A last one so unanswerably landed
The staked earth quailed and shivered in the handle?
Anahorish 1944
‘We were killing pigs when the Americans arrived.
A Tuesday morning, sunlight and gutter-blood
Outside the slaughterhouse. From the main road
They would have heard the squealing,
Then heard it stop and had a view of us
In our gloves and aprons coming down the hill.
Two lines of them, guns on their shoulders, marching.
Armoured cars and tanks and open jeeps.
Sunburnt hands and arms. Unknown, unnamed,
Hosting for Normandy.
Not that we knew then
Where they were headed, standing there like youngsters
As they tossed us gum and tubes of coloured sweets.’
Anything Can Happen
after Horace, Odes, 1, 34
Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter
Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head
Before he hurls the lightning? Well, just now
He galloped his thunder cart and his horses
Across a clear blue sky. It shook the earth
And the clogged underearth, the River Styx,
The winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself.
Anything can happen, the tallest towers
Be overturned, those in high places daunted,
Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak Fortune
Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest off one,
Setting it down bleeding on the next.
Ground gives. The heaven’s weight
Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle-lid.
Capstones shift, nothing resettles right.
Telluric ash and fire-spores boil away.
District and Circle
Tunes from a tin whistle underground
Curled up a corridor I’d be walking down
To where I knew I was always going to find
My watcher on the tiles, cap by his side,
His fingers perked, his two eyes eyeing me
In an unaccusing look I’d not avoid,
Or not just yet, since both were out to see
For ourselves.
As the music larked and capered
I’d trigger and untrigger a hot coin
Held at the ready, but now my gaze was lowered
For was our traffic not in recognition?
Accorded passage, I would re-pocket and nod,
And he, still eyeing me, would also nod.
*
Posted, eyes front, along the dreamy ramparts
Of escalators ascending and descending
To a monotonous slight rocking in the works,
We were moved along, upstanding.
Elsewhere, underneath, an engine powered,
Rumbled, quickened, evened, quieted.
The white tiles gleamed. In passages that flowed
With draughts from cooler tunnels, I missed the light
Of all-overing, long since mysterious day,
Parks at lunchtime where the sunners lay
On body-heated mown grass regardless,
A resurrection scene minutes before
The resurrection, habitués
Of their garden of delights, of staggered summer.
*
Another level down, the platform thronged.
I re-entered the safety of numbers,
A crowd half straggle-ravelled and half strung
Like a human chain, the pushy newcomers
Jostling and purling underneath the vault,
On their marks to be first through the doors,
Street-loud, then succumbing to herd-quiet …
Had I betrayed or not, myself or him?
Always new to me, always familiar,
This unrepentant, now repentant turn
As I stood waiting, glad of a first tremor,
Then caught up in the now-or-never whelm
Of one and all the full length of the train.
*
Stepping on to it across the gap,
On to the carriage metal, I reached to grab
The stubby black roof-wort and take my stand
From planted ball of heel to heel of hand
As sweet traction and heavy down-slump stayed me.
I was on my way, well girded, yet on edge,
Spot-rooted, buoyed, aloof,
Listening to the dwindling noises off,
My back to the unclosed door, the platform empty;
And wished it could have lasted,
That long between-times pause before the budge
And glaze-over, when any forwardness
Was unwelcome and bodies readjusted,
Blindsided to themselves and other bodies.
*
So deeper into it, crowd-swept, strap-hanging,
My lofted arm a-swivel like a flail,
My father’s glazed face in my own waning
And craning …
Again the growl
Of shutting doors, the jolt and one-off treble
Of iron on iron, then a long centrifugal
Haulage of speed through every dragging socket.
And so by night and day to be transported
Through galleried earth with them, the only relict
Of all that I belonged to, hurtled forward,
Reflecting in a window mirror-backed
By blasted weeping rock-walls.
Flicker-lit.
Wordsworth’s Skates
Star in the window.
Slate scrape.
Bird or branch?
Or the whet and scud of steel on placid ice?
Not the bootless runners lying toppled
In dust in a display case,
Their bindings perished,
But the reel of them on frozen Windermere
As he flashed from the clutch of earth along its curve
And left it scored.
Found Prose
1 The Lagans Road
The Lagans Road ran for about three quarters of a mile across an area of wetlands. It was one of those narrow country roads with weeds in the middle, grass verges and high hedges on either side, and all around it marsh and rushes and little shrubs and birch trees. For a minute or two every day, therefore, you were in the wilderness, but on the first morning I went to school it was as if the queen of elfland was leading me away. The McNicholls were neighbours and Philomena McNicholl had been put in charge of me during those first days. Ginger hair, freckled face, green gymfrock – a fey, if ever there was one. I remember my first sight of the school, a couple of low-set Nissen huts raising their corrugated backs above the hedges. From about a quarter of a mile away I could see youngsters running about in the road in front of the buildings and hear shouting in the playground. Years later, when I read an account of how the Indians of the Pacific Northwest foresaw their arrival in the land of the dead – coming along a forest path where other travellers’ cast-offs lay scattered on the bushes, hearing voices laughing and calling, knowing there was a life in the clearing up ahead that would be familiar, but feeling at the same time lost and homesick – it struck me I had already experienced that kind of arrival. Next thing in the porch I was faced with rows of coathooks nailed up at different heights along the wall, so that everyone in the different classes could reach them, everyone had place to hang overcoat or scarf and proceed to the strange
room, where our names were new in the rollbook and
would soon be called.
2 Tall Dames
Even though we called them ‘the gypsies’, we knew that gypsies were properly another race. They inhabited the land of eros, glimpsed occasionally when the circus rolled into a field and a fortune-teller, swathed in her silks and beads, inclined to us from the back door of a caravan. The people we called ‘the gypsies’ we would now call travellers, although at that time in that place ‘tinker’ was an honourable t
erm, signifying tin-smiths, white-smiths, pony-keepers, regulars on the doorstep, squatters on the long acre. Marvellous upfront women in unerotic woollen shawls, woven in big tartan patterns of tan and mossy green, their baskets full of dyed wooden flowers, their speech cadenced to beg and keep begging with all the stamina of a cantor. Walking the roads in ones and twos, children on their arms or at their heels. Squaws of the ditchback, in step with Yeats’s ‘tall dames’ walking in Avalon.
You encountered them in broad daylight, going about their usual business, yet there was always a feeling that they were coming towards you out of storytime. One of the menfolk on the road with a bit of a halter, you on your way to school, he with a smell of woodsmoke off him, asking if you’d seen an old horse anywhere behind the hedges. The stillness of the low tarpaulin tent as you approached and passed, the green wood in the fire spitting under a pot slung from a tripod. Every time they landed in the district, there was an extra-ness in the air, as if a gate had been left open in the usual life, as if something might get in or get out.
3 Boarders
There’s no heat in the bus, but the engine’s running and up where a destination should be showing it just says PRIVATE, so it must be ours. We’re back in the days of peaked caps and braid piping, drivers mounting steps as ominously as hangmen, conductors with plump bags of coin, the ticket punch a-dangle on its chain. But this is a special bus, so there’ll be no tickets, no conductor and no fare collection until the load is full.
The stops are the same as every other time, clusters of us with suitcases assembled in shop doorways or at the appointed crossroads, the old bus getting up speed wherever the going’s good, but now she’s changing down on Glenshane Pass. The higher she goes, the heavier she pulls, and yet there’s no real hurry. Let the driver keep doing battle with the gear-stick, let his revs and double-clutchings drag the heart, anything to put off that last stop when he slows down at the summit and turns and seems about to take us back. Instead of which he halts, pulls on the handbrake, gives us time to settle, then switches off.
When we start again, the full lock of the steering will be held, the labour of cut and spin leave tyre-marks in the gravel, the known country fall away behind us. But for the moment it’s altogether quiet, the whole bus shakes as he bangs the cabin door shut, comes round the side and in to lift the money. Unfamiliar, uninvolved, almost, it seems, angered, he deals with us one by one, as one by one we go farther into ourselves, wishing we were him on the journey back, flailing downhill with the windows all lit up, empty and faster and angrier bend after bend.
The Lift
A first green braird: the hawthorn half in leaf.
Her funeral filled the road
And could have stepped from some old photograph
Of a Breton pardon, remote
Familiar women and men in caps
Walking four abreast, soon falling quiet.
Of a helicopter crossing, and afterwards
Awareness of the sound of our own footsteps,
Of open air, and the life behind those words
‘Open’ and ‘air’. I remembered her aghast,
Foetal, shaking, sweating, shrunk, wet-haired,
A beaten breath, a misting mask, the flash
Of one wild glance, like ghost surveillance
From behind a gleam of helicopter glass.
A lifetime, then the deathtime: reticence
Keeping us together when together,
All declaration deemed outspokenness.
Favourite aunt, good sister, faithful daughter,
Delicate since childhood, tough alloy
Of disapproval, kindness and hauteur,
She took the risk, at last, of certain joys –
Her birdtable and jubilating birds,
The ‘fashion’ in her wardrobe and her tallboy.
Weather, in the end, would say our say.
Reprise of griefs in summer’s clearest mornings,
Children’s deaths in snowdrops and the may,
Whole requiems at the sight of plants and gardens …
They bore her lightly on the bier. Four women,
Four friends – she would have called them girls – stepped in
And claimed the final lift beneath the hawthorn.
Nonce Words
The road taken
to bypass Cavan
took me west,
(a sign mistaken)
so at Derrylin
I turned east.
Sun on ice,
white floss
on reed and bush,
the bridge-iron cast
in an Advent silence
I drove across,
then pulled in,
parked, and sat
breathing mist
on the windscreen.
Requiescat …
I got out
well happed up,
stood at the frozen
shore gazing
at rimed horizon,
my first stop
like this in years.
And blessed myself
in the name of the nonce
and happenstance,
the Who knows
and What nexts
and So be its.
Stern
in memory of Ted Hughes
‘And what was it like,’ I asked him,
‘Meeting Eliot?’
‘When he looked at you,’
He said, ‘it was like standing on a quay
Watching the prow of the Queen Mary
Come towards you, very slowly.’
Now it seems
I’m standing on a pierhead watching him
All the while watching me as he rows out
And a wooden end-stopped stern
Labours and shimmers and dips,
from Out of This World
in memory of Czeslaw Milosz
1 ‘Like everybody else …’
‘Like everybody else, I bowed my head
during the consecration of the bread and wine,
lifted my eyes to the raised host and raised chalice,
believed (whatever it means) that a change occurred.
I went to the altar rails and received the mystery
on my tongue, returned to my place, shut my eyes fast, made
an act of thanksgiving, opened my eyes and felt
time starting up again.
There was never a scene
when I had it out with myself or with another.
The loss occurred off-stage. And yet I cannot
disavow words like “thanksgiving” or “host”
or “communion bread”. They have an undying
tremor and draw, like well water far down.’
In Iowa
In Iowa once, among the Mennonites
In a slathering blizzard, conveyed all afternoon
Through sleet-glit pelting hard against the windscreen
And a wiper’s strong absolving slumps and flits,
I saw, abandoned in the open gap
Of a field where wilted corn stalks flagged the snow,
A mowing machine. Snow brimmed its iron seat,
Heaped each spoked wheel with a thick white brow
And took the shine off oil in the black-toothed gears.
Verily I came forth from that wilderness
As one unbaptized who had known darkness
At the third hour and the veil in tatters.
In Iowa once. In the slush and rush and hiss
Not of parted but as of rising waters.
Höfn
The three-tongued glacier has begun to melt.
What will we do, they ask, when boulder-milt
Comes wallowing across the delta flats
And the miles-deep shag-ice makes its move?
I saw it, ridged and rock-set, from above,
Undead grey-gristed earth-pelt, aeon
-scruff,
And feared its coldness that still seemed enough
To iceblock the plane window dimmed with breath,
Deepfreeze the seep of adamantine tilth
And every warm, mouthwatering word of mouth.
The Tollund Man in Springtime
Into your virtual city I’ll have passed
Unregistered by scans, screens, hidden eyes,
Lapping myself in time, an absorbed face
Coming and going, neither god nor ghost,
Not at odds or at one, but simply lost
To you and yours, out under seeding grass
And trickles of kesh water, sphagnum moss,
Dead bracken on the spreadfield, red as rust.
I reawoke to revel in the spirit
They strengthened when they chose to put me down
For their own good. And to a sixth-sensed threat:
Panicked snipe offshooting into twilight,
Then going awry, larks quietened in the sun,
Clear alteration in the bog-pooled rain.
*
Scone of peat, composite bog-dough
They trampled like a muddy vintage, then
Slabbed and spread and turned to dry in sun –
Though never kindling-dry the whole way through –
A dead-weight, slow-burn lukewarmth in the flue,
Ashless, flameless, its very smoke a sullen
Waft of swamp-breath … And me, so long unrisen,