ebb, current, rock, rapids,
a muscled icicle
that melts itself longer
and fatter, he buries
his arrival beyond
light and tidal water,
investing silt and sand
with a sleek root. By day
only the drainmaker’s
spade or the mud paddler
can make him abort. Dark
delivers him hungering
down each undulation.
3 Bait
Lamps dawdle in the field at midnight.
Three men follow their nose in the grass,
The lamp’s beam their prow and compass.
The bucket’s handle better not clatter now:
Silence and curious light gather bait.
Nab him, but wait
For the first shrinking, tacky on the thumb.
Let him resettle backwards in his tunnel.
Then draw steady and he’ll come.
Among the millions whorling their mud coronas
Under dewlapped leaf and bowed blades
A few are bound to be rustled in these night raids,
Innocent ventilators of the ground
Making the globe a perfect fit,
A few are bound to be cheated of it
When lamps dawdle in the field at midnight,
When fishers need a garland for the bay
And have him, where he needs to come, out of the clay.
4 Setting
I
A line goes out of sight and out of mind
Down to the soft bottom of silt and sand
Past the indifferent skill of the hunting hand.
A bouquet of small hooks coiled in the stern
Is being paid out, back to its true form,
Until the bouquet’s hidden in the worm.
The boat rides forward where the line slants back.
The oars in their locks go round and round.
The eel describes his arcs without a sound.
II
The gulls fly and umbrella overhead,
Treading air as soon as the line runs out,
Responsive acolytes above the boat.
Not sensible of any kyrie,
The fishers, who don’t know and never try,
Pursue the work in hand as destiny.
They clear the bucket of the last chopped worms,
Pitching them high, good riddance, earthy shower.
The gulls encompass them before the water.
5 Lifting
They’re busy in a high boat
That stalks towards Antrim, the power cut.
The line’s a filament of smut
Drawn hand over fist
Where every three yards a hook’s missed
Or taken (and the smut thickens, wrist-
Thick, a flail
Lashed into the barrel
With one swing). Each eel
Comes aboard to this welcome:
The hook left in gill or gum,
It’s slapped into the barrel numb
But knits itself, four-ply,
With the furling, slippy
Haul, a knot of back and pewter belly
That stays continuously one
For each catch they fling in
Is sucked home like lubrication.
And wakes are enwound as the catch
On the morning water: which
Boat was which?
And when did this begin?
This morning, last year, when the lough first spawned?
The crews will answer, ‘Once the season’s in.’
6 The Return
In ponds, drains, dead canals
she turns her head back,
older now, following
whim deliberately
till she’s at sea in grass
and damned if she’ll stop so
it’s new trenches, sunk pipes,
swamps, running streams, the lough,
the river. Her stomach
shrunk, she exhilarates
in mid-water. Its throbbing
is speed through days and weeks.
Who knows now if she knows
her depth or direction?
She’s passed Malin and
Tory, silent, wakeless,
a wisp, a wick that is
its own taper and light
through the weltering dark.
Where she’s lost once she lays
ten thousand feet down in
her origins. The current
carries slicks of orphaned spawn.
7 Vision
Unless his hair was fine-combed
The lice, they said, would gang up
Into a mealy rope
And drag him, small, dirty, doomed,
Down to the water. He was
Cautious then in riverbank
Fields. Thick as a birch trunk,
That cable flexed in the grass
Every time the wind passed. Years
Later in the same fields
He stood at night when eels
Moved through the grass like hatched fears
Towards the water. To stand
In one place as the field flowed
Past, a jellied road,
To watch the eels crossing land
Re-wound his world’s live girdle.
Phosphorescent, sinewed slime
Continued at his feet. Time
Confirmed the horrid cable.
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.
Whinlands
All year round the whin
Can show a blossom or two
But it’s in full bloom now.
As if the small yolk stain
From all the birds’ eggs in
All the nests of the spring
Were spiked and hung
Everywhere on bushes to ripen.
Hills oxidize gold.
Above the smoulder of green shoot
And dross of dead thorns underfoot
The blossoms scald.
Put a match under
Whins, they go up of a sudden.
They make no flame in the sun
But a fierce heat tremor
Yet incineration like that
Only takes the thorn.
The tough sticks don’t burn,
Remain like bone, charred horn.
Gilt, jaggy, springy, frilled
This stunted, dry richness
Persists on hills, near stone ditches,
Over flintbed and battlefield.
The Plantation
Any point in that wood
Was a centre, birch trunks
Ghosting your bearings,
Improvising charmed rings
Wherever you stopped.
Though you walked a straight line
It might be a circle you travelled
With toadstools and stumps
Always repeating themselves.
Or did you re-pass them?
Here were bleyberries quilting the floor,
The black char of a fire,
And having found them once
You were sure to find them again.
Someone had always
been there
Though always you were alone.
Lovers, birdwatchers,
Campers, gypsies and tramps
Left some trace of their trades
Or their excrement.
Hedging the road so
It invited all comers
To the hush and the mush
Of its whispering treadmill,
Its limits defined,
So they thought, from outside.
They must have been thankful
For the hum of the traffic
If they ventured in
Past the picnickers’ belt
Or began to recall
Tales of fog on the mountains.
You had to come back
To learn how to lose yourself,
To be pilot and stray – witch,
Hansel and Gretel in one.
Bann Clay
Labourers pedalling at ease
Past the end of the lane
Were white with it. Dungarees
And boots wore its powdery stain.
All day in open pits
They loaded on to the bank
Slabs like the squared-off clots
For centuries under the grass,
It baked white in the sun,
Relieved its hoarded waters
And began to ripen.
It underruns the valley,
The first slow residue
Of a river finding its way.
Above it, the webbed marsh is new,
Even the clutch of Mesolithic
Flints. Once, cleaning a drain
I shovelled up livery slicks
Till the water gradually ran
Clear on its old floor.
Under the humus and roots
This smooth weight. I labour
Towards it still. It holds and gluts.
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.
from WINTERING OUT (1972)
Fodder
Or, as we said,
fother, I open
my arms for it
again. But first
to draw from the tight
vise of a stack
the weathered eaves
of the stack itself
falling at your feet,
last summer’s tumbled
swathes of grass
and meadowsweet
multiple as loaves
and fishes, a bundle
tossed over half-doors
or into mucky gaps.
These long nights
I would pull hay
for comfort, anything
to bed the stall.
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.
Anahorish, soft gradient
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.
Servant Boy
He is wintering out
the back-end of a bad year,
swinging a hurricane-lamp
through some outhouse,
a jobber among shadows.
Old work-whore, slave-
blood, who stepped fair-hills
under each bidder’s eye
and kept your patience
and your counsel, how
you draw me into
your trail. Your trail
broken from haggard to stable,
a straggle of fodder
stiffened on snow,
comes first-footing
the back doors of the little
barons: resentful
and impenitent,
carrying the warm eggs.
Land
I
I stepped it, perch by perch.
Unbraiding rushes and grass
I opened my right-of-way
through old bottoms and sowed-out ground
and gathered stones off the ploughing
to raise a small cairn.
Cleaned out the drains, faced the hedges,
often got up at dawn
to walk the outlying fields.
I composed habits for those acres
so that my last look would be
neither gluttonous nor starved.
I was ready to go anywhere.
II
This is in place of what I would leave,
plaited and branchy,
on a long slope of stubble:
a woman of old wet leaves,
rush-bands and thatcher’s scollops,
stooked loosely, her breasts an open-work
of new straw and harvest bows.
Gazing out past
the shifting hares.
III
I sense the pads
unfurling under grass and clover:
if I lie with my ear
in this loop of silence
long enough, thigh-bone
and shoulder against the phantom ground,
I expect to pick up
a small drumming
and must not be surprised
in bursting air
to find myself snared, swinging
an ear-ring of sharp wire.
Gifts of Rain
I
Cloudburst and steady downpour now
for days.
Still mammal,
straw-footed on the mud,
he
begins to 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