New Selected Poems Read online

  a hemisphere of tiered, aired cotton,

  a hot terrain of linen from the iron

  folded in and over, stacked high

  neatened flat, stoving heat and white.

  Nocturne

  After a friend has gone I like the feel of it:

  the house at night. Everyone asleep.

  The way it draws in like atmosphere or evening.

  One o’clock. A floral teapot and a raisin scone.

  A tray waits to be taken down.

  The landing light is off. The clock strikes. The cat

  comes into his own, mysterious on the stairs,

  a black ambivalence around the legs of button-back

  chairs, an insinuation to be set beside

  the red spoon and the salt-glazed cup,

  the saucer with the thick spill of tea

  which scalds off easily under the tap. Time

  is a tick, a purr, a drop. The spider

  on the dining room window has fallen asleep

  among complexities as I will once

  the doors are bolted and the keys tested

  and the switch turned up of the kitchen light

  which made outside in the back garden

  an electric room – a domestication

  of closed daisies, an architecture

  instant and improbable.

  II

  The Journey

  for Elizabeth Ryle

  Immediately cries were heard. These were the loud wailing of infant souls weeping at the very entrance-way; never had they had their share of life’s sweetness forthe dark day had stolen them from their mothers’ breasts and plunged them to a death before their time.

  Virgil, The Aeneid, Book VI

  And then the dark fell and ‘there has never’

  I said ‘been a poem to an antibiotic:

  never a word to compare with the odes on

  the flower of the raw sloe for fever

  ‘or the devious Africa-seeking tern

  or the protein treasures of the sea-bed.

  Depend on it, somewhere a poet is wasting

  his sweet uncluttered metres on the obvious

  ‘emblem instead of the real thing.

  Instead of sulpha we shall have hyssop dipped

  in the wild blood of the unblemished lamb,

  so every day the language gets less

  ‘for the task and we are less with the language.’

  I finished speaking and the anger faded

  and dark fell and the book beside me

  lay open at the page Aphrodite

  comforts Sappho in her love’s duress.

  The poplars shifted their music in the garden,

  a child startled in a dream,

  my room was a mess –

  the usual hardcovers, half-finished cups,

  clothes piled up on an old chair –

  and I was listening out but in my head was

  a loosening and sweetening heaviness,

  not sleep, but nearly sleep, not dreaming really

  but as ready to believe and still

  unfevered, calm and unsurprised

  when she came and stood beside me

  and I would have known her anywhere

  and I would have gone with her anywhere

  and she came wordlessly

  and without a word I went with her

  down down down without so much as

  ever touching down but always, always

  with a sense of mulch beneath us

  the way of stairs winding down to a river

  and as we went on the light went on

  failing and I looked sideways to be certain

  it was she, misshapen, musical –

  Sappho – the scholiast’s nightingale

  and down we went, again down

  until we came to a sudden rest

  beside a river in what seemed to be

  an oppressive suburb of the dawn.

  My eyes got slowly used to the bad light.

  At first I saw shadows, only shadows.

  Then I could make out women and children

  and, in the way they were, the grace of love.

  ‘Cholera, typhus, croup, diphtheria’

  she said, ‘in those days they racketed

  in every backstreet and alley of old Europe.

  Behold the children of the plague.’

  Then to my horror I could see to each

  nipple some had clipped a limpet shape –

  suckling darknesses – while others had their arms

  weighed down, making terrible pietàs.

  She took my sleeve and said to me, ‘be careful.

  Do not define these women by their work:

  not as washerwomen trussed in dust and sweating,

  muscling water into linen by the river’s edge

  ‘nor as court ladies brailled in silk

  on wool and woven with an ivory unicorn

  and hung, nor as laundresses tossing cotton,

  brisking daylight with lavender and gossip.

  ‘But these are women who went out like you

  when dusk became a dark sweet with leaves,

  recovering the day, stooping, picking up

  teddy bears and rag dolls and tricycles and buckets –

  ‘love’s archaeology – and they too like you

  stood boot deep in flowers once in summer

  or saw winter come in with a single magpie

  in a caul of haws, a solo harlequin.’

  I stood fixed. I could not reach or speak to them.

  Between us was the melancholy river,

  the dream water, the narcotic crossing

  and they had passed over it, its cold persuasions.

  I whispered, ‘let me be

  let me at least be their witness,’ but she said

  ‘what you have seen is beyond speech,

  beyond song, only not beyond love;

  ‘remember it, you will remember it’

  and I heard her say but she was fading fast

  as we emerged under the stars of heaven,

  ‘there are not many of us; you are dear

  ‘and stand beside me as my own daughter.

  I have brought you here so you will know forever

  the silences in which are our beginnings,

  in which we have an origin like water,’

  and the wind shifted and the window clasp

  opened, banged and I woke up to find

  the poetry books stacked higgledy piggledy,

  my skirt spread out where I had laid it;

  nothing was changed; nothing was more clear

  but it was wet and the year was late.

  The rain was grief in arrears; my children

  slept the last dark out safely and I wept.

  Envoi

  It is Easter in the suburb. Clematis

  shrubs the eaves and trellises with pastel.

  The evenings lengthen and before the rain

  the Dublin mountains become visible.

  My muse must be better than those of men

  who made theirs in the image of their myth.

  The work is half-finished and I have nothing

  but the crudest measures to complete it with.

  Under the street-lamps the dustbins brighten.

  The winter flowering jasmine casts a shadow

  outside my window in my neighbour’s garden.

  These are the things that my muse must know.

  She must come to me. Let her come

  to be among the donnée, the given.

  I need her to remain with me until

  the day is over and the song is proven.

  Surely she comes, surely she comes to me –

  no lizard skin, no paps, no podded womb

  about her but a brightening and

  the consequences of an April tomb.

  What I have done I have done alone.

  What I have seen is unverified.

&
nbsp; I have the truth and I need the faith.

  It is time I put my hand in her side.

  If she will not bless the ordinary,

  if she will not sanctify the common,

  then here I am and here I stay and then am I

  the most miserable of women.

  III

  Listen. This is the Noise of Myth

  This is the story of a man and woman

  under a willow and beside a weir

  near a river in a wooded clearing.

  They are fugitives. Intimates of myth.

  Fictions of my purpose. I suppose

  I shouldn’t say that yet or at least

  before I break their hearts or save their lives

  I ought to tell their story and I will.

  When they went first it was winter; cold,

  cold through the Midlands and as far West

  as they could go. They knew they had to go –

  through Meath, Westmeath, Longford,

  their lives unravelling like the hours of light –

  and then there were lambs under the snow

  and it was January, aconite and jasmine

  and the hazel yellowing and puce berries on the ivy.

  They could not eat where they had cooked,

  nor sleep where they had eaten

  nor at dawn rest where they had slept.

  They shunned the densities

  of trees with one trunk and of caves

  with one dark and the dangerous embrace

  of islands with a single landing place.

  And all the time it was cold, cold:

  the fields still gardened by their ice,

  the trees stitched with snow overnight,

  the ditches full; frost toughening lichen,

  darning lace into rock crevices.

  And then the woods flooded and buds

  blunted from the chestnut and the foxglove

  put its big leaves out and chaffinches

  chinked and flirted in the branches of the ash.

  And here we are where we started from –

  under a willow and beside a weir

  near a river in a wooded clearing.

  The woman and the man have come to rest.

  Look how light is coming through the ash.

  The weir sluices kingfisher blues.

  The woman and the willow tree lean forward, forward.

  Something is near; something is about to happen;

  something more than spring

  and less than history. Will we see

  hungers eased after months of hiding?

  Is there a touch of heat in that light?

  If they stay here soon it will be summer; things

  returning, sunlight fingering minnowy deeps,

  seedy greens, reeds, electing lights

  and edges from the river. Consider

  legend, self-deception, sin, the sum

  of human purpose and its end; remember

  how our poetry depends on distance,

  aspect: gravity will bend starlight.

  Forgive me if I set the truth to rights.

  Bear with me if I put an end to this:

  She never turned to him; she never leaned

  under the sallow-willow over to him.

  They never made love; not there; not here;

  not anywhere; there was no winter journey;

  no aconite, no birdsong and no jasmine,

  no woodland and no river and no weir.

  Listen. This is the noise of myth. It makes

  the same sound as shadow. Can you hear it?

  Daylight greys in the preceptories.

  Her head begins to shine

  pivoting the planets of a harsh nativity.

  They were never mine. This is mine.

  This sequence of evicted possibilities.

  Displaced facts. Tricks of light. Reflections.

  Invention. Legend. Myth. What you will.

  The shifts and fluencies are infinite.

  The moving parts are marvellous. Consider

  how the bereavements of the definite

  are easily lifted from our heroine.

  She may or she may not. She was or wasn’t

  by the water at his side as dark

  waited above the Western countryside.

  O consolations of the craft.

  How we put

  the old poultices on the old sores,

  the same mirrors to the old magic. Look.

  The scene returns. The willow sees itself

  drowning in the weir and the woman

  gives the kiss of myth her human heat.

  Reflections. Reflections. He becomes her lover.

  The old romances make no bones about it.

  The long and short of it. The end and the beginning.

  The glories and the ornaments are muted.

  And when the story ends the song is over.

  An Irish Childhood in England: 1951

  The bickering of vowels on the buses,

  the clicking thumbs and the big hips of

  the navy-skirted ticket collectors with

  their crooked seams brought it home to me:

  Exile. Ration-book pudding.

  Bowls of dripping and the fixed smile

  of the school pianist playing ‘Iolanthe’,

  ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ and ‘John Peel’.

  I didn’t know what to hold, to keep.

  At night, filled with some malaise

  of love for what I’d never known I had,

  I fell asleep and let the moment pass.

  The passing moment has become a night

  of clipped shadows, freshly painted houses,

  the garden eddying in dark and heat,

  my children half-awake, half-asleep.

  Airless, humid dark. Leaf-noise.

  The stirrings of a garden before rain.

  A hint of storm behind the risen moon.

  We are what we have chosen. Did I choose to –

  in a strange city, in another country,

  on nights in a north-facing bedroom,

  waiting for the sleep that never did

  restore me as I’d hoped to what I’d lost –

  let the world I knew become the space

  between the words that I had by heart

  and all the other speech that always was

  becoming the language of the country that

  I came to in nineteen-fifty-one? –

  barely-gelled, a freckled six-year-old,

  overdressed and sick on the plane

  when all of England to an Irish child

  was nothing more than what you’d lost and how:

  was the teacher in the London convent who

  when I produced ‘I amn’t’ in the classroom

  turned and said – ‘you’re not in Ireland now’.

  Fond Memory

  It was a school where all the children wore darned worsted;

  where they cried – or almost all – when the Reverend Mother

  announced at lunch-time that the King had died

  peacefully in his sleep. I dressed in wool as well,

  ate rationed food, played English games and learned

  how wise the Magna Carta was, how hard the Hanoverians

  had tried, the measure and complexity of verse,

  the hum and score of the whole orchestra.

  At three o’clock I caught two buses home

  where sometimes in the late afternoon

  at a piano pushed into a corner of the playroom

  my father would sit down and play the slow

  lilts of Tom Moore while I stood there trying

  not to weep at the cigarette smoke stinging up

  from between his fingers and – as much as I could think –

  I thought this is my country, was, will be again,

  this upward-straining song made to be

  our safe inventory of pain. And I was wrong.

 
The Emigrant Irish

  Like oil lamps we put them out the back,

  of our houses, of our minds. We had lights

  better than, newer than and then

  a time came, this time and now

  we need them. Their dread, makeshift example.

  They would have thrived on our necessities.

  What they survived we could not even live.

  By their lights now it is time to

  imagine how they stood there, what they stood with,

  that their possessions may become our power.

  Cardboard. Iron. Their hardships parcelled in them.

  Patience. Fortitude. Long-suffering

  in the bruise-coloured dusk of the New World.

  And all the old songs. And nothing to lose.

  The Glass King

  Isabella of Bavaria married Charles VI of France in 1385. In later years his madness took the form of believing he was made from glass.

  When he is ready he is raised and carried

  among his vaporish plants; the palms and ferns flex;

  they almost bend; you’d almost think they were going to kiss him;

  and so they might; but she will not, his wife,

  no she can’t kiss his lips in case he splinters

  into a million Bourbons, mad pieces.

  What can she do with him – her daft prince?

  His nightmares are the Regency of France.

  Yes, she’s been through it all, his Bavaroise,

  blub-hipped and docile, urgent to be needed –