flax-pullings, dances, fair-days, crossroads chat
and the shaky local voice of education.
All that. And always, Orange drums.
And neighbours on the roads at night with guns.’
‘I know, I know, I know, I know,’ he said,
‘but you have to try to make sense of what comes.
Remember everything and keep your head.’
‘The alders in the hedge,’ I said, ‘mushrooms,
dark-clumped grass where cows or horses dunged,
the cluck when pith-lined chestnut shells split open
in your hand, the melt of shells corrupting,
old jam pots in a drain clogged up with mud—’
But now Carleton was interrupting:
‘All this is like a trout kept in a spring
or maggots sown in wounds—
another life that cleans our element.
We are earthworms of the earth, and all that
has gone through us is what will be our trace.’
He turned on his heel when he was saying this
and headed up the road at the same hard pace.
III
I knelt. Hiatus. Habit’s afterlife …
I was back among bead clicks and the murmurs
from inside confessionals, side altars
where candles died insinuating slight
intimate smells of wax at body heat.
There was an active, wind-stilled hush, as if
in a shell the listened-for ocean stopped
and a tide rested and sustained the roof.
A seaside trinket floated then and idled
in vision, like phosphorescent weed,
a toy grotto with seedling mussel shells
and cockles glued in patterns over it,
pearls condensed from a child invalid’s breath
into a shimmering ark, my house of gold
that housed the snowdrop weather of her death
long ago. I would stow away in the hold
of our big oak sideboard and forage for it
laid past in its tissue paper for good.
It was like touching birds’ eggs, robbing the nest
of the word wreath, as kept and dry and secret
as her name, which they hardly ever spoke
but was a white bird trapped inside me
beating scared wings when Health of the Sick
fluttered its pray for us in the litany.
A cold draught blew under the kneeling boards.
I thought of walking round
and round a space utterly empty,
utterly a source, like the idea of sound
or like the absence sensed in swamp-fed air
above a ring of walked-down grass and rushes
where we once found the bad carcass and scrags of hair
of our dog that had disappeared weeks before.
IV
Blurred swimmings as I faced the sun, my back
to the stone pillar and the iron cross,
ready to say the dream words I renounce …
Blurred oval prints of newly ordained faces,
‘Father’ pronounced with a fawning relish,
the sunlit tears of parents being blessed.
I saw a young priest, glossy as a blackbird,
as if he had stepped from his anointing
a moment ago: his purple stole and cord
or cincture tied loosely, his polished shoes
unexpectedly secular beneath
a pleated, lace-hemmed alb of linen cloth.
His name had lain undisturbed for years
like an old bicycle wheel in a ditch
ripped at last from under jungling briars,
wet and perished. My arms were open wide
but I could not say the words. ‘The rain forest,’ he said,
‘you’ve never seen the like of it. I lasted
only a couple of years. Bare-breasted
women and rat-ribbed men. Everything wasted.
I rotted like a pear. I sweated Masses…’
His breath came short and shorter. ‘In longhouses
I raised the chalice above headdresses.
In hoc signo … On that abandoned
mission compound, my vocation
is a steam off drenched creepers.’
I had broken off from the renunciation
while he was speaking, to clear the way
for other pilgrims queueing to get started.
‘I’m older now than you when you went away,’
I ventured, feeling a strange reversal.
‘I never could see you on the foreign missions.
I could only see you on a bicycle,
a clerical student home for the summer
doomed to the decent thing. Visiting neighbours.
Drinking tea and praising home-made bread.
Something in them would be ratified
when they saw you at the door in your black suit,
arriving like some sort of holy mascot.
You gave too much relief, you raised a siege
the world had laid against their kitchen grottoes
hung with holy pictures and crucifixes.’
‘And you,’ he faltered, ‘what are you doing here
but the same thing? What possessed you?
I at least was young and unaware
that what I thought was chosen was convention.
But all this you were clear of you walked into
over again. And the god has, as they say, withdrawn.
What are you doing, going through these motions?
Unless … Unless…’ Again he was short of breath
and his whole fevered body yellowed and shook.
‘Unless you are here taking the last look.’
Then where he stood was empty as the roads
we both grew up beside, where the sick man
had taken his last look one drizzly evening
when the tarmac steamed with the first breath of spring,
a knee-deep mist I waded silently
behind him, on his circuits, visiting.
V
An old man’s hands, like soft paws rowing forward,
groped for and warded off the air ahead.
Barney Murphy shuffled on the concrete.
Master Murphy. I heard the weakened voice
bulling in sudden rage all over again
and fell in behind, my eyes fixed on his heels
like a man lifting swathes at a mower’s heels.
His sockless feet were like the dried broad bean
that split its stitches in the display jar
high on a window in the old classroom,
white as shy faces in the classroom door.
‘Master,’ those elders whispered, ‘I wonder, master…’
rustling envelopes, proffering them, withdrawing,
waiting for him to sign beside their mark,
and ‘Master’ I repeated to myself
so that he stopped but did not turn or move,
gone quiet in the shoulders, his small head
vigilant in the cold gusts off the lough.
I moved ahead and faced him, shook his hand.
Above the winged collar, his mottled face
went distant in a smile as the voice
readied itself and husked and scraped, ‘Good man,
good man yourself,’ before it lapsed again
in the limbo and dry urn of the larynx.
The Adam’s apple in its weathered sac
worked like the plunger of a pump in drought
but yielded nothing to help the helpless smile.
Morning field smells came past on the wind,
the sex-cut of sweetbriar after rain,
new-mown meadow hay, birds’ nests filled with leaves.
‘You’d have thought that Anahorish School
was purgatory enough for any man,’
I said. ‘Y
ou have done your station.’
Then a little trembling happened and his breath
rushed the air softly as scythes in his lost meadows.
‘Birch trees have overgrown Leitrim Moss,
dairy herds are grazing where the school was
and the school garden’s loose black mould is grass.’
He was gone with that and I was faced wrong way
into more pilgrims absorbed in this exercise.
As I stood among their whispers and bare feet
the mists of all the mornings I set out
for Latin classes with him, face to face,
refreshed me. Mensa, mensa, mensam
sang in the air like a busy sharping-stone.
‘We’ll go some day to my uncle’s farm at Toome—’
Another master spoke. ‘For what is the great
moving power and spring of verse? Feeling, and
in particular, love. When I went last year
I drank three cups of water from the well.
It was very cold. It stung me in the ears.
You should have met him—’ Coming in as usual
with the rubbed quotation and his cocked bird’s eye
dabbing for detail. When you’re on the road
give lifts to people, you’ll always learn something.
There he went, in his belted gaberdine,
and after him, a third fosterer,
slack-shouldered and clear-eyed: ‘Sure I might have known
once I had made the pad, you’d be after me
sooner or later. Forty-two years on
and you’ve got no farther! But after that again,
where else would you go? Iceland, maybe? Maybe the Dordogne?’
And then the parting shot. ‘In my own day
the odd one came here on the hunt for women.’
VI
Freckle-face, fox-head, pod of the broom,
Catkin-pixie, little fern-swish:
Where did she arrive from?
Like a wish wished
And gone, her I chose at ‘secrets’
And whispered to. When we were playing houses.
I was sunstruck at the basilica door—
A stillness far away, a space, a dish,
A blackened tin and knocked-over stool—
Like a tramped neolithic floor
Uncovered among dunes where the bent grass
Whispers on like reeds about Midas’s
Secrets, secrets. I shut my ears to the bell.
Head hugged. Eyes shut. Leaf ears. Don’t tell. Don’t tell.
A stream of pilgrims answering the bell
Trailed up the steps as I went down them
Towards the bottle-green, still
Shade of an oak. Shades of the Sabine farm
On the beds of Saint Patrick’s Purgatory.
Late summer, country distance, not an air:
Loosen the toga for wine and poetry
Till Phoebus returning routs the morning star.
As a somnolent hymn to Mary rose
I felt an old pang that bags of grain
And the sloped shafts of forks and hoes
Once mocked me with, at my own long virgin
Fasts and thirsts, my nightly shadow feasts,
Haunting the granaries of words like breasts.
As if I knelt for years at a keyhole
Mad for it, and all that ever opened
Was the breathed-on grille of a confessional
Until that night I saw her honey-skinned
Shoulder-blades and the wheatlands of her back
Through the wide keyhole of her keyhole dress
And a window facing the deep south of luck
Opened and I inhaled the land of kindness.
As little flowers that were all bowed and shut
By the night chills rise on their stems and open
As soon as they have felt the touch of sunlight,
So I revived in my own wilting powers
And my heart flushed, like somebody set free.
Translated, given, under the oak tree.
VII
I had come to the edge of the water,
soothed by just looking, idling over it
as if it were a clear barometer
or a mirror, when his reflection
did not appear but I sensed a presence
entering into my concentration
on not being concentrated as he spoke
my name. And though I was reluctant
I turned to meet his face and the shock
is still in me at what I saw. His brow
was blown open above the eye and blood
had dried on his neck and cheek. ‘Easy now,’
he said, ‘it’s only me. You’ve seen men as raw
after a football match … What time it was
when I was wakened up I still don’t know
but I heard this knocking, knocking, and it
scared me, like the phone in the small hours,
so I had the sense not to put on the light
but looked out from behind the curtain.
I saw two customers on the doorstep
and an old Land Rover with the doors open
parked on the street, so I let the curtain drop;
but they must have been waiting for it to move
for they shouted to come down into the shop.
She started to cry then and roll round the bed,
lamenting and lamenting to herself,
not even asking who it was. “Is your head
astray, or what’s come over you?” I roared, more
to bring myself to my senses
than out of any real anger at her,
for the knocking shook me, the way they kept it up,
and her whingeing and half-screeching made it worse.
All the time they were shouting, “Shop!
Shop!” so I pulled on my shoes and a sportscoat
and went back to the window and called out,
“What do you want? Could you quieten the racket
or I’ll not come down at all.” “There’s a child not well.
Open up and see what you have got—pills
one of them said. He stepped back off the footpath
so I could see his face in the streetlamp
and when the other moved I knew them both.
But bad and all as the knocking was, the quiet
hit me worse. She was quiet herself now,
lying dead still, whispering to watch out.
At the bedroom door I switched on the light.
“It’s odd they didn’t look for a chemist.
Who are they anyway at this time of the night?”
she asked me, with the eyes standing in her head.
“I know them to see,” I said, but something
made me reach and squeeze her hand across the bed
before I went downstairs into the aisle
of the shop. I stood there, going weak
in the legs. I remember the stale smell
of cooked meat or something coming through
as I went to open up. From then on
you know as much about it as I do.’
‘Did they say nothing?’ ‘Nothing. What would they say?’
‘Were they in uniform? Not masked in any way?’
‘They were barefaced as they would be in the day,
shites thinking they were the be-all and the end-all.’
‘Not that it is any consolation,
but they were caught,’ I told him, ‘and got jail.’
Big-limbed, decent, open-faced, he stood
forgetful of everything now except
whatever was welling up in his spoiled head,
beginning to smile. ‘You’ve put on weight
since you did your courting in that big Austin
you got the loan of on a Sunday night.’
Through life and death he had hardly aged.
There always was an athlete’s cleanliness
shining off him, and except for the ravaged
forehead and the blood, he was still that same
rangy midfielder in a blue jersey
and starched pants, the one stylist on the team,
the perfect, clean, unthinkable victim.
‘Forgive the way I have lived indifferent—
forgive my timid circumspect involvement,’
I surprised myself by saying. ‘Forgive
my eye,’ he said, ‘all that’s above my head.’
And then a stun of pain seemed to go through him
and he trembled like a heatwave and faded.
VIII
Black water. White waves. Furrows snowcapped.
A magpie flew from the basilica
and staggered in the granite airy space
I was staring into, on my knees
at the hard mouth of Saint Brigid’s Bed.
I came to and there at the bed’s stone hub
was my archaeologist, very like himself,
with his scribe’s face smiling its straight-lipped smile,
starting at the sight of me with the same old
pretence of amazement, so that the wing
of wood-kerne’s hair fanned down over his brow.
And then as if a shower were blackening
already blackened stubble, the dark weather
of his unspoken pain came over him.
A pilgrim bent and whispering on his rounds
inside the bed passed between us slowly.
‘Those dreamy stars that pulsed across the screen
beside you in the ward—your heartbeats, Tom, I mean—
scared me the way they stripped things naked.
My banter failed too early in that visit.
I could not take my eyes off the machine.
I had to head back straightaway to Dublin,
guilty and empty, feeling I had said nothing
and that, as usual, I had somehow broken
covenants, and failed an obligation.
I half-knew we would never meet again …
Did our long gaze and last handshake contain
nothing to appease that recognition?’
‘Nothing at all. But familiar stone
had me half-numbed to face the thing alone.
I loved my still-faced archaeology.
The small crab-apple physiognomies
on high crosses, carved heads in abbeys …
Why else dig in for years in that hard place
in a muck of bigotry under the walls
picking through shards and Williamite cannon balls?
But all that we just turned to banter too.
I felt that I should have seen far more of you
and maybe would have—but dead at thirty-two!
Ah poet, lucky poet, tell me why