Sometimes, leather-aproned, hairs in his nose,
He leans out on the jamb, recalls a clatter
Of hoofs where traffic is flashing in rows;
Then grunts and goes in, with a slam and flick
To beat real iron out, to work the bellows.
The Peninsula
When you have nothing more to say, just drive
For a day all round the peninsula.
The sky is tall as over a runway,
The land without marks, so you will not arrive
But pass through, though always skirting landfall.
At dusk, horizons drink down sea and hill,
The ploughed field swallows the whitewashed gable
And you’re in the dark again. Now recall
The glazed foreshore and silhouetted log,
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.
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, Abbeville, 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.
The Given Note
On the most westerly Blasket
In a dry-stone hut
He got this air out of the night.
Strange noises were heard
By others who followed, bits of a tune
Coming in on loud weather
Though nothing like melody.
He blamed their fingers and ear
As unpractised, their fiddling easy
For he had gone alone into the island
And brought back the whole thing.
The house throbbed like his full violin.
So whether he calls it spirit music
Or not, I don’t care. He took it
Out of wind off mid-Atlantic.
Still he maintains, from nowhere.
It comes off the bow gravely,
Rephrases itself into the air.
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.
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.
Anahorish, soft gradient
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.
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 O
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.
The Other Side
I
Thigh-deep in sedge and marigolds,
a neighbour laid his shadow
on the stream, vouching
‘It’s as 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
hung with texts, swept tidy
as the body o’ the kirk.
III
Then sometimes when the rosary was dragging
mournfully on in the kitchen
we would hear his step round the gable
though not until after the litany
would the knock come to the door
and the casual whistle strike up
on the doorstep. ‘A right-look
ing night,’
he might say, ‘I was dandering by
and says I, I might as well call.’
But now I stand behind him
in the dark yard, in the moan of prayers.
He puts a hand in a pocket
or taps a little tune with the blackthorn
shyly, as if he were party to
lovemaking or a stranger’s weeping.
Should I slip away, I wonder,
or go up and touch his shoulder
and talk about the weather
or the price of grass-seed?
The Tollund Man
I
Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eyelids,
His pointed skin cap.
In the flat country nearby
Where they dug him out,
His last gruel of winter seeds
Caked in his stomach,
Naked except for
The cap, noose and girdle,
I will stand a long time.
Bridegroom to the goddess,
She tightened her torc on him
And opened her fen,
Those dark juices working
Him to a saint’s kept body,
Trove of the turfcutters’
Honeycombed workings.
Now his stained face
Reposes at Aarhus.
II
I could risk blasphemy,
Consecrate the cauldron bog
Our holy ground and pray
Him to make germinate
The scattered, ambushed
Flesh of labourers,
Stockinged corpses
Laid out in the farmyards,
Tell-tale skin and teeth
Flecking the sleepers
Of four young brothers, trailed
For miles along the lines.
III
Something of his sad freedom
As he rode the tumbril
Should come to me, driving,
Saying the names
Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard,
Watching the pointing hands
Of country people,
Not knowing their tongue.
Out there in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy and at home.
Wedding Day
I am afraid.
Sound has stopped in the day
And the images reel over
And over. Why all those tears,
The wild grief on his face
Outside the taxi? The sap
Of mourning rises
In our waving guests.
You sing behind the tall cake
Like a deserted bride
Who persists, demented,
And goes through the ritual.
When I went to the Gents
There was a skewered heart
And a legend of love. Let me
Sleep on your breast to the airport.
Westering
in California
I sit under Rand McNally’s
‘Official Map of the Moon’ –
The colour of frogskin,
Its enlarged pores held
Open and one called
‘Pitiscus’ at eye level –
Recalling the last night
In Donegal, my shadow
Neat upon the whitewash
From her bony shine,
The cobbles of the yard
Lit pale as eggs.
Summer had been a free fall
Ending there,
The empty amphitheatre
Of the west. Good Friday
We had started out
Past shopblinds drawn on the afternoon,
Cars stilled outside still churches,
Bikes tilting to a wall;
We drove by,
A dwindling interruption,
As clappers smacked
On a bare altar
And congregations bent
To the studded crucifix.
What nails dropped out that hour?
Roads unreeled, unreeled
Falling light as casts
Laid down
On shining waters.
Under the moon’s stigmata
Six thousand miles away,
I imagine untroubled dust,
A loosening gravity,
Christ weighing by his hands.
Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication
for Mary Heaney
1 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
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. Brueghel,
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.
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 by-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 its 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