New Selected Poems Read online

  eclipse

  in these hips,

  these loins

  the moon,

  the blood

  flux.

  It’s done.

  I turn,

  I flab upward

  blub-lipped,

  hipless

  and I am

  sexless

  shed

  of ecstasy,

  a pale

  swimmer

  sequin-skinned,

  pearling eggs

  screamlessly

  in seaweed.

  It’s what

  I set my heart on.

  Yet

  ruddering

  and muscling

  in the sunless tons

  of new freedoms,

  still

  I feel

  a chill pull,

  a brightening,

  a light, a light,

  and how

  in my loomy cold,

  my greens,

  still

  she moons

  in me.

  from THE JOURNEY

  1987

  I

  Self-Portrait on a Summer Evening

  Jean-Baptiste Chardin

  is painting a woman

  in the last summer light.

  All summer long

  he has been slighting her

  in botched blues, tints

  half-tones, rinsed neutrals.

  What you are watching

  is light unlearning itself

  an infinite unfrocking of the prism.

  Before your eyes

  the ordinary life

  is being glazed over:

  pigments of the bibelot

  the cabochon, the water-opal

  pearl to the intimate

  simple colours of

  her ankle-length summer skirt.

  Truth makes shift:

  the triptych shrinks

  to the cabinet picture.

  Can’t you feel it?

  Aren’t you chilled by it?

  The way the late afternoon

  is reduced to detail –

  the sky that odd shape of apron –

  opaque, scumbled –

  the lazulis of the horizon becoming

  optical greys

  before your eyes

  before your eyes

  in my ankle-length

  summer skirt

  crossing between

  the garden and the house,

  under the whitebeam trees,

  keeping an eye on

  the length of the grass,

  the height of the hedge,

  the distance of the children

  I am Chardin’s woman

  edged in reflected light,

  hardened by

  the need to be ordinary.

  Mise Eire

  I won’t go back to it –

  my nation displaced

  into old dactyls,

  oaths made

  by the animal tallows

  of the candle –

  land of the Gulf Stream,

  the small farm,

  the scalded memory,

  the songs

  that bandage up the history,

  the words

  that make a rhythm of the crime

  where time is time past.

  A palsy of regrets.

  No. I won’t go back.

  My roots are brutal:

  I am the woman –

  a sloven’s mix

  of silk at the wrists,

  a sort of dove-strut

  in the precincts of the garrison –

  who practises

  the quick frictions,

  the rictus of delight

  and gets cambric for it,

  rice-coloured silks.

  I am the woman

  in the gansy-coat

  on board the Mary Belle,

  in the huddling cold,

  holding her half-dead baby to her

  as the wind shifts east

  and north over the dirty

  water of the wharf

  mingling the immigrant

  guttural with the vowels

  of homesickness who neither

  knows nor cares that

  a new language

  is a kind of scar

  and heals after a while

  into a passable imitation

  of what went before.

  The Oral Tradition

  I was standing there

  at the end of a reading

  or a workshop or whatever,

  watching people heading

  out into the weather,

  only half-wondering

  what becomes of words,

  the brisk herbs of language,

  the fragrances we think we sing,

  if anything.

  We were left behind

  in a firelit room

  in which the colour scheme

  crouched well down –

  golds, a sort of dun

  a distressed ochre –

  and the sole richness was

  in the suggestion of a texture

  like the low flax gleam

  that comes off polished leather.

  Two women

  were standing in shadow,

  one with her back turned.

  Their talk was a gesture,

  an outstretched hand.

  They talked to each other

  and words like ‘summer’

  ‘birth’ ‘great-grandmother’

  kept pleading with me,

  urging me to follow.

  ‘She could feel it coming’ –

  one of them was saying –

  ‘all the way there,

  across the fields at evening

  and no one there, God help her

  ‘and she had on a skirt

  of cross-woven linen

  and the little one

  kept pulling at it.

  It was nearly night …’

  (Wood hissed and split

  in the open grate,

  broke apart in sparks,

  a windfall of light

  in the room’s darkness)

  ‘… when she lay down

  and gave birth to him

  in an open meadow.

  What a child that was

  to be born without a blemish!’

  It had started raining,

  the windows dripping, misted.

  One moment I was standing

  not seeing out,

  only half-listening

  staring at the night; the next

  without warning

  I was caught by it:

  the bruised summer light,

  the musical sub-text

  of mauve eaves on lilac

  and the laburnum past

  and shadow where the lime

  tree dropped its bracts

  in frills of contrast

  where she lay down

  in vetch and linen

  and lifted up her son

  to the archive

  they would shelter in:

  the oral song

  avid as superstition,

  layered like an amber in

  the wreck of language

  and the remnants of a nation.

  I was getting out

  my coat, buttoning it,

  shrugging up the collar.

  It was bitter outside,

  a real winter’s night

  and I had distances

  ahead of me: iron miles

  in trains, iron rails

  repeating instances

  and reasons; the wheels

  singing innuendoes, hints,

  outlines underneath

  the surface, a sense

  suddenly of truth,

  its resonance.

  Fever

  is what remained or what they thought

  remained after the ague and the sweats

  were over
and the shock of wild flowers

  at the bedside had been taken away;

  is what they tried to shake out of

  the crush and dimple of cotton,

  the shy dust of a bridal skirt;

  is what they beat, lashed, hurt like

  flesh as if it were a lack of virtue

  in a young girl sobbing her heart out

  in a small town for having been seen

  kissing by the river; is what they burned

  alive in their own back gardens

  as if it were a witch and not the fulllength

  winter gaberdine and breathed again

  when the fires went out in charred dew.

  My grandmother died in a fever ward,

  younger than I am and far from

  the sweet chills of a Louth spring –

  its sprigged light and its wild flowers –

  with five orphan daughters to her name.

  Names, shadows, visitations, hints

  and a half-sense of half-lives remain.

  And nothing else, nothing more unless

  I re-construct the soaked-through midnights;

  vigils; the histories I never learned

  to predict the lyric of; and re-construct

  risk; as if silence could become rage,

  as if what we lost is a contagion

  that breaks out in what cannot be

  shaken out from words or beaten out

  from meaning and survives to weaken

  what is given, what is certain

  and burns away everything but this

  exact moment of delirium when

  someone cries out someone’s name.

  Lace

  Bent over

  the open notebook –

  light fades out

  making the trees stand out

  and my room

  at the back

  of the house, dark.

  In the dusk

  I am still

  looking for it –

  the language that is

  lace:

  a baroque obligation

  at the wrist

  of a prince

  in a petty court.

  Look, just look

  at the way he shakes out

  the thriftless phrases,

  the crystal rhetoric

  of bobbined knots

  and bosses:

  a vagrant drift

  of emphasis

  to wave away an argument

  or frame the hand

  he kisses;

  which, for all that, is still

  what someone

  in the corner

  of a room,

  in the dusk,

  bent over

  as the light was fading

  lost their sight for.

  I Remember

  I remember the way the big windows washed

  out the room and the winter darks tinted

  it and how, in the brute quiet and aftermath,

  an eyebrow waited helplessly to be composed

  from the palette with its scarabs of oil

  colours gleaming through a dusk leaking from

  the iron railings and the ruined evenings of

  bombed-out, post-war London; how the easel was

  mulberry wood and, porcupining in a jar,

  the spines of my mother’s portrait brushes

  spiked from the dirty turpentine and the face

  on the canvas was the scattered fractions

  of the face which had come up the stairs

  that morning and had taken up position in

  the big drawing-room and had been still

  and was now gone; and I remember, I remember

  I was the interloper who knows both love and fear,

  who comes near and draws back, who feels nothing

  beyond the need to touch, to handle, to dismantle it,

  the mystery; and how in the morning when I came down –

  a nine-year-old in high, fawn socks –

  the room had been shocked into a glacier

  of cotton sheets thrown over the almond

  and vanilla silk of the French Empire chairs.

  The Bottle Garden

  I decanted them – feather mosses, fan-shaped plants,

  asymmetric greys in the begonia –

  into this globe which shows up how the fern shares

  the invertebrate lace of the sea-horse.

  The sun is in the bottle garden,

  submarine, out of its element

  when I come down on a spring morning;

  my sweet, greenish, inland underwater.

  And in my late thirties, past the middle way,

  I can say how did I get here?

  I hardly know the way back, still less forward.

  Still, if you look for them, there are signs:

  Earth stars, rock spleenwort, creeping fig

  and English ivy all furled and herded

  into the green and cellar wet

  of the bottle; well, here they are

  here I am a gangling schoolgirl

  in the convent library, the April evening outside,

  reading the Aeneid as the room darkens

  to the underworld of the Sixth Book –

  the Styx, the damned, the pity and

  the improvised poetic of imprisoned meanings;

  only half aware of the open weave of harbour lights

  and my school blouse riding up at the sleeves.

  Suburban Woman: A Detail

  I

  The chimneys have been swept.

  The gardens have their winter cut.

  The shrubs are prinked, the hedges gelded.

  The last dark shows up the headlights

  of the cars coming down the Dublin mountains.

  Our children used to think they were stars.

  II

  This is not the season

  when the goddess rose

  out of seed, out of wheat,

  out of thawed water

  and went, distracted and astray,

  to find her daughter.

  Winter will be soon:

  dun pools of rain;

  ruddy, addled distances;

  winter pinks, tinges and

  a first-thing smell of turf

  when I take the milk in.

  III

  Setting out for a neighbour’s house

  in a denim skirt,

  a blouse blended in

  by the last light,

  I am definite

  to start with

  but the light is lessening,

  the hedge losing its detail,

  the path its edge.

  Look at me, says the tree.

  I was a woman once like you,

  full-skirted, human.

  Suddenly I am not certain

  of the way I came

  or the way I will return,

  only that something

  which may be nothing

  more than darkness has begun

  softening the definitions

  of my body, leaving

  the fears and all the terrors

  of the flesh shifting the airs

  and forms of the autumn quiet

  crying ‘remember us’.

  The Briar Rose

  Intimate as underthings

  beside the matronly damasks –

  the last thing

  to go out at night

  is the lantern-like, white insistence

  of these small flowers;

  their camisole glow.

  Standing here on the front step

  watching wildness break out again

  it could be

  the unlighted stairway,

  I could be

  the child I was, opening

  a bedroom door

  on Irish whiskey, lipstick,

  an empty glass,

  oyster crêpe-de-Chine

  and closing it without knowing why.r />
  The Women

  This is the hour I love: the in-between,

  neither here-nor-there hour of evening.

  The air is tea-coloured in the garden.

  The briar rose is spilled crêpe-de-Chine.

  This is the time I do my work best,

  going up the stairs in two minds,

  in two worlds, carrying cloth or glass,

  leaving something behind, bringing

  something with me I should have left behind.

  The hour of change, of metamorphosis,

  of shape-shifting instabilities.

  My time of sixth sense and second sight

  when in the words I choose, the lines I write,

  they rise like visions and appear to me:

  women of work, of leisure, of the night,

  in stove-coloured silks, in lace, in nothing,

  with crewel needles, with books, with wide open legs

  who fled the hot breath of the god pursuing,

  who ran from the split hoof and the thick lips

  and fell and grieved and healed into myth,

  into me in the evening at my desk

  testing the water with a sweet quartet,

  the physical force of a dissonance –

  the fission of music into syllabic heat –

  and getting sick of it and standing up

  and going downstairs in the last brightness

  into a landscape without emphasis,

  light, linear, precisely planned,