That rock where breakers shredded into rags,
The leggy birds stilted on their own legs,
Islands riding themselves out into the fog
And drive back home, still with nothing to say
Except that now you will uncode all landscapes
By this: things founded clean on their own shapes,
Water and ground in their extremity.
Requiem for the Croppies
The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley –
No kitchens on the run, no striking camp –
We moved quick and sudden in our own country.
The priest lay behind ditches with the tramp.
A people, hardly marching – on the hike –
We found new tactics happening each day:
We’d cut through reins and rider with the pike
And stampede cattle into infantry,
Then retreat through hedges where cavalry must be thrown.
Until, on Vinegar Hill, the fatal conclave.
Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.
The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.
They buried us without shroud or coffin
And in August the barley grew up out of the grave.
The Wife’s Tale
When I had spread it all on linen cloth
Under the hedge, I called them over.
The hum and gulp of the thresher ran down
And the big belt slewed to a standstill, straw
Hanging undelivered in the jaws.
There was such quiet that I heard their boots
Crunching the stubble twenty yards away.
He lay down and said ‘Give these fellows theirs,
I’m in no hurry,’ plucking grass in handfuls
And tossing it in the air. ‘That looks well.’
(He nodded at my white cloth on the grass.)
‘I declare a woman could lay out a field
Though boys like us have little call for cloths.’
He winked, then watched me as I poured a cup
And buttered the thick slices that he likes.
‘It’s threshing better than I thought, and mind
It’s good clean seed. Away over there and look.’
Always this inspection has to be made
Even when I don’t know what to look for.
But I ran my hand in the half-filled bags
Hooked to the slots. It was hard as shot,
Innumerable and cool. The bags gaped
Where the chutes ran back to the stilled drum
And forks were stuck at angles in the ground
As javelins might mark lost battlefields.
I moved between them back across the stubble.
They lay in the ring of their own crusts and dregs
Smoking and saying nothing. ‘There’s good yield,
Isn’t there?’ – as proud as if he were the land itself –
‘Enough for crushing and for sowing both.’
And that was it. I’d come and he had shown me
So I belonged no further to the work.
I gathered cups and folded up the cloth
And went. But they still kept their ease
Spread out, unbuttoned, grateful, under the trees.
Night Drive
The smells of ordinariness
Were new on the night drive through France:
Rain and hay and woods on the air
Made warm draughts in the open car.
Signposts whitened relentlessly.
Montreuil, Abbéville, Beauvais
Were promised, promised, came and went,
Each place granting its name’s fulfilment.
A combine groaning its way late
Bled seeds across its work-light.
A forest fire smouldered out.
One by one small cafés shut.
I thought of you continuously
A thousand miles south where Italy
Laid its loin to France on the darkened sphere.
Your ordinariness was renewed there.
Relic of Memory
The lough waters
Can petrify wood:
Old oars and posts
Over the years
Harden their grain,
Incarcerate ghosts
Of sap and season.
And give and take:
Constant ablutions,
Such drowning love
Stun a stake
To stalagmite.
Dead lava,
The cooling star,
Coal and diamond
Or sudden birth
Of burnt meteor
Are too simple,
Without the lure
That relic stored –
A piece of stone
On the shelf at school,
Oatmeal coloured.
Bogland
For T. P. Flanagan
We have no prairies
To slice a big sun at evening –
Everywhere the eye concedes to
Encroaching horizon,
Is wooed into the cyclops’ eye
Of a tarn. Our unfenced country
Is bog that keeps crusting
Between the sights of the sun.
They’ve taken the skeleton
Of the Great Irish Elk
Out of the peat, set it up
An astounding crate full of air.
Butter sunk under
More than a hundred years
Was recovered salty and white.
The ground itself is kind, black butter
Melting and opening underfoot,
Missing its last definition
By millions of years.
They’ll never dig coal here,
Only the waterlogged trunks
Of great firs, soft as pulp.
Our pioneers keep striking
Inwards and downwards,
Every layer they strip
Seems camped on before.
The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.
The wet centre is bottomless.
Bog Oak
A carter’s trophy
split for rafters,
a cobwebbed, black,
long-seasoned rib
under the first thatch.
I might tarry
with the moustached
dead, the creel-fillers,
or eavesdrop on
their hopeless wisdom
as a blow-down of smoke
struggles over the half-door
and mizzling rain
blurs the far end
of the cart track.
The softening ruts
lead back to no
‘oak groves’, no
cutters of mistletoe
in the green clearings.
Perhaps I just make out
Edmund Spenser,
dreaming sunlight,
encroached upon by
geniuses who creep
‘out of every corner
of the woodes and glennes’
towards watercress and carrion.
Anahorish
My ‘place of clear water’,
the first hill in the world
where springs washed into
the shiny grass
and darkened cobbles
in the bed of the lane.
of consonant, vowel-meadow,
after-image of lamps
swung through the yards
on winter evenings.
With pails and barrows
those mound-dwellers
go waist-deep in mist
to break the light ice
at wells and dunghills.
Gifts of Rain
I
Cloudburst and steady downpour now
for days.
Still mammal,
straw-footed on the mud,
he begins t
o sense weather
by his skin.
A nimble snout of flood
licks over stepping stones
and goes uprooting.
He fords
his life by sounding.
Soundings.
II
A man wading lost fields
breaks the pane of flood:
a flower of mud-
water blooms up to his reflection
like a cut swaying
its red spoors through a basin.
His hands grub
where the spade has uncastled
sunken drills, an atlantis
he depends on. So
he is hooped to where he planted
and sky and ground
are running naturally among his arms
that grope the cropping land.
III
When rains were gathering
there would be an all-night
roaring off the ford.
Their world-schooled ear
could monitor the usual
confabulations, the race
slabbering past the gable,
the Moyola harping on
its gravel beds:
all spouts by daylight
brimmed with their own airs
and overflowed each barrel
in long tresses.
I cock my ear
at an absence –
in the shared calling of blood
arrives my need
for antediluvian lore.
Soft voices of the dead
are whispering by the shore
that I would question
(and for my children’s sake)
about crops rotted, river mud
glazing the baked clay floor.
IV
The tawny guttural water
spells itself: Moyola
is its own score and consort,
bedding the locale
in the utterance,
reed music, an old chanter
breathing its mists
through vowels and history.
A swollen river,
a mating call of sound
rises to pleasure me, Dives,
hoarder of common ground.
Broagh
Riverbank, the long rigs
ending in broad docken
and a canopied pad
down to the ford.
The garden mould
bruised easily, the shower
gathering in your heelmark
was the black Ο
in Broagh,
its low tattoo
among the windy boortrees
and rhubarb-blades
ended almost
suddenly, like that last
gh the strangers found
difficult to manage.
Oracle
Hide in the hollow trunk
of the willow tree,
its listening familiar,
until, as usual, they
cuckoo your name
across the fields.
You can hear them
draw the poles of stiles
as they approach
calling you out:
small mouth and ear
in a woody cleft,
lobe and larynx
of the mossy places.
A New Song
I met a girl from Derrygarve
And the name, a lost potent musk,
Recalled the river’s long swerve,
A kingfisher’s blue bolt at dusk
And stepping stones like black molars
Sunk in the ford, the shifty glaze
Of the whirlpool, the Moyola
Pleasuring beneath alder trees.
And Derrygarve, I thought, was just:
Vanished music, twilit water –
A smooth libation of the past
Poured by this chance vestal daughter.
But now our river tongues must rise
From licking deep in native haunts
To flood, with vowelling embrace,
Demesnes staked out in consonants.
And Castledawson we’ll enlist
And Upperlands, each planted bawn –
Like bleaching-greens resumed by grass –
A vocable, as rath and bullaun.
The Other Side
I
Thigh-deep in sedge and marigolds
a neighbour laid his shadow
on the stream, vouching
‘It’s poor as Lazarus, that ground,’
and brushed away
among the shaken leafage.
I lay where his lea sloped
to meet our fallow,
nested on moss and rushes,
my ear swallowing
his fabulous, biblical dismissal,
that tongue of chosen people.
When he would stand like that
on the other side, white-haired,
swinging his blackthorn
at the marsh weeds,
he prophesied above our scraggy acres,
then turned away
towards his promised furrows
on the hill, a wake of pollen
drifting to our bank, next season’s tares.
II
For days we would rehearse
each patriarchal dictum:
Lazarus, the Pharaoh, Solomon
and David and Goliath rolled
magnificently, like loads of hay
too big for our small lanes,
or faltered on a rut –
‘Your side of the house, I believe,
hardly rule by the book at all.’
His brain was a whitewashed kitchen