New and Selected Poems (14 page)

Without bed or board

I face dark days

in frozen lairs

and wind-driven snow.

   

 

Ice scoured by winds.

Watery shadows from weak sun.

Shelter from the one tree

on a plateau.

   

 

Haunting deer-paths,

enduring rain,

first-footing the grey

frosted grass.

   

 

I climb towards the pass

and the stag’s belling

rings off the wood,

surf-noise rises

   

 

where I go, heartbroken

and worn out,

sharp-haunched Sweeney,

raving and moaning.

   

 

The sough of the winter night,

my feet packing the hailstones

as I pad the dappled

banks of Mourne

   

 

or lie, unslept, in a wet bed

on the hills by Lough Erne,

tensed for first light

and an early start.

   

 

Skimming the waves

at Dunseverick,

listening to billows

at Dun Rodairce,

   

 

hurtling from that great wave

to the wave running

in tidal Barrow,

one night in hard Dun Cernan,

   

 

the next among the wild flowers

of Benn Boirne;

and then a stone pillow

on the screes of Croagh Patrick.

   

 

But to have ended up

lamenting here

on Ailsa Craig.

A hard station!

   

 

Ailsa Craig,

the seagulls’ home,

God knows it is

hard lodgings.

   

 

Ailsa Craig,

bell-shaped rock,

reaching sky-high,

snout in the sea –

   

 

it hard-beaked,

me seasoned and scraggy:

we mated like a couple

of hard-shanked cranes.

Sainted cliff at Alternan,

nut grove, hazel wood!

Cold quick sweeps of water

fall down the cliff-side.

   

 

Ivies green and thicken there,

its oak-mast is precious.

Fruited branches nod and bend

from heavy-headed apple trees.

   

 

Badgers make their setts there

and swift hares have their form;

and seals’ heads swim the ocean,

cobbling the running foam.

   

 

And by the waterfall, Colman’s son,

haggard, spent, frost-bitten Sweeney,

Ronan of Drumgesh’s victim,

is sleeping at the foot of a tree.

There was a time when I preferred

the turtle-dove’s soft jubilation

as it flitted round a pool

to the murmur of conversation.

   

 

There was a time when I preferred

the blackbird singing on the hill

and the stag loud against the storm

to the clinking tongue of this bell.

   

 

There was a time when I preferred

the mountain grouse crying at dawn

to the voice and closeness

of a beautiful woman.

   

 

There was a time when I preferred

wolf-packs yelping and howling

to the sheepish voice of a cleric

bleating out plainsong.

   

 

You are welcome to pledge healths

and carouse in your drinking dens;

I will dip and steal water

from a well with my open palm.

   

 

You are welcome to that cloistered hush

of your students’ conversation;

I will study the pure chant

of hounds baying in Glen Bolcain.

   

 

You are welcome to your salt meat

and fresh meat in feasting-houses;

I will live content elsewhere

on tufts of green watercress.

   

 

The herd’s sharp spear wounded me

and passed clean through my body.

Ah Christ, who disposed all things, why

was I not killed at Moira?

   

 

Of all the innocent lairs I made

the length and breadth of Ireland

I remember an open bed

above the lough in Mourne.

   

 

Of all the innocent lairs I made

the length and breadth of Ireland

I remember bedding down

above the wood in Glen Bolcain.

   

 

To you, Christ, I give thanks

for your Body in communion.

Whatever evil I have done

in this world, I repent.

There we were in the vaulted tunnel running,

You in your going-away coat speeding ahead

And me, me then like a fleet god gaining

Upon you before you turned to a reed

   

 

Or some new white flower japped with crimson

As the coat flapped wild and button after button

Sprang off and fell in a trail

Between the Underground and the Albert Hall.

   

 

Honeymooning, mooning around, late for the Proms,

Our echoes die in that corridor and now

I come as Hansel came on the moonlit stones

Retracing the path back, lifting the buttons

   

 

To end up in a draughty lamplit station

After the trains have gone, the wet track

Bared and tensed as I am, all attention

For your step following and damned if I look back.

The clear weather of juniper

darkened into winter.

She fed gin to sloes

and sealed the glass container.

   

 

When I unscrewed it

I smelled the disturbed

tart stillness of a bush

rising through the pantry.

   

 

When I poured it

it had a cutting edge

and flamed

like Betelgeuse.

   

 

I drink to you

in smoke-mirled, blue-black,

polished sloes, bitter

and dependable.

For Derek Mahon

So, he would pay his ‘debt to medicine’.

But first he drank cognac by the ocean

With his back to all he travelled there to face.

His head was swimming free as the troikas

   

 

Of Tyumin, he looked down from the rail

Of his thirty years and saw a mile

Into himself as if he were clear water:

Lake Baikhal from the deckrail of the steamer.

   

 

So far away, Moscow was like lost youth.

And who was he, to savour in his mouth

Fine spirits that the puzzled literati

Packed off with him to a penal colony –

   

 

Him, born, you may say, under the counter?

At least that meant he knew its worth. No cantor

In full throat by the iconostasis

Got holier joy than he got from that glass

   

 

That shone and warmed like diamonds warming

On some pert young cleavage in a salon,

Inviolable and affronting.

He felt the glass go cold in the midnight sun.

   

 

When he staggered up and smashed it on the stones

It rang as clearly as the convicts’ chains

That haunted him. All through the months to come

It rang on like the burden of his freedom

   

 

To try for the right tone – not tract, not thesis –

And walk away from floggings. He who thought to squeeze

His slave’s blood out and waken the free man

Shadowed a convict guide through Sakhalin.