New Selected Poems Read online

  The hour mercurial rainwater

  Makes a mirror for sparrows.

  It’s time we drowned our sorrows.

  I tiptoe in.

  I lift you up

  Wriggling

  In your rosy, zipped sleeper.

  Yes, this is the hour

  For the early bird and me

  When finder is keeper.

  I crook the bottle.

  How you suckle!

  This is the best I can be,

  Housewife

  To this nursery

  Where you hold on,

  Dear life.

  A silt of milk.

  The last suck.

  And now your eyes are open,

  Birth-coloured and offended.

  Earth wakes.

  You go back to sleep.

  The feed is ended.

  Worms turn.

  Stars go in.

  Even the moon is losing face.

  Poplars stilt for dawn

  And we begin

  The long fall from grace.

  I tuck you in.

  Domestic Interior

  for Kevin

  The woman is as round

  as the new ring

  ambering her finger.

  The mirror weds her.

  She has long since been bedded.

  There is

  about it all

  a quiet search for attention

  like the unexpected shine

  of a despised utensil.

  The oils,

  the varnishes,

  the cracked light,

  the worm of permanence –

  all of them supplied by Van Eyck –

  by whose edict she will stay

  burnished, fertile,

  on her wedding day,

  interred in her joy.

  Love, turn.

  The convex of your eye

  that is so loving, bright

  and constant yet shows

  only this woman in her varnishes,

  who won’t improve in the light.

  But there’s a way of life

  that is its own witness:

  Put the kettle on, shut the blind.

  Home is a sleeping child,

  an open mind

  and our effects,

  shrugged and settled

  in the sort of light

  jugs and kettles

  grow important by.

  Energies

  This is my time:

  the twilight closing in,

  a hissing on the ring,

  stove noises, kettle steam

  and children’s kisses.

  But the energy of flowers!

  Their faces are so white –

  my garden daisies –

  they are so tight-fisted,

  such economies of light.

  In the dusk they have made hay:

  in a banked radiance,

  in an acreage of brightness

  they are misering the day

  while mine delays away

  in chores left to do:

  the soup, the bath, the fire

  then bed-time,

  up the stairs –

  and there, there

  the buttery curls,

  the light,

  the bran-fur of the teddy bear,

  the fist like a night-time daisy,

  damp and tight.

  Monotony

  The stilled hub

  and polar drab

  of the suburb

  closes in.

  In the round

  of the staircase,

  my arms sheafing nappies,

  I grow in and down

  to an old spiral,

  a well of questions,

  an oracle:

  will it tell me

  am I

  at these altars,

  warm shrines,

  washing machines, dryers

  with their incense

  of men and infants,

  priestess

  or sacrifice?

  My late tasks

  wait like children:

  milk bottles,

  the milkman’s note.

  Cold air

  clouds the rinsed,

  milky glass,

  blowing clear

  with a hint

  of winter constellations:

  will I find

  my answer where

  Virgo reaps?

  Her arms sheafing

  the hemisphere,

  hour after frigid hour,

  her virgin stars,

  her maidenhead

  married to force

  harry us

  to wed our gleams

  to brute routines:

  solstices,

  small families.

  Endings

  A child

  shifts in a cot.

  No matter what happens now

  I’ll never fill one again.

  It’s a night

  white things ember in:

  jasmine and the shine –

  flowering, opaline –

  of the apple trees.

  If I lean

  I can see

  what it is the branches end in:

  The leaf.

  The reach.

  The blossom.

  The abandon.

  After a Childhood Away from Ireland

  One summer

  we slipped in at dawn

  on plum-coloured water

  in the sloppy quiet.

  The engines

  of the ship stopped.

  There was an eerie

  drawing near,

  a noiseless coming head-on

  of red roofs, walls,

  dogs, barley stooks.

  Then we were there.

  Cobh.

  Coming home.

  I had heard of this:

  the ground the emigrants

  resistless, weeping

  laid their cheeks to,

  put their lips to kiss.

  Love is also memory.

  I only stared.

  What I had lost

  was not land

  but the habit of land:

  whether of growing out of

  or settling back on,

  or being

  defined by.

  I climb

  to your nursery.

  I stand listening

  to the dissonances

  of the summer’s day ending.

  I bend to kiss you.

  Your cheeks

  are brick pink.

  The Muse Mother

  My window pearls wet.

  The bare rowan tree

  berries rain.

  I can see

  from where I stand

  a woman hunkering –

  her busy hand

  worrying a child’s face,

  working a nappy liner

  over his sticky loud

  round of a mouth.

  Her hand’s a cloud

  across his face

  making light and rain,

  smiles and a frown,

  a smile again.

  She jockeys him to her hip,

  pockets the nappy liner,

  collars rain on her nape

  and moves away

  but my mind stays fixed:

  if I could only decline her –

  lost noun

  out of context,

  stray figure of speech –

  from this rainy street

  again to her roots,

  she might teach me

  a new language:

  to be a sibyl

  able to sing the past

  in pure syllables,

  limning hymns sung

  to belly wheat or a woman –

  able to speak at last

  my mother tongue.

  Woman in Kitchen

  Breakfast over, islanded by noise,

  she watches the machines go fast
and slow.

  She stands among them as they shake the house.

  They move. Their destination is specific.

  She has nowhere definite to go:

  she might be a pedestrian in traffic.

  White surfaces retract. White

  sideboards light the white of walls.

  Cups wink white in their saucers.

  The light of day bleaches as it falls

  on cups and sideboards. She could use

  the room to tap with if she lost her sight.

  Machines jigsaw everything she knows.

  And she is everywhere among their furor:

  the tropic of the dryer tumbling clothes.

  The round lunar window of the washer.

  The kettle in the toaster is a kingfisher

  swooping for trout above the river’s mirror.

  The wash done, the kettle boiled, the sheets

  spun and clean, the dryer stops dead.

  The silence is a death. It starts to bury

  the room in white spaces. She turns to spread

  a cloth on the board and irons sheets

  in a room white and quiet as a mortuary.

  Patchwork or the Poet’s Craft

  I have been thinking at random

  on the universe

  or rather, how nothing in the universe

  is random –

  (there’s nothing like presumption late at night.)

  My sumptuous

  trash bag of colours –

  Laura Ashley cottons –

  waits to be cut

  and stitched and patched

  but there’s a mechanical feel

  about the handle

  of my second-hand sewing machine,

  with its flowers

  and Singer painted orange on it.

  And its iron wheel.

  My back is to the dark.

  Somewhere out there

  are stars and bits of stars

  and little bits of bits.

  And swiftnesses and brightnesses and drift.

  But is it craft or art?

  I will be here

  till midnight,

  cross-legged in the dining-room,

  logging triangles and diamonds,

  cutting and aligning,

  finding greens in pinks

  and burgundies in whites

  until I finish it.

  There’s no reason in it.

  Only when it’s laid

  right across the floor,

  sphere on square

  and seam on seam,

  in a good light –

  a night-sky spread –

  will it start to hit me.

  These are not bits.

  They are pieces.

  And the pieces fit.

  Degas’s Laundresses

  You rise, you dawn

  roll-sleeved Aphrodites,

  out of a camisole brine,

  a linen pit of stitches,

  silking the fitted sheets

  away from you like waves.

  You seam dreams in the folds

  of wash from which freshes

  the whiff and reach of fields

  where it bleached and stiffened.

  Your chat’s sabbatical:

  brides, wedding outfits,

  a pleasure of leisured women

  are sweated into the folds,

  the neat heaps of linen.

  Now the drag of the clasp.

  Your wrists basket your waist.

  You round to the square weight.

  Wait. There behind you.

  A man. There behind you.

  Whatever you do don’t turn.

  Why is he watching you?

  Whatever you do don’t turn.

  Whatever you do don’t turn.

  See he takes his ease

  staking his easel so,

  slowly sharpening charcoal,

  closing his eyes just so,

  slowly smiling as if

  so slowly he is

  unbandaging his mind.

  Surely a good laundress

  would understand its twists,

  its white turns,

  its blind designs –

  it’s your winding sheet.

  It’s a Woman’s World

  Our way of life

  has hardly changed

  since a wheel first

  whetted a knife.

  Maybe flame

  burns more greedily

  and wheels are steadier

  but we’re the same

  who milestone

  our lives

  with oversights –

  living by the lights

  of the loaf left

  by the cash register,

  the washing powder

  paid for and wrapped,

  the wash left wet:

  like most historic peoples

  we are defined

  by what we forget,

  by what we will never be –

  star-gazers,

  fire-eaters.

  It’s our alibi

  for all time:

  as far as history goes

  we were never

  on the scene of the crime.

  So when the king’s head

  gored its basket –

  grim harvest –

  we were gristing bread

  or getting the recipe

  for a good soup

  to appetise

  our gossip.

  It’s still the same.

  By night our windows

  moth our children

  to the flame

  of hearth not history.

  And still no page

  scores the low music

  of our outrage.

  Appearances

  still reassure:

  that woman there

  craned to the starry mystery

  is merely getting a breath

  of evening air,

  while this one here –

  her mouth

  a burning plume –

  she’s no fire-eater,

  just my frosty neighbour

  coming home.

  The New Pastoral

  The first man had flint to spark. He had a wheel

  to read his world

  I’m in the dark.

  I am a lost, last inhabitant –

  displaced person

  in a pastoral chaos.

  All day I listen to

  the loud distress, the switch and tick of

  new herds.

  But I’m no shepherdess.

  Can I unbruise these sprouts or clean this mud flesh

  till it roots again?

  Can I make whole

  this lamb’s knuckle, butchered from its last crooked suckling?

  I could be happy here,

  I could be something more than a refugee

  were it not for this lamb unsuckled, for the nonstop

  switch and tick

  telling me

  there was a past,

  there was a pastoral,

  and these chance sights

  what are they all

  but amnesias of a rite

  I danced once on a frieze?

  ‘Daphne with her thighs in bark’

  I have written this

  so that,

  in the next myth,

  my sister will be wiser.

  Let her learn from me:

  the opposite of passion

  is not virtue

  but routine.

  Look at me

  I can be cooking,

  making coffee,

  scrubbing wood, perhaps,

  and back it comes:

  the crystalline, the otherwhere,

  the wood

  where I was

  when he began the chase.

  And how I ran from him!

  Pan-thighed,

  satyr-faced he was.

  The trees reached out to me.r />
  I silvered and

  I quivered. I shook out

  my foil of quick leaves.

  He snouted past.

  What a fool I was!

  I shall be here forever,

  setting out the tea,

  among the coppers and the branching alloys and

  the tin shine of this kitchen;

  laying saucers on the pine table.

  Save face, sister.

  Fall. Stumble.

  Rut with him.

  His rough heat will keep you warm and

  you will be better off than me,

  with your memories

  down the garden,

  at the start of March,

  unable to keep your eyes

  off the chestnut tree –

  just the way

  it thrusts and hardens

  The Woman Turns Herself into a Fish

  Unpod

  the bag,

  the seed.

  Slap

  the flanks back.

  Flatten

  paps.

  Make finny

  scaled

  and chill

  the slack

  and dimple

  of the rump.

  Pout

  the mouth,

  brow the eyes

  and now

  and now