New Selected Poems Page 4
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.
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,