New and Selected Poems (12 page)

VIII

 

Thunderlight on the split logs: big raindrops

At body heat and lush with omen

Spattering dark on the hatchet iron.

This morning when a magpie with jerky steps

Inspected a horse asleep beside the wood

I thought of dew on armour and carrion.

What would I meet, blood-boltered, on the road?

How deep into the woodpile sat the toad?

What welters through this dark hush on the crops?

Do you remember that
pension
in Les Landes

Where the old one rocked and rocked and rocked

A mongol in her lap, to little songs?

Come to me quick, I am upstairs shaking.

My all of you birchwood in lightning.

IX

 

Outside the kitchen window a black rat

Sways on the briar like infected fruit:

‘It looked me through, it stared me out, I’m not

Imagining things. Go you out to it.’

Did we come to the wilderness for this?

We have our burnished bay tree at the gate,

Classical, hung with the reek of silage

From the next farm, tart-leafed as inwit.

Blood on a pitch-fork, blood on chaff and hay,

Rats speared in the sweat and dust of threshing –

What is my apology for poetry?

The empty briar is swishing

When I come down, and beyond, inside, your face

Haunts like a new moon glimpsed through tangled glass.

X

 

I dreamt we slept in a moss in Donegal

On turf banks under blankets, with our faces

Exposed all night in a wetting drizzle,

Pallid as the dripping sapling birches.

Lorenzo and Jessica in a cold climate.

Diarmuid and Grainne waiting to be found.

Darkly asperged and censed, we were laid out

Like breathing effigies on a raised ground.

And in that dream I dreamt – how like you this? –

Our first night years ago in that hotel

When you came with your deliberate kiss

To raise us towards the lovely and painful

Covenants of flesh; our separateness;

The respite in our dewy dreaming faces.

She would plunge all poets in the ninth circle

And fix them, tooth in skull, tonguing for brain;

For backbiting in life she’d make their hell

A rabid egotistical daisy-chain.

   

 

Unyielding, spurred, ambitious, unblunted,

Lockjawed, mantrapped, each a fastened badger

Jockeying for position, hasped and mounted

Like Ugolino on Archbishop Roger.

   

 

And when she’d make her circuit of the ice,

Aided and abetted by Virgil’s wife,

I would cry out, ‘My sweet, who wears the bays

In our green land above, whose is the life

   

 

Most dedicated and exemplary?’

And she: ‘I have closed my widowed ears

To the sulphurous news of poets and poetry.

Why could you not have, oftener, in our years

   

 

Unclenched, and come down laughing from your room

And walked the twilight with me and your children –

Like that one evening of elder bloom

And hay, when the wild roses were fading?’

   

 

And (as some maker gaffs me in the neck)

‘You weren’t the worst. You aspired to a kind,

Indifferent, faults-on-both-sides tact.

You left us first, and then those books, behind.’

When you plunged

The light of Tuscany wavered

And swung through the pool

From top to bottom.

   

 

I loved your wet head and smashing crawl,

Your fine swimmer’s back and shoulders

Surfacing and surfacing again

This year and every year since.

   

 

I sat dry-throated on the warm stones.

You were beyond me.

The mellowed clarities, the grape-deep air

Thinned and disappointed.

   

 

Thank God for the slow loadening,

When I hold you now

We are close and deep

As the atmosphere on water.

   

 

My two hands are plumbed water.

You are my palpable, lithe

Otter of memory

In the pool of the moment,

   

 

Turning to swim on your back,

Each silent, thigh-shaking kick

Re-tilting the light,

Heaving the cool at your neck.

   

 

And suddenly you’re out,

Back again, intent as ever,

Heavy and frisky in your freshened pelt,

Printing the stones.

Up, black, striped and damasked like the chasuble

At a funeral mass, the skunk’s tail

Paraded the skunk. Night after night

I expected her like a visitor.

   

 

The refrigerator whinnied into silence.

My desk light softened beyond the veranda.

Small oranges loomed in the orange tree.

I began to be tense as a voyeur.

   

 

After eleven years I was composing

Love-letters again, broaching the word ‘wife’

Like a stored cask, as if its slender vowel

Had mutated into the night earth and air

   

 

Of California. The beautiful, useless

Tang of eucalyptus spelt your absence.

The aftermath of a mouthful of wine

Was like inhaling you off a cold pillow.

   

 

And there she was, the intent and glamorous,

Ordinary, mysterious skunk,

Mythologized, demythologized,

Snuffing the boards five feet beyond me.

   

 

It all came back to me last night, stirred

By the sootfall of your things at bedtime,

Your head-down, tail-up hunt in a bottom drawer

For the black plunge-line nightdress.

Walking with you and another lady

In wooded parkland, the whispering grass

Ran its fingers through our guessing silence

And the trees opened into a shady

Unexpected clearing where we sat down.

I think the candour of the light dismayed us.

We talked about desire and being jealous,

Our conversation a loose single gown

Or a white picnic tablecloth spread out

Like a book of manners in the wilderness.

‘Show me,’ I said to our companion, ‘what

I have much coveted, your breast’s mauve star.’

And she consented. Ο neither these verses

Nor my prudence, love, can heal your wounded stare.

I

 

Where the sally tree went pale in every breeze,
where the perfect eye of the nesting blackbird watched,

where one fern was always green

   

I was standing watching you
take the pad from the gatehouse at the crossing
and reach to lift a white wash off the whins.

   

 

I could see the vaccination mark
stretched on your upper arm, and smell the coal smell
of the train that comes between us, a slow goods,

   

waggon after waggon full of big-eyed cattle.

III

 

Not the mud slick,

not the black weedy water

full of alder cones and pock-marked leaves.

   

 

Not the cow parsley in winter

with its old whitened shins and wrists,

its sibilance, its shaking.

   

 

Not even the tart green shade of summer

thick with butterflies

and fungus plump as a leather saddle.

   

 

No. But in a still corner,

braced to its pebble-dashed wall,

heavy, earth-drawn, all mouth and eye,

   

 

the sunflower, dreaming umber.

IV

 

Catspiss smell,

the pink bloom open:

I press a leaf

of the flowering currant

on the back of your hand

for the tight slow burn

of its sticky juice

to prime your skin,

and your veins to be crossed

criss-cross with leaf-veins.

I lick my thumb

and dip it in mould,

I anoint the anointed

leaf-shape. Mould

blooms and pigments

the back of your hand

like a birthmark –

my umber one,

you are stained, stained

to perfection.

A rowan like a lipsticked girl.

Between the by-road and the main road

Alder trees at a wet and dripping distance

Stand off among the rushes.

   

 

There are the mud-flowers of dialect

And the immortelles of perfect pitch

And that moment when the bird sings very close

To the music of what happens.