To end up in a draughty lamplit station
After the trains have gone, the wet track
Bared and tensed as I am, all attention
For your step following and damned if I look back.
Sloe Gin
The clear weather of juniper
darkened into winter.
She fed gin to sloes
and sealed the glass container.
When I unscrewed it
I smelled the disturbed
tart stillness of a bush
rising through the pantry.
When I poured it
it had a cutting edge
and flamed
like Betelgeuse.
I drink to you
in smoke-mirled, blue-
black sloes, bitter
and dependable.
Chekhov on Sakhalin
for Derek Mahon
So, he would pay his ‘debt to medicine’.
But first he drank cognac by the ocean
With his back to all he had travelled there to face.
His head was swimming free as the troikas
Of Tyumen, he looked down from the rail
Of his thirty years and saw a mile
Into himself as if he were clear water:
Lake Baikal from the deckrail of the steamer.
So far away, Moscow was like lost youth.
And who was he, to savour in his mouth
Fine spirits that the puzzled literati
Packed off with him to a penal colony –
Him, born, you may say, under the counter?
At least that meant he knew its worth. No cantor
In full throat by the iconostasis
Got holier joy than he got from that glass
That shone and warmed like diamonds warming
On some pert young cleavage in a salon,
Inviolable and affronting.
He felt the glass go cold in the midnight sun.
When he staggered up and smashed it on the stones
It rang as clearly as the convicts’ chains
That haunted him. All through the months to come
It rang on like the burden of his freedom
To try for the right tone – not tract, not thesis –
And walk away from floggings. He who thought to squeeze
His slave’s blood out and waken the free man
Shadowed a convict guide through Sakhalin.
Sandstone Keepsake
It is a kind of chalky russet
solidified gourd, sedimentary
and so reliably dense and bricky
I often clasp it and throw it from hand to hand.
It was ruddier, with an underwater
hint of contusion, when I lifted it,
wading a shingle beach on Inishowen.
Across the estuary light after light
came on silently round the perimeter
of the camp. A stone from Phlegethon,
bloodied on the bed of hell’s hot river?
Evening frost and the salt water
made my hand smoke, as if I’d plucked the heart
that damned Guy de Montfort to the boiling flood –
but not really, though I remembered
his victim’s heart in its casket, long venerated.
Anyhow, there I was with the wet red stone
in my hand, staring across at the watch-towers
from my free state of image and allusion,
swooped on, then dropped by trained binoculars:
a silhouette not worth bothering about,
out for the evening in scarf and waders
and not about to set times wrong or right,
stooping along, one of the venerators.
from Shelf Life
Granite Chip
Houndstooth stone. Aberdeen of the mind.
Saying An union in the cup I’ll throw
I have hurt my hand, pressing it hard around
this bit hammered off Joyce’s Martello
Tower, this flecked insoluble brilliant
I keep but feel little in common with –
a kind of stone-age circumcising knife,
a Calvin edge in my complaisant pith.
Granite is jaggy, salty, punitive
and exacting. Come to me, it says
all you who labour and are burdened, I
will not refresh you. And it adds, Seize
the day. And, You can take me or leave me.
Old Smoothing Iron
Often I watched her lift it
from where its compact wedge
rode the back of the stove
like a tug at anchor.
To test its heat she’d stare
and spit in its iron face
or hold it up next her cheek
to divine the stored danger.
Soft thumps on the ironing board.
Her dimpled angled elbow
and intent stoop
as she aimed the smoothing iron
like a plane into linen,
like the resentment of women.
To work, her dumb lunge says,
is to move a certain mass
through a certain distance,
is to pull your weight and feel
exact and equal to it.
Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.
Stone from Delphi
To be carried back to the shrine some dawn
when the sea spreads its far sun-crops to the south
and I make a morning offering again:
that I may escape the miasma of spilled blood,
govern the tongue, fear hybris, fear the god
until he speaks in my untrammelled mouth.
Making Strange
I stood between them,
the one with his travelled intelligence
and tawny containment,
his speech like the twang of a bowstring,
and another, unshorn and bewildered
in the tubs of his Wellingtons,
smiling at me for help,
faced with this stranger I’d brought him.
Then a cunning middle voice
came out of the field across the road
saying, ‘Be adept and be dialect,
tell of this wind coming past the zinc hut,
call me sweetbriar after the rain
or snowberries cooled in the fog.
But love the cut of this travelled one
and call me also the cornfield of Boaz.
Go beyond what’s reliable
in all that keeps pleading and pleading,
these eyes and puddles and stones,
and recollect how bold you were
when I visited you first
with departures you cannot go back on.’
A chaffinch flicked from an ash and next thing
I found myself driving the stranger
through my own country, adept
at dialect, reciting my pride
in all that I knew, that began to make strange
at that same recitation.
The Birthplace
I
The deal table where he wrote, so small and plain,
the single bed a dream of discipline.
And a flagged kitchen downstairs, its mote-slants
of thick light: the unperturbed, reliable
ghost life he carried, with no need to invent.
And high trees round the house, breathed upon
day and night by winds as slow as a cart
coming late from market, or the stir
a fiddle could make in his reluctant heart.
II
That day, we were like one
of his troubled couples, speechless
until he spoke for them,
haunters of silence at noon
in a deep lane that was sexual
with ferns and butterflies,
scared at our hurt,
throat-sick, heat-struck, driven
into the damp-floored wood
where we made an episode
of ourselves, unforgettable,
unmentionable,
and broke out again like cattle
through bushes, wet and raised,
only yards from the house.
III
Everywhere being nowhere,
who can prove
one place more than another?
We come back emptied,
to nourish and resist
the words of coming to rest:
birthplace, roofbeam, whitewash,
flagstone, hearth,
like unstacked iron weights
afloat among galaxies.
Still, was it thirty years ago
I read until first light
for the first time, to finish
The Return of the Native?
The corncrake in the aftergrass
verified himself, and I heard
roosters and dogs, the very same
as if he had written them.
Changes
As you came with me in silence
to the pump in the long grass
I heard much that you could not hear:
the bite of the spade that sank it,
the slithering and grumble
as the mason mixed his mortar,
and women coming with white buckets
like flashes on their ruffled wings.
The cast-iron rims of the lid
clinked as I uncovered it,
something stirred in its mouth.
I had a bird’s eye view of a bird,
finch-green, speckly white,
nesting on dry leaves, flattened, still,
suffering the light.
So I roofed the citadel
as gently as I could, and told you
and you gently unroofed it
but where was the bird now?
There was a single egg, pebbly white,
and in the rusted bend of the spout
tail feathers splayed and sat tight.
So tender, I said, ‘Remember this.
It will be good for you to retrace this path
when you have grown away and stand at last
at the very centre of the empty city.’
A Bat on the Road
A batlike soul waking to consciousness of itself in darkness and secrecy and loneliness.
You would hoist an old hat on the tines of a fork
and trawl the mouth of the bridge for the slight
bat-thump and flutter. Skinny downy webs,
babynails clawing the sweatband … But don’t
bring it down, don’t break its flight again,
don’t deny it; this time let it go free.
Follow its bat-flap under the stone bridge,
under the Midland and Scottish Railway
and lose it there in the dark.
Next thing it shadows moonslicked laurels
or skims the lapped net on a tennis court.
Next thing it’s ahead of you in the road.
What are you after? You keep swerving off,
flying blind over ashpits and netting wire;
invited by the brush of a word like peignoir,
rustles and glimpses, shot silk, the stealth of floods
So close to me I could hear her breathing
and there by the lighted window behind trees
it hangs in creepers matting the brickwork
and now it’s a wet leaf blowing in the drive,
now soft-deckled, shadow-convolvulus
by the White Gates. Who would have thought it? At the White Gates
She let them do whatever they liked. Cling there
as long as you want. There is nothing to hide.
A Hazel Stick for Catherine Ann
The living mother-of-pearl of a salmon
just out of the water
is gone just like that, but your stick
is kept salmon-silver.
Seasoned and bendy,
it convinces the hand
that what you have you hold
to play with and pose with
and lay about with.
But then too it points back to cattle
and spatter and beating
the bars of a gate –
the very stick we might cut
from your family tree.
The living cobalt of an afternoon
dragonfly drew my eye to it first
and the evening I trimmed it for you
you saw your first glow-worm –
all of us stood round in silence, even you
gigantic enough to darken the sky
for a glow-worm.
And when I poked open the grass
a tiny brightening den lit the eye
in the blunt pared end of your stick.
A Kite for Michael and Christopher
All through that Sunday afternoon
a tightened drumhead, a flitter of blown chaff.
I’d seen it grey and slippy in the making,
I’d tapped it when it dried out white and stiff,
I’d tied the bows of newspaper
along its six-foot tail.
But now it was far up like a small black lark
and now it dragged as if the bellied string
were a wet rope hauled upon
to lift a shoal.
My friend says that the human soul
is about the weight of a snipe,
yet the soul at anchor there,
the string that sags and ascends,
weighs like a furrow assumed into the heavens.
Before the kite plunges down into the wood
and this line goes useless
take in your two hands, boys, and feel
the strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief.
You were born fit for it.
Stand in here in front of me
and take the strain.
The Railway Children
When we climbed the slopes of the cutting
We were eye-level with the white cups
Of the telegraph poles and the sizzling wires.
Like lovely freehand they curved for miles
East and miles west beyond us, sagging
Under their burden of swallows.
We were small and thought we knew nothing
Worth knowing. We thought words travelled the wires
In the shiny pouches of raindrops,
Each one seeded full with the light
Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves
So infinitesimally scaled
We could stream through the eye of a needle.
Widgeon
for Paul Muldoon
It had been badly shot.
While he was plucking it
he found, he says, the voice box –
like a flute stop
in the broken windpipe –
and blew upon it
unexpectedly
his own small widgeon cries.
Sheelagh na Gig
at Kilpeck
I
We look up at her
hunkered into her angle
under the eaves.
She bears the whole stone burden
on the small of her back and shoulders
and pinioned elbows,
the astute mouth, the gripping fingers
saying push, push hard,
push harder.
As the hips go high
her big tadpole forehead
is rounded out in sunlight.
And here beside her are two birds,
a rabbit’s head, a ram’s,
a mouth devouring heads.
II
Her hands holding herself
are like hands in an old barn
holding a bag open.
I was outside looking in
at its lapped and supple mouth
running grain.
I looked up under the thatch
at the dark mouth and eye
of a bird’s nest or a rat hole,
smelling the rose on the wall,
mildew, an earthen floor,
the warm depth of the eaves.
And then one night in the yard
I stood still under heavy rain
wearing the bag like a caul.
III
We look up to her,
her ring-fort eyes,
her little slippy shoulders,
her nose incised and flat,
and feel light-headed looking up.
She is twig-boned, saddle-sexed,
grown-up, grown ordinary,
seeming to say,