That could have been excitement or the death-throes
Turned into lift-off, big sure sweeps and dips
Above the water – no rafter-skimming souls
Translating in and out of the house of life
But air-heavers, far heavier than the air.
Yet something in us had unhoused itself
At the sight of them, so that when she bent
To turn the key she only half-turned it
And spoke, as it were, directly to the windscreen,
In profile and in thought, the wheel at arm’s length,
Averring that this time, yes, it had indeed
Been useful to stop; then inclined her driver’s brow
Which shook a little as the ignition fired.
The Clothes Shrine
It was a whole new sweetness
In the early days to find
Light white muslin blouses
On a see-through nylon line
Drip-drying in the bathroom
Or a nylon slip in the shine
Of its own electricity –
As if St Brigid once more
Had rigged up a ray of sun
Like the one she’d strung on air
To dry her own cloak on
(Hard-pressed Brigid, so
Unstoppably on the go) –
The damp and slump and unfair
Drag of the workaday
Made light of and got through
As usual, brilliantly.
Glanmore Eclogue
MYLES
A house and ground. And your own bay tree as well
And time to yourself. You’ve landed on your feet.
If you can’t write now, when will you ever write?
POET
A woman changed my life. Call her Augusta
Because we arrived in August, and from now on
This month’s baled hay and blackberries and combines
Will spell Augusta’s bounty.
MYLES
Outsiders own
The country nowadays, but even so
I don’t begrudge you. You’re Augusta’s tenant
And that’s enough. She has every right,
Maybe more right than most, to her quarter acre.
She knows the big glen inside out, and everything
Meliboeus ever wrote about it,
All the tramps he met tramping the roads
And all he picked up, listening in a loft
To servant girls colloguing in the kitchen.
Talk about changed lives! Those were the days –
Land Commissions making tenants owners,
Empire taking note at last too late …
But now with all this money coming in
And peace being talked up, the boot’s on the other foot.
First it was Meliboeus’ people
Went to the wall, now it will be us.
Small farmers here are priced out of the market.
POET
Backs to the wall and empty pockets: Meliboeus
Was never happier than when he was on the road
With people on their uppers. Loneliness
Was his passport through the world. Midge-angels
On the face of water, the first drop before thunder,
A stranger on a wild night, out in the rain falling.
His spirit lives for me in things like that.
MYLES
Book-learning is the thing. You’re a lucky man.
No stock to feed, no milking times, no tillage
Nor blisters on your hand nor weather-worries.
POET
Meliboeus would have called me ‘Mr Honey’.
MYLES
Our old language that Meliboeus learnt
Has lovely songs. What about putting words
On one of them, words that the rest of us
Can understand, and singing it here and now?
POET
I have this summer song for the glen and you:
Early summer, cuckoo cuckoos,
Welcome, summer is what he sings.
Heather breathes on soft bog-pillows.
Bog-cotton bows to moorland wind.
The deer’s heart skips a beat; he startles.
The sea’s tide fills, it rests, it runs.
Season of the drowsy ocean.
Tufts of yellow-blossoming whins.
Bogbanks shine like ravens’ wings.
The cuckoo keeps on calling Welcome.
The speckled fish jumps; and the strong
Warrior is up and running.
A little nippy chirpy fellow
Hits the highest note there is;
The lark sings out his clear tidings.
Summer, shimmer, perfect days.
Sonnets from Hellas
1 Into Arcadia
It was opulence and amen on the mountain road.
Walnuts bought on a high pass from a farmer
Who’d worked in Melbourne once and now trained water
Through a system of pipes and runnels of split reed
Known in Hellas, probably, since Hesiod –
That was the least of it. When we crossed the border
From Argos into Arcadia, and farther
Into Arcadia, a lorry load
Of apples had burst open on the road
So that for yards our tyres raunched and scrunched them
But we drove on, juiced up and fleshed and spattered,
Revelling in it. And then it was the goatherd
With his goats in the forecourt of the filling station,
Subsisting beyond eclogue and translation.
2 Conkers
All along the dank, sunk, rock-floored lane
To the acropolis in Sparta, we couldn’t help
Tramping on burst shells and crunching down
The high-gloss horse-chestnuts. I thought of kelp
And foals’ hooves, bladderwort, dubbed leather
As I bent to gather them, a hint of ordure
Coming and going off their tainted pith.
Cyclopic stone on each side of the path.
Rings of defence. Breached walls. The looted conkers
Gravid in my satchel, swinging nicely.
Then a daylight moon appeared behind Dimitri
As he sketched and squared his shoulders like a centaur’s
And nodded, nodded, nodded towards the spouses,
Heard but not seen behind much thick acanthus.
3 Pylos
Barbounia schooled below the balcony –
Shadows on shelving sand in sandy Pylos.
Wave-clip and flirt, tide-slap and flop and flow:
I woke to the world there like Telemachos,
Young again in the whitewashed light of morning
That flashed on the ceiling like an early warning
From myself to be more myself in the mast-bending
Marine breeze, to key the understanding
To that image of the bow strung as a lyre
Robert Fitzgerald spoke of: Harvard Nestor,
Sponsor and host, translator of all Homer,
His wasted face in profile, ceiling-staring
As he schooled me in the course, not yet past caring,
Scanning the offing. Far-seeing shadower.
4 The Augean Stables
My favourite bas-relief: Athene showing
Heracles where to broach the river bank
With a nod of her high helmet, her staff sunk
In the exact spot, the Alpheus flowing
Out of its course into the deep dung strata
Of King Augeas’ reeking yard and stables.
Sweet dissolutions from the water tables,
Blocked doors and packed floors deluging like gutters …
And it was there in Olympia, down among green willows,
The lustral wash and run of river shallows,
That we heard of Sean Brown’s murder in the grounds
Of
Bellaghy GAA Club. And imagined
Hose-water smashing hard back off the asphalt
In the car park where his athlete’s blood ran cold.
5 Castalian Spring
Thunderface. Not Zeus’s ire, but hers
Refusing entry, and mine mounting from it.
This one thing I had vowed: to drink the waters
Of the Castalian Spring, to arrogate
That much to myself and be the poet
Under the god Apollo’s giddy cliff –
But the inner water sanctum was roped off
When we arrived. Well then, to hell with that,
And to hell with all who’d stop me, thunderface!
So up the steps then, into the sandstone grottoes,
The seeps and dreeps, the shallow pools, the mosses,
Come from beyond, and come far, with this useless
Anger draining away, on terraces
Where I bowed and mouthed in sweetness and defiance.
6 Desfina
Mount Parnassus placid on the skyline:
Slieve na mBard, Knock Filiocht, Ben Duan.
We gaelicized new names for Poetry Hill
As we wolfed down horta, tarama and houmos
At sunset in the farmyard, drinking ouzos,
Pretending not to hear the Delphic squeal
Of the streel-haired cailleach in the scullery.
Then it was time to head into Desfina
To allow them to sedate her. And so retsina,
Anchovies, squid, dolmades, french fries even.
My head was light, I was hyper, boozed, borean
As we bowled back down towards the olive plain,
Siren-tyred and manic on the horn
Round hairpin bends looped like boustrophedon.
Vitruviana
for Felim Egan
In the deep pool at Portstewart, I waded in
Up to the chest, then stood there half-suspended
Like Vitruvian man, both legs wide apart,
Both arms out buoyant to the fingertips,
Oxter-cogged on water.
My head was light,
My backbone plumb, my boy-nipples bisected
And tickled by the steel-zip cold meniscus.
*
On the hard scrabble of the junior football pitch
Where Leo Day, the college ‘drillie’, bounced
And counted and kept us all in line
In front of the wooden horse – ‘One! Two! In! Out!’ –
We upped and downed and scissored arms and legs
And spread ourselves on the wind’s cross, felt our palms
As tautly strung as Francis of Assisi’s
In Giotto’s mural, where angelic neon
Zaps the ping-palmed saint with the stigmata.
*
On Sandymount Strand I can connect
Some bits and pieces. My seaside whirligig.
The cardinal points. The grey matter of sand
And sky. And a light that is down to earth
Beginning to fan out and open up.
Audenesque
in memory of Joseph Brodsky
Joseph, yes, you know the beat.
Wystan Auden’s metric feet
Marched to it, unstressed and stressed,
Laying William Yeats to rest.
Therefore, Joseph, on this day,
Yeats’s anniversary,
(Double-crossed and death-marched date,
January twenty-eight),
Its measured ways I tread again
Quatrain by constrained quatrain,
Meting grief and reason out
As you said a poem ought.
Trochee, trochee, falling: thus
Grief and metre order us.
Repetition is the rule,
Spins on lines we learnt at school.
Repetition, too, of cold
In the poet and the world,
Dublin Airport locked in frost,
Rigor mortis in your breast.
Ice no axe or book will break,
No Horatian ode unlock,
No poetic foot imprint,
Quatrain shift or couplet dint,
Ice of Archangelic strength,
Ice of this hard two-faced month,
Ice like Dante’s in deep hell
Makes your heart a frozen well.
Pepper vodka you produced
Once in Western Massachusetts
With the reading due to start
Warmed my spirits and my heart
But no vodka, cold or hot,
Aquavit or uisquebaugh
Brings the blood back to your cheeks
Or the colour to your jokes,
Politically incorrect
Jokes involving sex and sect,
Everything against the grain,
Drinking, smoking like a train.
In a train in Finland we
Talked last summer happily,
Swapping manuscripts and quips,
Both of us like cracking whips
Sharpened up and making free,
Heading west for Tampere
Lenin’s train-trip in reverse).
Nevermore that wild speed-read,
Nevermore your tilted head
Like a deck where mind took off
With a mind-flash and a laugh,
Nevermore that rush to pun
Or to hurry through all yon
Jammed enjambements piling up
As you went above the top,
Nose in air, foot to the floor,
Revving English like a car
You hijacked when you robbed its bank
(Russian was your reserve tank).
Worshipped language can’t undo
Damage time has done to you:
Even your peremptory trust
In words alone here bites the dust.
Dust-cakes, still – see Gilgamesh –
Feed the dead. So be their guest.
Do again what Auden said
Good poets do: bite, break their bread.
To the Shade of Zbigniew Herbert
You were one of those from the back of the north wind
Whom Apollo favoured and would keep going back to
In the winter season. And among your people you
Remained his herald whenever he’d departed
And the land was silent and summer’s promise thwarted.
You learnt the lyre from him and kept it tuned.
Bodies and Souls
1 In the Afterlife
It will be like following Jim Logue, the caretaker,
As he goes to sweep our hair off that classroom floor
Where the school barber set up once a fortnight,
Falling into step as he does his rounds,
Glimmerman of dorms and silent landings,
Of the refectory with its solid, crest-marked delph,
The ground-floor corridor, the laundry pile
And boots tagged for the cobbler. Was that your name
On a label? Were you a body or a soul?
2 Nights of ’57
It wasn’t asphodel but mown grass
We practised on each night after night prayers
When we lapped the college front lawn in bare feet,
Heel-bone and heart-thud, open-mouthed for summer.
The older I get, the quicker and the closer
I hear those labouring breaths and feel the coolth.
3 The Bereaved
Set apart. First out down the aisle
Like brides. Or those boys who were permitted
To leave the study early for music practice –
Privileged and unenvied, left alone
In the four bare walls to face the exercise,
Eyes shut, shoulders straight back, cold hands out
Above the keys. And then the savagery
Of the piano music’s music going wrong.
&nb
sp; from Electric Light
Lisp and relapse. Eddy of sybilline English.
Splashes between a ship and dock, to which,
Animula, I would come alive in time
As ferries churned and turned down Belfast Lough
Towards the brow-to-glass transport of a morning train,
The very ‘there-you-are-and-where-are-you?’
Of poetry itself. Backs of houses
Like the back of hers, meat-safes and mangles
In the railway-facing yards of fleeting England,
An allotment scarecrow among patted rigs,
Then a town-edge soccer pitch, the groin of distance,
Fields of grain like the Field of the Cloth of Gold.
To Southwark too I came,
From tube-mouth into sunlight,
Moyola-breath by Thames’s ‘straunge stronde’.
A Shiver
The way you had to stand to swing the sledge,
Your two knees locked, your lower back shock-fast
As shields in a testudo, spine and waist
A pivot for the tight-braced, tilting rib-cage;
The way its iron head planted the sledge
Unyieldingly as a club-footed last;
The way you had to heft and then half-rest
Its gathered force like a long-nursed rage
About to be let fly: does it do you good
To have known it in your bones, directable,
Withholdable at will,
A first blow that could make air of a wall,