Bared and tensed as I am, all attention
For your step following and damned if I look back.
Sloe Gin
The clear weather of juniper
darkened into winter.
She fed gin to sloes
and sealed the glass container.
When I unscrewed it
I smelled the disturbed
tart stillness of a bush
rising through the pantry.
When I poured it
it had a cutting edge
and flamed
like Betelgeuse.
I drink to you
in smoke-mirled, blue-black,
polished sloes, bitter
and dependable.
Chekhov on Sakhalin
For Derek Mahon
So, he would pay his ‘debt to medicine’.
But first he drank cognac by the ocean
With his back to all he travelled north to face.
His head was swimming free as the troikas
Of Tyumin, he looked down from the rail
Of his thirty years and saw a mile
Into himself as if he were clear water:
Lake Baikal from the deckrail of the steamer.
So far away, Moscow was like lost youth.
And who was he, to savour in his mouth
Fine spirits that the puzzled literati
Packed off with him to a penal colony—
Him, born, you may say, under the counter?
At least that meant he knew its worth. No cantor
In full throat by the iconostasis
Got holier joy than he got from that glass
That shone and warmed like diamonds warming
On some pert young cleavage in a salon,
Inviolable and affronting.
He felt the glass go cold in the midnight sun.
When he staggered up and smashed it on the stones
It rang as clearly as the convicts’ chains
That haunted him. All through the months to come
It rang on like the burden of his freedom
To try for the right tone—not tract, not thesis—
And walk away from floggings. He who thought to squeeze
His slave’s blood out and waken the free man
Shadowed a convict guide through Sakhalin.
Sandstone Keepsake
It is a kind of chalky russet
solidified gourd, sedimentary
and so reliably dense and bricky
I often clasp it and throw it from hand to hand.
It was ruddier, with an underwater
hint of contusion, when I lifted it,
wading a shingle beach on Inishowen.
Across the estuary light after light
came on silently round the perimeter
of the camp. A stone from Phlegethon,
bloodied on the bed of hell’s hot river?
Evening frost and the salt water
made my hand smoke, as if I’d plucked the heart
that damned Guy de Montfort to the boiling flood—
but not really, though I remembered
his victim’s heart in its casket, long venerated.
Anyhow, there I was with the wet red stone
in my hand, staring across at the watch-towers
from my free state of image and allusion,
swooped on, then dropped by trained binoculars:
a silhouette not worth bothering about,
out for the evening in scarf and waders
and not about to set times wrong or right,
stooping along, one of the venerators.
From Shelf Life
Granite Chip
Houndstooth stone. Aberdeen of the mind.
Saying An union in the cup I’ll throw
I have hurt my hand, pressing it hard around
this bit hammered off Joyce’s Martello
Tower, this flecked insoluble brilliant
I keep but feel little in common with—
a kind of stone-age circumcising knife,
a Calvin edge in my complaisant pith.
Granite is jaggy, salty, punitive
and exacting. Come to me, it says
all you who labour and are burdened, I
will not refresh you. And it adds, Seize
the day. And, You can take me or leave me.
Old Smoothing Iron
Often I watched her lift it
from where its compact wedge
rode the back of the stove
like a tug at anchor.
To test its heat she’d stare
and spit in its iron face
or hold it up next her cheek
to divine the stored danger.
Soft thumps on the ironing board.
Her dimpled angled elbow
and intent stoop
as she aimed the smoothing iron
like a plane into linen,
like the resentment of women.
To work, her dumb lunge says,
is to move a certain mass
through a certain distance,
is to pull your weight and feel
exact and equal to it.
Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.
Stone from Delphi
To be carried back to the shrine some dawn
when the sea spreads its far sun-crops to the south
and I make a morning offering again:
that I may escape the miasma of spilled blood,
govern the tongue, fear hybris, fear the god
until he speaks in my untrammelled mouth.
Making Strange
I stood between them,
the one with his travelled intelligence
and tawny containment,
his speech like the twang of a bowstring,
and another, unshorn and bewildered
in the tubs of his wellingtons,
smiling at me for help,
faced with this stranger I’d brought him.
Then a cunning middle voice
came out of the field across the road
saying, ‘Be adept and be dialect,
tell of this wind coming past the zinc hut,
call me sweetbriar after the rain
or snowberries cooled in the fog.
But love the cut of this travelled one
and call me also the cornfield of Boaz.
Go beyond what’s reliable
in all that keeps pleading and pleading,
these eyes and puddles and stones,
and recollect how bold you were
when I visited you first
with departures you cannot go back on.’
A chaffinch flicked from an ash and next thing
I found myself driving the stranger
through my own country, adept
at dialect, reciting my pride
in all that I knew, that began to make strange
at that same recitation.
A Hazel Stick for Catherine Ann
The living mother-of-pearl of a salmon
just out of the water
is gone just like that, but your stick
is kept salmon-silver.
Seasoned and bendy,
it convinces the hand
that what you have you hold
to play with and pose with
and lay about with.
But then too it points back to cattle
and spatter and beating
the bars of a gate—
the very stick we might cut
from your family tree.
The living cobalt of an afternoon
dragonfly drew my eye to it first
and the evening I trimmed it for you
you saw your first glow-worm—
all of us stood round in silence, even you
gigantic enough to darken the sky
for a glow-worm.
And when I poked open the grass
a tiny brightening den
lit the eye
in the blunt cut end of your stick.
A Kite for Michael and Christopher
All through that Sunday afternoon
a kite flew above Sunday,
a tightened drumhead, an armful of blown chaff.
I’d seen it grey and slippy in the making,
I’d tapped it when it dried out white and stiff,
I’d tied the bows of newspaper
along its six-foot tail.
But now it was far up like a small black lark
and now it dragged as if the bellied string
were a wet rope hauled upon
to lift a shoal.
My friend says that the human soul
is about the weight of a snipe,
yet the soul at anchor there,
the string that sags and ascends,
weigh like a furrow assumed into the heavens.
Before the kite plunges down into the wood
and this line goes useless
take in your two hands, boys, and feel
the strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief.
You were born fit for it.
Stand in here in front of me
and take the strain.
The Railway Children
When we climbed the slopes of the cutting
We were eye-level with the white cups
Of the telegraph poles and the sizzling wires.
Like lovely freehand they curved for miles
East and miles west beyond us, sagging
Under their burden of swallows.
We were small and thought we knew nothing
Worth knowing. We thought words travelled the wires
In the shiny pouches of raindrops,
Each one seeded full with the light
Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves
So infinitesimally scaled
We could stream through the eye of a needle.
The King of the Ditchbacks
For John Montague
I
As if a trespasser
unbolted a forgotten gate
and ripped the growth
tangling its lower bars—
just beyond the hedge
he has opened a dark morse
along the bank,
a crooked wounding
of silent, cobwebbed
grass. If I stop
he stops
like the moon.
He lives in his feet
and ears, weather-eyed,
all pad and listening,
a denless mover.
Under the bridge
his reflection shifts
sideways to the current,
mothy, alluring.
I am haunted
by his stealthy rustling,
the unexpected spoor,
the pollen settling.
II
I was sure I knew him. The time I’d spent obsessively in that upstairs room bringing myself close to him: each entranced hiatus as I chainsmoked and stared out the dormer into the grassy hillside I was laying myself open. He was depending on me as I hung out on the limb of a translated phrase like a youngster dared out onto an alder branch over the whirlpool. Small dreamself in the branches. Dream fears I inclined towards, interrogating:
—Are you the one I ran upstairs to find drowned under running water in the bath?
—The one the mowing machine severed like a hare in the stiff frieze of harvest?
—Whose little bloody clothes we buried in the garden?
—The one who lay awake in darkness a wall’s breadth from the troubled hoofs?
After I had dared these invocations, I went back towards the gate to follow him. And my stealth was second nature to me, as if I were coming into my own. I remembered I had been vested for this calling.
III
When I was taken aside that day
I had the sense of election:
they dressed my head in a fishnet
and plaited leafy twigs through meshes
so my vision was a bird’s
at the heart of a thicket
and I spoke as I moved
like a voice from a shaking bush.
King of the ditchbacks,
I went with them obediently
to the edge of a pigeon wood—
deciduous canopy, screened wain of evening
we lay beneath in silence.
No birds came, but I waited
among briars and stones, or whispered
or broke the watery gossamers
if I moved a muscle.
‘Come back to us,’ they said, ‘in harvest,
when we hide in the stooked corn,
when the gundogs can hardly retrieve
what’s brought down.’ And I saw myself
rising to move in that dissimulation,
top-knotted, masked in sheaves, noting
the fall of birds: a rich young man
leaving everything he had
for a migrant solitude.
Station Island
I
A hurry of bell-notes
flew over morning hush
and water-blistered cornfields,
an escaped ringing
that stopped as quickly
as it started. Sunday,
the silence breathed
and could not settle back
for a man had appeared
at the side of the field
with a bow-saw, held
stiffly up like a lyre.
He moved and stopped to gaze
up into hazel bushes,
angled his saw in,
pulled back to gaze again
and move on to the next.
‘I know you, Simon Sweeney,
for an old Sabbath-breaker
who has been dead for years.’
‘Damn all you know,’ he said,
his eye still on the hedge
and not turning his head.
‘I was your mystery man
and am again this morning.
Through gaps in the bushes,
would watch me cutting timber.
When cut or broken limbs
of trees went yellow, when
woodsmoke sharpened air
or ditches rustled
you sensed my trail there
as if it had been sprayed.
It left you half afraid.
When they bade you listen
in the bedroom dark
to wind and rain in the trees
and think of tinkers camped
under a heeled-up cart
you shut your eyes and saw
a wet axle and spokes
in moonlight, and me
streaming from the shower,
headed for your door.’
Sunlight broke in the hazels,
the quick bell-notes began
a second time. I turned
at another sound:
a crowd of shawled women
were wading the young corn,
their skirts brushing softly.
Their motion saddened morning.
It whispered to the silence,
‘Pray for us, pray for us,’
it conjured through the air
until the field was full
of half-remembered faces,
a loosed congregation
that straggled past and on.
As I drew behind them
I was a fasted pilgrim,
light-headed, leaving home
to face into my station.
‘Stay clear of all processions!’
Sweeney shouted at me
but the murmur of the crowd
and their feet slushing through
the tender, bladed growth
had opened a drugged path
I was set upon.
I trailed those early-risers
fallen into step
before the smokes were up.
The quick bell rang again.
II
I was parked on a high road, listening
to peewits and wind blowing round the car
when something came to life in the driving mirror,
someone walking fast in an overcoat
and boots, bareheaded, big, determined
in his sure haste along the crown of the road
so that I felt myself the challenged one.
The car door slammed. I was suddenly out
face to face with an aggravated man
raving on about nights spent listening for
gun butts to come cracking on the door,
yeomen on the rampage, and his neighbour
among them, hammering home the shape of things.
‘Round about here you overtook the women,’
I said, as the thing came clear. ‘Your Lough Derg Pilgrim
haunts me every time I cross this mountain—
as if I am being followed, or following.
I’m on my road there now to do the station.’
‘O holy Jesus Christ, does nothing change?’
His head jerked sharply side to side and up
like a diver’s surfacing,
then with a look that said, Who is this cub
anyhow, he took cognizance again
of where he was: the road, the mountain top,
and the air, softened by a shower of rain,
worked on his anger visibly until:
‘It is a road you travel on your own.
I who learned to read in the reek of flax
and smelled hanged bodies rotting on their gibbets
and saw their looped slime gleaming from the sacks—
hard-mouthed Ribbonmen and Orange bigots
made me into the old fork-tongued turncoat
who mucked the byre of their politics.
If times were hard, I could be hard too.
I made the traitor in me sink the knife.
And maybe there’s a lesson there for you,
whoever you are, wherever you come out of,
for though there’s something natural in your smile
there’s something in it strikes me as defensive.’
‘The angry role was never my vocation,’
I said. ‘I come from County Derry,
where the last marching bands of Ribbonmen
on Patrick’s Day still played their “Hymn to Mary”.
Obedient strains like theirs tuned me first
and not that harp of unforgiving iron
the Fenians strung. A lot of what you wrote
I heard and did: this Lough Derg station,