heavy, earth-drawn, all mouth and eye,
the sunflower, dreaming umber.
IV
Catpiss smell,
the pink bloom open:
I press a leaf
of the flowering currant
on the back of your hand
for the tight slow burn
of its sticky juice
to prime your skin,
and your veins to be crossed
criss-cross with leaf-veins.
I lick my thumb
and dip it in mould,
I anoint the anointed
leaf-shape. Mould
blooms and pigments
the back of your hand
like a birthmark—
my umber one,
you are stained, stained
to perfection.
Song
A rowan like a lipsticked girl.
Between the by-road and the main road
Alder trees at a wet and dripping distance
Stand off among the rushes.
There are the mud-flowers of dialect
And the immortelles of perfect pitch
And that moment when the bird sings very close
To the music of what happens.
The Harvest Bow
As you plaited the harvest bow
You implicated the mellowed silence in you
In wheat that does not rust
But brightens as it tightens twist by twist
Into a knowable corona,
A throwaway love-knot of straw.
Hands that aged round ash plants and cane sticks
And lapped the spurs on a lifetime of gamecocks
Harked to their gift and worked with fine intent
Until your fingers moved somnambulant:
I tell and finger it like braille,
Gleaning the unsaid off the palpable,
And if I spy into its golden loops
I see us walk between the railway slopes
Into an evening of long grass and midges,
Blue smoke straight up, old beds and ploughs in hedges,
An auction notice on an outhouse wall—
You with a harvest bow in your lapel,
Me with the fishing rod, already homesick
For the big lift of these evenings, as your stick
Whacking the tips off weeds and bushes
Beats out of time, and beats, but flushes
Nothing: that original townland
Still tongue-tied in the straw tied by your hand.
The end of art is peace
Could be the motto of this frail device
That I have pinned up on our deal dresser—
Like a drawn snare
Slipped lately by the spirit of the corn
Yet burnished by its passage, and still warm.
In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge
Killed in France 31 July 1917
The bronze soldier hitches a bronze cape
That crumples stiffly in imagined wind
No matter how the real winds buff and sweep
His sudden hunkering run, forever craned
Over Flanders. Helmet and haversack,
The gun’s firm slope from butt to bayonet,
The loyal, fallen names on the embossed plaque—
It all meant little to the worried pet
I was in nineteen forty-six or seven,
Gripping my Aunt Mary by the hand
Along the Portstewart prom, then round the crescent
To thread the Castle Walk out to the strand.
The pilot from Coleraine sailed to the coal-boat.
Courting couples rose out of the scooped dunes.
A farmer stripped to his studs and shiny waistcoat
Rolled the trousers down on his timid shins.
Francis Ledwidge, you courted at the seaside
Beyond Drogheda one Sunday afternoon.
Literary, sweet-talking, countrified,
You pedalled out the leafy road from Slane
Where you belonged, among the dolorous
And lovely: the May altar of wild flowers,
Easter water sprinkled in outhouses,
Mass-rocks and hill-top raths and raftered byres.
I think of you in your Tommy’s uniform,
A haunted Catholic face, pallid and brave,
Ghosting the trenches like a bloom of hawthorn
Or silence cored from a Boyne passage-grave.
It’s summer, nineteen-fifteen. I see the girl
My aunt was then, herding on the long acre.
Behind a low bush in the Dardanelles
You suck stones to make your dry mouth water.
It’s nineteen-seventeen. She still herds cows
But a big strafe puts the candles out in Ypres:
‘My soul is by the Boyne, cutting new meadows …
My country wears her confirmation dress.’
‘To be called a British soldier while my country
Has no place among nations…’ You were rent
By shrapnel six weeks later. ‘I am sorry
That party politics should divide our tents.’
In you, our dead enigma, all the strains
Criss-cross in useless equilibrium
And as the wind tunes through this vigilant bronze
I hear again the sure confusing drum
You followed from Boyne water to the Balkans
But miss the twilit note your flute should sound.
You were not keyed or pitched like these true-blue ones
Though all of you consort now underground.
FROM
Sweeney Astray
(1983)
Sweeney Praises the Trees
It was the end of the harvest season and Sweeney heard a hunting-call from a company in the skirts of the wood.
—This will be the outcry of the Ui Faolain coming to kill me, he said. I slew their king at Moira and this host is out to avenge him.
He heard the stag bellowing and he made a poem in which he praised aloud all the trees of Ireland, and rehearsed some of his own hardships and sorrows, saying:
Suddenly this bleating
and belling in the glen!
The little timorous stag
like a scared musician
startles my heartstrings
with high homesick refrains—
deer on my lost mountains,
flocks out on the plain.
The bushy leafy oak tree
is highest in the wood,
the forking shoots of hazel
hide sweet hazel-nuts.
The alder is my darling,
all thornless in the gap,
some milk of human kindness
coursing in its sap.
The blackthorn is a jaggy creel
stippled with dark sloes;
green watercress in thatch on wells
where the drinking blackbird goes.
Sweetest of the leafy stalks,
the vetches strew the pathway;
the oyster-grass is my delight,
and the wild strawberry.
Low-set clumps of apple trees
drum down fruit when shaken;
scarlet berries clot like blood
on mountain rowan.
Briars curl in sideways,
arch a stickle back,
draw blood and curl up innocent
to sneak the next attack.
The yew tree in each churchyard
wraps night in its dark hood.
Ivy is a shadowy
genius of the wood.
Holly rears its windbreak,
a door in winter’s face;
life-blood on a spear-shaft
darkens the grain of ash.
Birch tree, smooth and blessed,
delicious to the breeze,
high twigs plait and crown it
the queen of trees.
The aspen pales
and whispers, hesitate
s:
a thousand frightened scuts
race in its leaves.
But what disturbs me most
in the leafy wood
is the to and fro and to and fro
of an oak rod.
Sweeney Astray
I would live happy
in an ivy bush
high in some twisted tree
and never come out.
The skylarks rising
to their high space
send me pitching and tripping
over stumps on the moor
and my hurry flushes
the turtle-dove.
I overtake it,
my plumage rushing,
am startled
by the startled woodcock
or a blackbird’s sudden
volubility.
Think of my alarms,
my coming to earth
where the fox still
gnaws at the bones,
my wild career
as the wolf from the wood
goes tearing ahead
and I lift towards the mountain,
the bark of foxes
echoing below me,
the wolves behind me
howling and rending—
their vapoury tongues,
their low-slung speed
shaken off like nightmare
at the foot of the slope.
If I show my heels
I am hobbled by guilt.
I am a sheep
without a fold
who sleeps his sound sleep
in the old tree at Kilnoo,
dreaming back the good days
with Congal in Antrim.
A starry frost will come
dropping on pools
and I’ll be astray here
on unsheltered heights:
herons calling
in cold Glenelly,
flocks of birds quickly
coming and going.
I prefer the elusive
rhapsody of blackbirds
to the garrulous blather
of men and women.
I prefer the squeal of badgers
in their sett
to the tally-ho
of the morning hunt.
I prefer the re-
echoing belling of a stag
among the peaks
to that arrogant horn.
Those unharnessed runners
from glen to glen!
Nobody tames
that royal blood,
each one aloof
on its rightful summit,
antlered, watchful.
Imagine them,
the stag of high Slieve Felim,
the stag of the steep Fews,
the stag of Duhallow, the stag of Orrery,
the fierce stag of Killarney.
The stag of Islandmagee, Larne’s stag,
the stag of Moylinny,
the stag of Cooley, the stag of Cunghill,
the stag of the two-peaked Burren.
The mother of this herd
is old and grey,
the stags that follow her
are branchy, many-tined.
I would be cloaked in the grey
sanctuary of her head,
I would roost among
her mazy antlers
and would be lofted into
this thicket of horns
on the stag that lows at me
over the glen.
I am Sweeney, the whinger,
the scuttler in the valley.
But call me, instead,
Peak-pate, Stag-head.
Sweeney’s Lament on Ailsa Craig
Without bed or board
I face dark days
in frozen lairs
and wind-driven snow.
Ice scoured by winds.
Watery shadows from weak sun.
Shelter from the one tree
on a plateau.
Haunting deer-paths,
enduring rain,
first-footing the grey
frosted grass.
I climb towards the pass
and the stag’s belling
rings off the wood,
surf-noise rises
where I go, heartbroken
and worn out,
sharp-haunched Sweeney,
raving and moaning.
The sough of the winter night,
my feet packing the hailstones
as I pad the dappled
banks of Mourne
or lie, unslept, in a wet bed
on the hills by Lough Erne,
tensed for first light
and an early start.
Skimming the waves
at Dunseverick,
listening to billows
at Dun Rodairce,
hurtling from that great wave
to the wave running
in tidal Barrow,
one night in hard Dun Cernan,
the next among the wild flowers
of Benn Boirne;
and then a stone pillow
on the screes of Croagh Patrick.
But to have ended up
lamenting here
on Ailsa Craig.
A hard station!
Ailsa Craig,
the seagulls’ home,
God knows it is
hard lodgings.
Ailsa Craig,
bell-shaped rock,
reaching sky-high,
snout in the sea—
it hard-beaked,
we mated like a couple
of hard-shanked cranes.
Sweeney in Connacht
One day Sweeney went to Drum Iarann in Connacht, where he stole some watercress and drank from a green-flecked well. A cleric came out of the church, full of indignation and resentment, calling Sweeney a well-fed, contented madman, and reproaching him where he cowered in the yew tree:
Cleric:
Aren’t you the contented one?
You eat my watercress,
then you perch in the yew tree
beside my little house.
Sweeney:
Contented’s not the word!
I am so terrified,
so panicky, so haunted
I dare not bat an eyelid.
The flight of a small wren
scares me as much, bell-man,
as a great expedition
out to hunt me down.
Were you in my place, monk,
and I in yours, think:
would you enjoy being mad?
Would you be contented?
Once when Sweeney was rambling and raking through Connacht he ended up in Alternan in Tireragh. A community of holy people had made their home there, and it was a lovely valley, with a turbulent river shooting down the cliff; trees fruited and blossomed on the cliff-face; there were sheltering ivies and heavy-topped orchards, there were wild deer and hares and fat swine; and sleek seals, that used to sleep on the cliff, having come in from the ocean beyond. Sweeney coveted the place mightily and sang its praises aloud in this poem:
Sainted cliff at Alternan,
nut grove, hazel-wood!
Cold quick sweeps of water
fall down the cliff-side.
Ivies green and thicken there,
its oak-mast is precious.
Fruited branches nod and bend
from heavy-headed apple trees.
Badgers make their setts there
and swift hares have their form;
and seals’ heads swim the ocean,
cobbling the running foam.
And by the waterfall, Colman’s son,
haggard, spent, frost-bitten Sweeney,
Ronan of Drumgesh’s victim,
is sleeping at the foot of a tree.
Sweeney’s Last Poem
There was a time when I preferred
the turtle-dove’s soft jubilation
as it flitted round a pool
to the murmur of conversation.
There was a time when I preferred
the blackbird singing on the hill
and the stag loud against the storm
to the clinking tongue of this bell.
There was a time when I preferred
the mountain grouse crying at dawn
to the voice and closeness
of a beautiful woman.
There was a time when I preferred
wolf-packs yelping and howling
to the sheepish voice of a cleric
bleating out plainsong.
You are welcome to pledge healths
and carouse in your drinking dens;
I will dip and steal water
from a well with my open palm.
You are welcome to that cloistered hush
of your students’ conversation;
I will study the pure chant
of hounds baying in Glen Bolcain.
You are welcome to your salt meat
and fresh meat in feasting-houses;
I will live content elsewhere
on tufts of green watercress.
The herd’s sharp spear wounded me
and passed clean through my body.
Ah Christ, who disposed all things, why
was I not killed at Moira?
Of all the innocent lairs I made
the length and breadth of Ireland
I remember an open bed
above the lough in Mourne.
Of all the innocent lairs I made
the length and breadth of Ireland
I remember bedding down
above the wood in Glen Bolcain.
To you, Christ, I give thanks
for your Body in communion.
Whatever evil I have done
in this world, I repent.
Then Sweeney’s death-swoon came over him and Moling, attended by his clerics, rose up and each of them placed a stone on Sweeney’s grave.
FROM
Station Island
(1984)
The Underground
There we were in the vaulted tunnel running,
You in your going-away coat speeding ahead
And me, me then like a fleet god gaining
Upon you before you turned to a reed
Or some new white flower japped with crimson
As the coat flapped wild and button after button
Sprang off and fell in a trail
Between the Underground and the Albert Hall.
Honeymooning, mooning around, late for the Proms,
Our echoes die in that corridor and now
I come as Hansel came on the moonlit stones
Retracing the path back, lifting the buttons
To end up in a draughty lamplit station
After the trains have gone, the wet track