and bare feet
the mists of all the mornings I set out
for Latin classes with him, face to face,
refreshed me. Mensa, mensa, mensam
sang on the air like a busy sharping-stone.
‘We’ll go some day to my uncle’s farm at Toome – ’
Another master spoke. ‘For what is the great
moving power and spring of verse? Feeling, and
in particular, love. When I went last year
I drank three cups of water from the well.
It was very cold. It stung me in the ears.
You should have met him – ’ Coming in as usual