New Selected Poems Read online

  from churching to milk fever, from tongue-tied princess

  to the queen of a mulish king – and now this.

  They were each other’s fantasy in youth.

  No splintering at all about that mouth

  when they were flesh and muscle, woman and man,

  fire and kindling. See that silk divan?

  Enough said. Now the times themselves

  are his asylum: these are the Middle Ages, sweet

  and savage era of the saving grace; indulgences

  are two a penny; under the stonesmith’s hand

  stone turns into lace. I need his hand now.

  Outside my window October soaks the stone;

  you can hear it; you’d almost think

  the brick was drinking it; the rowan drips

  and history waits. Let it wait. I want

  no elsewheres: the clover-smelling, stove-warm

  air of autumn catches cold; the year turns;

  the leaves fall; the poem hesitates:

  If we could see ourselves, not as we do –

  in mirrors, self-deceptions, self-regardings –

  but as we ought to be and as we have been:

  poets, lute-stringers, makyres and abettors

  of our necessary art, soothsayers of the ailment

  and disease of our times, sweet singers,

  truth tellers, intercessors for self-knowledge –

  what would we think of these fin-de-siècle

  half-hearted penitents we have become

  at the sick-bed of the century: hand-wringing

  elegists with an ill-concealed greed

  for the inheritance?

  My prince, demented

  in a crystal past, a lost France, I elect you emblem

  and ancestor of our lyric: it fits you like a glove –

  doesn’t it? – the part; untouchable, outlandish,

  esoteric, inarticulate and out of reach

  of human love: studied every day by your wife,

  an ordinary honest woman out of place

  in all this, wanting nothing more than the man

  she married, all her sorrows in her stolid face.

  from OUTSIDE HISTORY

  1990

  I Object Lessons

  The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me

  It was the first gift he ever gave her,

  buying it for five francs in the Galeries

  in pre-war Paris. It was stifling.

  A starless drought made the nights stormy.

  They stayed in the city for the summer.

  They met in cafés. She was always early.

  He was late. That evening he was later.

  They wrapped the fan. He looked at his watch.

  She looked down the Boulevard des Capucines.

  She ordered more coffee. She stood up.

  The streets were emptying. The heat was killing.

  She thought the distance smelled of rain and lightning.

  These are wild roses, appliqued on silk by hand,

  darkly picked, stitched boldly, quickly.

  The rest is tortoiseshell and has the reticent,

  clear patience of its element. It is

  a worn-out, underwater bullion and it keeps,

  even now, an inference of its violation.

  The lace is overcast as if the weather

  it opened for and offset had entered it.

  The past is an empty café terrace.

  An airless dusk before thunder. A man running.

  And no way now to know what happened then –

  none at all – unless, of course, you improvise:

  The blackbird on this first sultry morning,

  in summer, finding buds, worms, fruit,

  feels the heat. Suddenly she puts out her wing –

  the whole, full flirtatious span of it.

  The Rooms of Other Women Poets

  I wonder about you: whether the blue abrasions

  of daylight, falling as dusk across your page,

  make you reach for the lamp. I sometimes think

  I see that gesture in the way you use language.

  And whether you think, as I do, that wild flowers

  dried and fired on the ironstone rim of

  the saucer underneath your cup, are a sign of

  a savage, old calligraphy: you will not have it.

  The chair you use, for instance, may be cane

  soaked and curled in spirals, painted white

  and eloquent, or iron mesh and the table

  a horizon of its own on plain, deal trestles,

  bearing up unmarked, steel-cut foolscap,

  a whole quire of it; when you leave I know

  you look at them and you love their air of

  unaggressive silence as you close the door.

  The early summer, its covenant, its grace,

  is everywhere: even shadows have leaves.

  Somewhere you are writing or have written in

  a room you came to as I come to this

  room with honeyed corners, the interior sunless,

  the windows shut but clear so I can see

  the bay windbreak, the laburnum hang fire, feel

  the ache of things ending in the jasmine darkening early.

  The Shadow Doll

  This was sent to the bride-to-be in Victorian times, by her dressmaker. It consisted in a porcelain doll, under a dome of glass, modelling the proposed wedding dress.

  They stitched blooms from ivory tulle

  to hem the oyster gleam of the veil.

  They made hoops for the crinoline.

  Now, in summary and neatly sewn –

  a porcelain bride in an airless glamour –

  the shadow doll survives its occasion.

  Under glass, under wraps, it stays

  even now, after all, discreet about

  visits, fevers, quickenings and lusts

  and just how, when she looked at

  the shell-tone spray of seed pearls,

  the bisque features, she could see herself

  inside it all, holding less than real

  stephanotis, rose petals, never feeling

  satin rise and fall with the vows

  I kept repeating on the night before –

  astray among the cards and wedding gifts –

  the coffee pots and the clocks and

  the battered tan case full of cotton

  lace and tissue-paper, pressing down, then

  pressing down again. And then, locks.

  The Latin Lesson

  Easter light in the convent garden.

  The eucalyptus tree glitters in it.

  A bell rings for

  the first class.

  Today the Sixth Book of the Aeneid.

  An old nun calls down the corridor.

  Manners, girls. Where

  are your manners?

  Last night in his Lenten talk

  the local priest asked us to remember

  everything is put here

  for a purpose:

  even eucalyptus leaves are suitable

  for making oil from to steep wool in,

  to sweeten our blankets

  and gaberdines.

  My forefinger crawls on the lines.

  A storm light comes in from the bay.

  How beautiful the words

  look, how

  vagrant and strange on the page

  before we crush them for their fragrance

  and crush them again

  to discover

  the pathway to hell and that these

  shadows in their shadow-bodies,

  chittering and mobbing

  on the far

  shore, signalling their hunger for

  the small usefulness of a life, are

  the dead. And how

  before the bell

  will I hail the black keel and flatter the dark

  boatman and cross the river and still

  keep
a civil tongue

  in my head?

  Bright-Cut Irish Silver

  I take it down

  from time to time, to feel

  the smooth path of silver meet the cicatrice of skill.

  These scars, I tell myself, are learned.

  This gift for wounding an artery of rock

  was passed on from father to son, to the father

  of the next son;

  is an aptitude

  for injuring earth while inferring it in curves and surfaces;

  is this cold potency which has come,

  by time and chance,

  into my hands.

  II Outside History

  A sequence

  I The Achill Woman

  She came up the hill carrying water.

  She wore a half-buttoned, wool cardigan,

  a tea-towel round her waist.

  She pushed the hair out of her eyes with

  her free hand and put the bucket down.

  The zinc-music of the handle on the rim

  tuned the evening. An Easter moon rose.

  In the next-door field a stream was

  a fluid sunset; and then, stars.

  I remember the cold rosiness of her hands.

  She bent down and blew on them like broth.

  And round her waist, on a white background,

  in coarse, woven letters, the words ‘glass cloth’.

  And she was nearly finished for the day.

  And I was all talk, raw from college –

  week-ending at a friend’s cottage

  with one suitcase and the set text

  of the Court poets of the Silver Age.

  We stayed putting down time until

  the evening turned cold without warning.

  She said goodnight and started down the hill.

  The grass changed from lavender to black.

  The trees turned back to cold outlines.

  You could taste frost

  but nothing now can change the way I went

  indoors, chilled by the wind

  and made a fire

  and took down my book

  and opened it and failed to comprehend

  the harmonies of servitude,

  the grace music gives to flattery

  and language borrows from ambition –

  and how I fell asleep

  oblivious to

  the planets clouding over in the skies,

  the slow decline of the spring moon,

  the songs crying out their ironies.

  II A False Spring

  Alders are tasselled.

  Flag-iris is already out on the canal.

  From my window I can see

  the College gardens, crocuses stammering

  in pools of rain, plum blossom

  on the branches.

  I want to find her,

  the woman I once was,

  who came out of that reading-room

  in a hard January, after studying

  Aeneas in the underworld,

  how his old battle-foes spotted him there –

  how they called and called and called

  only to have it be

  a yell of shadows, an O vanishing in

  the polished waters

  and the topsy-turvy seasons of hell –

  her mind so frail her body was its ghost.

  I want to tell her she can rest,

  she is embodied now.

  But narcissi,

  opening too early,

  are all I find.

  I hear the bad sound of these south winds,

  the rain coming from some region which has lost sight

  of our futures, leaving us

  nothing to look forward to except

  what one serious frost can accomplish.

  III The Making of an Irish Goddess

  Ceres went to hell

  with no sense of time.

  When she looked back

  all that she could see was

  the arteries of silver in the rock,

  the diligence of rivers always at one level,

  wheat at one height,

  leaves of a single colour,

  the same distance in the usual light;

  a seasonless, unscarred earth.

  But I need time –

  my flesh and that history –

  to make the same descent.

  In my body,

  neither young now nor fertile,

  and with the marks of childbirth

  still on it,

  in my gestures –

  the way I pin my hair to hide

  the stitched, healed blemish of a scar –

  must be

  an accurate inscription

  of that agony:

  the failed harvests,

  the fields rotting to the horizon,

  the children devoured by their mothers

  whose souls, they would have said,

  went straight to hell,

  followed by their own.

  There is no other way:

  myth is the wound we leave

  in the time we have

  which in my case is this

  March evening

  at the foothills of the Dublin mountains,

  across which the lights have changed all day,

  holding up my hand,

  sickle-shaped, to my eyes

  to pick out

  my own daughter from

  all the other children in the distance;

  her back turned to me.

  IV White Hawthorn in the West of Ireland

  I drove West

  in the season between seasons.

  I left behind suburban gardens.

  Lawnmowers. Small talk.

  Under low skies, past splashes of coltsfoot,

  I assumed

  the hard shyness of Atlantic light

  and the superstitious aura of hawthorn.

  All I wanted then was to fill my arms with

  sharp flowers,

  to seem, from a distance, to be part of

  that ivory, downhill rush. But I knew,

  I had always known

  the custom was

  not to touch hawthorn.

  Not to bring it indoors for the sake of

  the luck

  such constraint would forfeit –

  a child might die, perhaps, or an unexplained

  fever speckle heifers. So I left it

  stirring on those hills

  with a fluency

  only water has. And, like water, able

  to re-define land. And free to seem to be –

  for anglers,

  and for travellers astray in

  the unmarked lights of a May dusk –

  the only language spoken in those parts.

  V Daphne Heard with Horror the Addresses of the God

  It was early summer. Already

  the conservatory was all steam and greenness.

  I would have known the stephanotis by

  its cut-throat sweetness anywhere.

  We drank tea. You were telling me

  a story you had heard as a child,

  about the wedding of a local girl,

  long ago, and a merchant from Argyll.

  I thought the garden looked so at ease.

  The roses were beginning on one side.

  The laurel hedge was nothing but itself,

  and all of it so free of any need

  for nymphs, goddesses, wounded presences –

  the fleet river-daughters who took root

  and can be seen in the woods in

  unmistakable shapes of weeping.

  You were still speaking. By the time

  I paid attention they were well married:

  the bridegroom had his bride on the ship.

  The sails were ready to be set. You said

  small craft went with her to the ship and,

  as it sailed out, well-wishers

  took in
armfuls, handfuls, from the boats

  white roses and threw them on the water.

  We cleared up then, saying how

  the greenfly needed spraying, the azaleas

  were over; and you went inside. I

  stayed in the heat looking out at

  the garden in its last definition.

  Freshening and stirring. A suggestion,

  behind it all, of darkness. In the shadow,

  beside the laurel hedge, its gesture.

  VI The Photograph on My Father’s Desk

  It could be

  any summer afternoon.

  The sun is warm on

  the fruitwood garden seat.

  Fuchsia droops.

  Thrushes move to get

  windfalls underneath the crab apple tree.

  The woman

  holds her throat like a wound.

  She wears

  mutton-coloured gaberdine with

  a scum of lace

  just above her boot

  which is pointed at

  this man coming down the path with

  his arms wide open. Laughing.

  The garden fills up

  with a burned silence.

  The talk has stopped.

  The spoon which just now