Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked
Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked
Into the network of eternal life,
Is moved to pity: now he must hold his hand
Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks
Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.
*
And since the whole thing’s imagined anyhow,
Imagine being Kevin. Which is he?
Self-forgetful or in agony all the time
From the neck on out down through his hurting forearms?
Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees?
Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth
Crept up through him? Is there distance in his head?
Alone and mirrored clear in love’s deep river,
‘To labour and not to seek reward,’ he prays,
A prayer his body makes entirely
For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird
And on the riverbank forgotten the river’s name.
from The Flight Path
4
The following for the record, in the light
Of everything before and since:
One bright May morning, nineteen seventy-nine,
Just off the red-eye special from New York,
I’m on the train for Belfast. Plain, simple
Exhilaration at being back: the sea
At Skerries, the nuptial hawthorn bloom,
The trip north taking sweet hold like a chain
On every bodily sprocket.
Enter then –
As if he were some film noir border guard –
Enter this one I’d last met in a dream,
More grimfaced now than in the dream itself
When he’d flagged me down at the side of a mountain road,
Come up and leant his elbow on the roof
And explained through the open window of the car
That all I’d have to do was drive a van
Carefully in to the next customs post
At Pettigo, switch off, get out as if
I were on my way with dockets to the office –
But then instead I’d walk ten yards more down
Towards the main street and get in with – here
Another schoolfriend’s name, a wink and smile,
I’d know him all right, he’d be in a Ford
And I’d be home in three hours’ time, as safe
As houses …
So he enters and sits down
Opposite and goes for me head on.
‘When, for fuck’s sake, are you going to write
Something for us?’ ‘If I do write something,
Whatever it is, I’ll be writing for myself.’
And that was that. Or words to that effect.
The jail walls all those months were smeared with shite.
Out of Long Kesh after his dirty protest
The red eyes were the eyes of Ciaran Nugent
Like something out of Dante’s scurfy hell,
Drilling their way through the rhymes and images
Where I too walked behind the righteous Virgil,
As safe as houses and translating freely:
When he had said all this, his eyes rolled
And his teeth, like a dog’s teeth clamping round a bone,
Bit into the skull and again took hold.
5
When I answered that I came from ‘far away’,
The policeman at the roadblock snapped, ‘Where’s that?’
He’d only half-heard what I said and thought
It was the name of some place up the country.
And now it is – both where I have been living
And where I left – a distance still to go
Like starlight that is light years on the go
From far away and takes light years arriving.
Mycenae Lookout
for Cynthia and Dimitri Hadzi
The ox is on my tongue
AESCHYLUS, Agamemnon
1 The Watchman’s War
Some people wept, and not for sorrow – joy
That the king had armed and upped and sailed for Troy,
But inside me like struck sound in a gong
That killing-fest, the life-warp and world-wrong
It brought to pass, still augured and endured.
I’d dream of blood in bright webs in a ford,
Of bodies raining down like tattered meat
On top of me asleep – and me the lookout
The queen’s command had posted and forgotten,
The blind spot her farsightedness relied on.
And then the ox would lurch against the gong
And deaden it and I would feel my tongue
Like the dropped gangplank of a cattle truck,
Trampled and rattled, running piss and muck,
All swimmy-trembly as the lick of fire,
A victory beacon in an abattoir …
Next thing then I would waken at a loss,
For all the world a sheepdog stretched in grass,
Exposed to what I knew, still honour-bound
To concentrate attention out beyond
The city and the border, on that line
Where the blaze would leap the hills when Troy had fallen.
My sentry work was fate, a home to go to,
An in-between-times that I had to row through
Year after year: when the mist would start
To lift off fields and inlets, when morning light
Would open like the grain of light being split,
Day in, day out, I’d come alive again,
Silent and sunned as an esker on a plain,
Up on my elbows, gazing, biding time
In my outpost on the roof … What was to come
Out of that ten years’ wait that was the war
Flawed the black mirror of my frozen stare.
If a god of justice had reached down from heaven
For a strong beam to hang his scale-pans on
He would have found me tensed and ready-made.
I balanced between destiny and dread
And saw it coming, clouds bloodshot with the red
Of victory fires, the raw wound of that dawn
Igniting and erupting, bearing down
Like lava on a fleeing population …
Up on my elbows, head back, shutting out
The agony of Clytemnestra’s love-shout
That rose through the palace like the yell of troops
Hurled by King Agamemnon from the ships.
2 Cassandra
No such thing
as innocent
bystanding.
Her soiled vest,
her little breasts,
her clipped, devast-
ated, scabbed
punk head,
the char-eyed
famine gawk –
she looked
camp-fucked
and simple.
People
could feel
a missed
trueness in them
focus,
a homecoming
in her dropped-wing,
half-calculating
bewilderment.
No such thing
as innocent.
Old King Cock-
of-the-Walk
was back,
King Kill-
the-Child-
and-Take-
What-Comes,
King Agamem-
non’s drum-
balled, old buck’s
stride was back.
And then her Greek
words came,
a lamb
at lambing time,
bleat of clair-
voyant dread,
the gene-hammer
and tread
of the roused god.
And the result-
ant s
hock desire
in bystanders
to do it to her
there and then.
Little rent
cunt of their guilt:
in she went
to the knife,
to the killer wife,
to the net over
her and her slaver,
the Troy reaver,
saying, ‘A wipe
of the sponge,
that’s it.
The shadow-hinge
swings unpredict-
ably and the light’s
blanked out.’
3 His Dawn Vision
Cities of grass. Fort walls. The dumbstruck palace.
I’d come to with the night wind on my face,
Agog, alert again, but far, far less
Focused on victory than I should have been –
Still isolated in my old disdain
Of claques who always needed to be seen
And heard as the true Argives. Mouth athletes,
Quoting the oracle and quoting dates,
Petitioning, accusing, taking votes.
No element that should have carried weight
Out of the grievous distance would translate.
Our war stalled in the pre-articulate.
The little violets’ heads bowed on their stems,
The pre-dawn gossamers, all dew and scrim
And star-lace, it was more through them
I felt the beating of the huge time-wound
We lived inside. My soul wept in my hand
When I would touch them, my whole being rained
Down on myself, I saw cities of grass,
Valleys of longing, tombs, a windswept brightness,
And far off, in a hilly, ominous place,
Small crowds of people watching as a man
Jumped a fresh earth-wall and another ran
Amorously, it seemed, to strike him down.
4 The Nights
They both needed to talk,
pretending what they needed
was my advice. Behind backs
each one of them confided
it was sexual overload
every time they did it –
and indeed from the beginning
(a child could have hardly missed it)
their real life was the bed.
The king should have been told,
but who was there to tell him
if not myself? I willed them
to cease and break the hold
of my cross-purposed silence
but still kept on, all smiles
to Aegisthus every morning,
much favoured and self-loathing.
The roof was like an eardrum.
The ox’s tons of dumb
inertia stood, head-down
and motionless as a herm.
Atlas, watchmen’s patron,
would come into my mind,
the only other one
up at all hours, ox-bowed
under his yoke of cloud
out there at the world’s end.
The loft-floor where the gods
and goddesses took lovers
and made out endlessly
successfully, those thuds
and moans through the cloud cover
were wholly on his shoulders.
Sometimes I thought of us
apotheosized to boulders
called Aphrodite’s Pillars.
High and low in those days
hit their stride together.
When the captains in the horse
felt Helen’s hand caress
its wooden boards and belly
they nearly rode each other.
But in the end Troy’s mothers
bore their brunt in alley,
bloodied cot and bed.
The war put all men mad,
horned, horsed or roof-posted,
the boasting and the bested.
My own mind was a bull-pen
where horned King Agamemnon
had stamped his weight in gold.
But when hills broke into flame
and the queen wailed on and came,
it was the king I sold.
I moved beyond bad faith:
for his bullion bars, his bonus
was a rope-net and a bloodbath.
And the peace had come upon us.
5 His Reverie of Water
At Troy, at Athens, what I most clearly
see and nearly smell
is the fresh water.
A filled bath, still unentered
and unstained, waiting behind housewalls
that the far cries of the butchered on the plain
keep dying into, until the hero comes
surging in incomprehensibly
stripped to the skin, blood-plastered, moaning
and rocking, splashing, dozing off,
accommodated as if he were a stranger.
And the well at Athens too.
Or rather that old lifeline leading up
and down from the Acropolis
to the well itself, a set of timber steps
slatted in between the sheer cliff face
and a free-standing, covering spur of rock,
secret staircase the defenders knew
and the invaders found, where what was to be
Greek met Greek,
the ladder of the future
and the past, besieger and besieged,
the treadmill of assault
turned waterwheel, the rungs of stealth
and habit all the one
bare foot extended, searching.
And then this ladder of our own that ran
deep into a well-shaft being sunk
in broad daylight, men puddling at the source
through tawny mud, then coming back up
deeper in themselves for having been there,
like discharged soldiers testing the safe ground,
finders, keepers, seers of fresh water
in the bountiful round mouths of iron pumps
and gushing taps.
The Gravel Walks
River gravel. In the beginning, that.
High summer, and the angler’s motorbike
Deep in roadside flowers, like a fallen knight
Whose ghost we’d lately questioned: ‘Any luck?’
As the engines of the world prepared, green nuts
Dangled and clustered closer to the whirlpool.
The trees dipped down. The flints and sandstone-bits
Worked themselves smooth and smaller in a sparkle
Of shallow, hurrying barley-sugar water
Where minnows schooled that we scared when we played –
An eternity that ended once a tractor
Dropped its link-box in the gravel bed
And cement mixers began to come to life
And men in dungarees, like captive shades,
Mixed concrete, loaded, wheeled, turned, wheeled, as if
The Pharaoh’s brickyards burned inside their heads.
*
Hoard and praise the verity of gravel.
Gems for the undeluded. Milt of earth.
Its plain, champing song against the shovel
Soundtests and sandblasts words like ‘honest worth’.
Beautiful in or out of the river,
The kingdom of gravel was inside you too –
Deep down, far back, clear water running over
Pebbles of caramel, hailstone, mackerel-blue.
But the actual washed stuff kept you slow and steady
As you went stooping with your barrow full
Into an absolution of the body,
The shriven life tired bones and marrow feel.
So walk on air against your better judgement
Establishing yourself somewhere in between
Those solid batches mixed with grey cement
And a tune called ‘The Gravel Walks’ that conjures green.
Whitby-sur-Moyola
Caedmon too I was lucky to have known,
Back in situ there with his full bucket
And armfuls of clean straw, the perfect yardman,
Unabsorbed in what he had to do
But doing it perfectly, and watching you.
He had worked his angel stint. He was hard as nails
And all that time he’d been poeting with the harp
His real gift was the big ignorant roar
He could still let out of him, just bogging in
As if the sacred subjects were a herd
That had broken out and needed rounding up.
I never saw him once with his hands joined
Unless it was a case of eyes to heaven
And the quick sniff and test of fingertips
After he’d passed them through a sick beast’s water.
Oh, Caedmon was the real thing all right.
‘Poet’s Chair’
for Carolyn Mulholland
Leonardo said: the sun has never
Seen a shadow. Now watch the sculptor move
Full circle round her next work, like a lover
In the sphere of shifting angles and fixed love.
1
Angling shadows of itself are what
Your ‘Poet’s Chair’ stands to and rises out of
In its sun-stalked inner-city courtyard.
On the qui vive all the time, its four legs land
On their feet – cat’s-foot, goat-foot, big soft splay-foot too;
Its straight back sprouts two bronze and leafy saplings.