New Selected Poems Read online

  jingled at the rim of the lemonade jug

  is still.

  And the shrubbed lavender

  will find

  neither fragrance nor muslin.

  VII We Are Human History. We Are Not Natural History.

  At twilight in

  the shadow of the poplars

  the children found a swarm of wild bees.

  It was late summer and I knew as

  they came shouting in that, yes,

  this evening had been singled out by

  a finger pointing at trees,

  the inland feel of that greenness,

  the sugar-barley iron of a garden chair

  and children still bramble-height

  and fretful from the heat and a final

  brightness stickle-backing that particular

  patch of grass across which light

  was short-lived and elegiac as

  the view from a train window of

  a station parting, all tears. And this,

  this I thought, is how it will have been

  chosen from those summer evenings

  which under the leaves of the poplars –

  striped dun and ochre, simmering over

  the stashed-up debris of old seasons –

  a swarm of wild bees is making use of.

  VIII An Old Steel Engraving

  Look.

  The figure in the foreground breaks his fall with

  one hand. He cannot die.

  The river cannot wander

  into the shadows to be dragged by willows.

  The passer-by is scared witless. He cannot escape.

  He cannot stop staring at

  this hand which can barely raise

  the patriot

  above the ground which is

  the origin and reason for it all.

  More closely now:

  at the stillness of unfinished action in

  afternoon heat, at the spaces on the page. They widen

  to include us:

  we have found

  the country of our malediction where

  nothing can move until we find the word,

  nothing can stir until we say this is

  what happened and is happening and history

  is one of us who turns away

  while the other is

  turning the page.

  Is this river which

  moments ago must have flashed the morse

  of a bayonet thrust. And is moving on.

  IX In Exile

  The German girls who came to us that winter and

  the winter after and who helped my mother fuel

  the iron stove and arranged our clothes in wet

  thicknesses on the wooden rail after tea was over,

  spoke no English, understood no French. They were

  sisters from a ruined city and they spoke rapidly

  in their own tongue: syllables in which pain was

  radical, integral; and with what sense of injury

  the language angled for an unhurt kingdom – for

  the rise, curve, kill and swift return to the wrist,

  to the hood – I never knew. To me they were the sounds

  of evening only, of the cold, of the Irish dark and

  continuous with all such recurrences: the drizzle in

  the lilac, the dusk always at the back door, like

  the tinkers I was threatened with, the cat inching

  closer to the fire with its screen of clothes, where

  I am standing in the stone-flagged kitchen; there are

  bleached rags, perhaps, and a pot of tea on the stove.

  And I see myself, four years of age and looking up,

  storing such music – guttural, hurt to the quick –

  as I hear now, forty years on and far from where

  I heard it first. Among these salt-boxes, marshes and

  the glove-tanned colours of the sugar-maples, in

  this New England town at the start of winter, I am

  so much south of it: the soft wet, the light and

  those early darks which strengthen the assassin’s

  hand; and hide the wound. Here, in this scalding air,

  my speech will not heal. I do not want it to heal.

  X We Are Always Too Late

  Memory

  is in two parts.

  First, the re-visiting:

  the way even now I can see

  those lovers at the café table. She is weeping.

  It is New England, breakfast-time, winter. Behind her,

  outside the picture window, is

  a stand of white pines.

  New snow falls and the old,

  losing its balance in the branches,

  showers down,

  adding fractions to it. Then

  the re-enactment. Always that.

  I am getting up, pushing away

  coffee. Always, I am going towards her.

  The flush and scald is

  to her forehead now and back down to her neck.

  I raise one hand. I am pointing to

  those trees, I am showing her our need for these

  beautiful upstagings of

  what we suffer by

  what survives. And she never even sees me.

  XI What We Lost

  It is a winter afternoon.

  The hills are frozen. Light is failing.

  The distance is a crystal earshot.

  A woman is mending linen in her kitchen.

  She is a countrywoman.

  Behind her cupboard doors she hangs sprigged,

  stove-dried lavender in muslin.

  Her letters and mementoes and memories

  are packeted in satin at the back with

  gaberdine and worsted and

  the cambric she has made into bodices;

  the good tobacco silk for Sunday Mass.

  She is sewing in the kitchen.

  The sugar-feel of flax is in her hands.

  Dusk. And the candles brought in then.

  One by one. And the quiet sweat of wax.

  There is a child at her side.

  The tea is poured, the stitching put down.

  The child grows still, sensing something of importance.

  The woman settles and begins her story.

  Believe it, what we lost is here in this room

  on this veiled evening.

  The woman finishes. The story ends.

  The child, who is my mother, gets up, moves away.

  In the winter air, unheard, unshared,

  the moment happens, hangs fire, leads nowhere.

  The light will fail and the room darken,

  the child fall asleep and the story be forgotten.

  The fields are dark already.

  The frail connections have been made and are broken.

  The dumb-show of legend has become language,

  is becoming silence and who will know that once

  words were possibilities and disappointments,

  were scented closets filled with love-letters

  and memories and lavender hemmed into muslin,

  stored in sachets, aired in bed-linen;

  and travelled silks and the tones of cotton

  tautened into bodices, subtly shaped by breathing;

  were the rooms of childhood with their griefless peace,

  their hands and whispers, their candles weeping brightly?

  XII Outside History

  There are outsiders, always. These stars –

  these iron inklings of an Irish January,

  whose light happened

  thousands of years before

  our pain did: they are, they have always been

  outside history.

  They keep their distance. Under them remains

  a place where you found

  you were human and

  a landscape in which you know you are mortal.

  And a time to choose between them. />
  I have chosen:

  out of myth into history I move to be

  part of that ordeal

  whose darkness is

  only now reaching me from those fields,

  those rivers, those roads clotted as

  firmaments with the dead.

  How slowly they die

  as we kneel beside them, whisper in their ear.

  And we are too late. We are always too late.

  III Distances

  Distances

  The radio is playing downstairs in the kitchen.

  The clock says eight and the light says

  winter. You are pulling up your hood against a bad morning.

  Don’t leave, I say. Don’t go without telling me

  the name of that song. You call it back to me from the stairs –

  ‘I Wish I Was In Carrickfergus’

  and the words open out with emigrant grief the way the streets

  of a small town open out in

  memory: salt-loving fuchsias to one side and

  a market in full swing on the other with

  linen for sale and tacky apples and a glass and wire hill

  of spectacles on a metal tray. The front door bangs

  and you’re gone. I will think of it all morning while a fine

  drizzle closes in, making the distances

  fiction: not of that place but this and of how

  restless we would be, you and I, inside the perfect

  music of that basalt and sandstone

  coastal town. We would walk the streets in

  the scentless afternoon of a ballad measure,

  longing to be able

  to tell each other that the starched lace and linen of

  adult handkerchiefs scraped your face and left your tears

  falling; how the apples were mush inside the crisp sugar

  shell and the spectacles out of focus.

  Midnight Flowers

  I go down step by step.

  The house is quiet, full of trapped heat and sleep.

  In the kitchen everything is still.

  Nothing is distinct; there is no moon to speak of.

  I could be undone every single day by

  paradox or what they call in the countryside

  blackthorn winter,

  when hailstones come with the first apple blossom.

  I turn a switch and the garden grows.

  A whole summer’s work in one instant!

  I press my face to the glass. I can see

  shadows of lilac, of fuchsia; a dark likeness of blackcurrant:

  little clients of suddenness, how sullen they are at

  the margins of the light.

  They need no rain, they have no roots.

  I reach out a hand; they are gone.

  When I was a child a snapdragon was

  held an inch from my face. Look, a voice said, this

  is the colour of your hair. And there it was, my head,

  a pliant jewel in the hands of someone else.

  Our Origins Are in the Sea

  I live near the coast. On these summer nights

  the dog-star rises somewhere near the hunter,

  near the sun. I stand at the edge of our grass.

  I do not connect them: once they were connected –

  the fixity of stars and unruly salt water –

  by sailors with an avarice for landfall.

  And this is land. The way the whitebeams will

  begin their fall to an alluvial earth and

  a bicycle wheel is spinning on it, proves that.

  From where I stand the sea is just a rumour.

  The stars are put out by our streetlamp. Light

  and seawater are well separated. And how little

  survives of the sea-captain in his granddaughter

  is everywhere apparent. Such things get lost.

  He drowned in the Bay of Biscay. I never saw him.

  I turn to go in. The hills are indistinct.

  The coast is near and darkening. The stars are clearer.

  The grass and the house are lapped in shadow.

  And the briar rose is rigged in the twilight,

  the way I imagine sails used to be –

  lacy and stiff together, a frigate of ivory.

  What Love Intended

  I can imagine if,

  I came back again,

  looking through windows at

  broken mirrors, pictures,

  and, in the cracked upstairs,

  the beds where it all began.

  The suburb in the rain

  this October morning,

  full of food and children

  and animals, will be –

  when I come back again –

  gone to rack and ruin.

  I will be its ghost,

  its revenant, discovering

  again in one place

  the history of my pain,

  my ordeal, my grace,

  unable to resist

  seeing what is past,

  judging what has ended

  and whether, first to last,

  from then to now and even

  here, ruined, this

  is what love intended –

  finding even the yellow

  jasmine in the dusk,

  the smell of early dinners,

  the voices of our children,

  taking turns and quarrelling,

  burned on the distance,

  gone. And the small square

  where under cropped lime

  and poplar, on bicycles

  and skates in the summer,

  they played until dark;

  propitiating time.

  And even the two whitebeams

  outside the house gone, with

  the next-door-neighbour

  who used to say in April –

  when one was slow to bloom –

  they were a man and woman.

  from IN A TIME OF VIOLENCE

  1994

  The Singers

  for M.R.

  The women who were singers in the West

  lived on an unforgiving coast.

  I want to ask was there ever one

  moment when all of it relented,

  when rain and ocean and their own

  sense of home were revealed to them

  as one and the same?

  After which

  every day was still shaped by weather,

  but every night their mouths filled with

  Atlantic storms and clouded-over stars

  and exhausted birds.

  And only when the danger

  was plain in the music could you know

  their true measure of rejoicing in

  finding a voice where they found a vision.

  I Writing in a Time of Violence

  A sequence

  As in a city where the evil are permitted to have authority and the good are put out of the way, so in the soul of man, as we maintain, the imitative poet implants an evil constitution, for he indulges the irrational nature which has no discernment of greater or less.

  Plato, The Republic, X

  1 That the Science of Cartography is Limited

  – and not simply by the fact that this shading of

  forest cannot show the fragrance of balsam,

  the gloom of cypresses

  is what I wish to prove.

  When you and I were first in love we drove

  to the borders of Connacht

  and entered a wood there.

  Look down you said: this was once a famine road.

  I looked down at ivy and the scutch grass

  rough-cast stone had

  disappeared into as you told me

  in the second winter of their ordeal, in

  1847, when the crop had failed twice,

  Relief Committees gave

  the starving Irish such roads to build.

  Where they died, there the road ended
r />   and ends still and when I take down

  the map of this island, it is never so

  I can say here is

  the masterful, the apt rendering of

  the spherical as flat, nor

  an ingenious design which persuades a curve

  into a plane,

  but to tell myself again that

  the line which says woodland and cries hunger

  and gives out among sweet pine and cypress

  and finds no horizon

  will not be there.

  2 The Death of Reason

  When the Peep-O-Day Boys were laying fires down in

  the hayricks and seed-barns of a darkening Ireland,

  the art of portrait-painting reached its height

  across the water.

  The fire caught.

  The flames cracked and the light showed up the scaffold

  and the wind carried staves of a ballad.

  The flesh-smell of hatred.

  And she climbed the stairs.

  Nameless composite. Anonymous beauty-bait for the painter.

  Rustling gun-coloured silks. To set a seal on Augustan London.

  And sat down.

  The easel waits for her

  and the age is ready to resemble her and