New and Selected Poems (15 page)

It is a kind of chalky russet

solidified gourd, sedimentary

and so reliably dense and bricky

I often clasp it and throw it from hand to hand.

   

 

It was ruddier, with an underwater

hint of contusion, when I lifted it,

wading a shingle beach on Inishowen.

Across the estuary light after light

   

 

came on silently round the perimeter

of the camp. A stone from Phlegethon,

bloodied on the bed of hell’s hot river?

Evening frost and the salt water

   

 

made my hand smoke, as if I’d plucked the heart

that damned Guy de Montfort to the boiling flood –

but not really, though I remembered

his victim’s heart in its casket, long venerated.

   

 

Anyhow, there I was with the wet red stone

in my hand, staring across at the watch-towers

from my free state of image and allusion,

swooped on, then dropped by trained binoculars:

   

 

a silhouette not worth bothering about,

out for the evening in scarf and waders

and not about to set times wrong or right,

stooping along, one of the venerators.

Houndstooth stone. Aberdeen of the mind.

   

 

Saying
An union in the cup I’ll throw

I have hurt my hand, pressing it hard around

this bit hammered off Joyce’s Martello

Tower, this flecked insoluble brilliant

   

 

I keep but feel little in common with –

a kind of stone age circumcising knife,

a Calvin edge in my complaisant pith.

Granite is jaggy, salty, punitive

   

 

and exacting.
Come to me
, it says

all you who labour and are burdened, I

will not refresh you
. And it adds,
Seize

the day
. And,
You can take me or leave me
.

Often I watched her lift it

from where its compact wedge

rode the back of the stove

like a tug at anchor.

   

 

To test its heat she’d stare

and spit in its iron face

or hold it up next her cheek

to divine the stored danger.

   

 

Soft thumps on the ironing board.

Her dimpled angled elbow

and intent stoop

as she aimed the smoothing iron

   

 

like a plane into linen,

like the resentment of women.

To work, her dumb lunge says,

is to move a certain mass

   

 

through a certain distance,

is to pull your weight and feel

exact and equal to it.

Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.

To be carried back to the shrine some dawn

when the sea spreads its far sun-crops to the south

and I make a morning offering again:

that I may escape the miasma of spilled blood
,

govern the tongue, fear hybris, fear the god

until he speaks in my untrammelled mouth
.

I stood between them,

the one with his travelled intelligence

and tawny containment,

his speech like the twang of a bowstring,

   

 

and another, unshorn and bewildered

in the tubs of his Wellingtons,

smiling at me for help,

faced with this stranger I’d brought him.

   

 

Then a cunning middle voice

came out of the field across the road

saying, ‘Be adept and be dialect,

tell of this wind coming past the zinc hut,

   

 

call me sweetbriar after the rain

or snowberries cooled in the fog.

But love the cut of this travelled one

and call me also the cornfield of Boaz.

   

 

Go beyond what’s reliable

in all that keeps pleading and pleading,

these eyes and puddles and stones,

and recollect how bold you were

   

 

when I visited you first

with departures you cannot go back on.’

A chaffinch flicked from an ash and next thing

I found myself driving the stranger

   

 

through my own country, adept

at dialect, reciting my pride

in all that I knew, that began to make strange

at that same recitation.

The living mother-of-pearl of a salmon

just out of the water

   

 

is gone just like that, but your stick

is kept salmon-silver.

   

 

Seasoned and bendy,

it convinces the hand

   

 

that what you have you hold

to play with and pose with

   

 

and lay about with.

But then too it points back to cattle

   

 

and spatter and beating

the bars of a gate –

   

 

the very stick we might cut

from your family tree.

   

 

The living cobalt of an afternoon

dragonfly drew my eye to it first

   

 

and the evening I trimmed it for you

you saw your first glow-worm –

   

 

all of us stood round in silence, even you

gigantic enough to darken the sky

   

 

for a glow-worm.

And when I poked open the grass

   

 

a tiny brightening den lit the eye

in the blunt cut end of your stick.

All through that Sunday afternoon

a kite flew above Sunday,

a tightened drumhead, an armful of blown chaff.

   

 

I’d seen it grey and slippy in the making,

I’d tapped it when it dried out white and stiff,

I’d tied the bows of newspaper

along its six-foot tail.

   

 

But now it was far up like a small black lark

and now it dragged as if the bellied string

were a wet rope hauled upon

to lift a shoal.

   

 

My friend says that the human soul

is about the weight of a snipe

yet the soul at anchor there,

the string that sags and ascends,

weighs like a furrow assumed into the heavens.

   

 

Before the kite plunges down into the wood

and this line goes useless

take in your two hands, boys, and feel

the strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief.

You were born fit for it.

Stand in here in front of me

and take the strain.

When we climbed the slopes of the cutting

We were eye-level with the white cups

Of the telegraph poles and the sizzling wires.

   

 

Like lovely freehand they curved for miles

East and miles west beyond us, sagging

Under their burden of swallows.

   

 

We were small and thought we knew nothing

Worth knowing. We thought words travelled the wires

In the shiny pouches of raindrops,

   

 

Each one seeded full with the light

Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves

So infinitesimally scaled

   

 

We could stream through the eye of a needle.

For John Montague

As if a trespasser

unbolted a forgotten gate

and ripped the growth

tangling its lower bars –

   

 

just beyond the hedge

he has opened a dark morse

along the bank,

a crooked wounding

   

 

of silent, cobwebbed

grass. If I stop

he stops

like the moon.

   

 

He lives in his feet

and ears, weather-eyed,

all pad and listening,

a denless mover.

   

 

Under the bridge

his reflection shifts

sideways to the current,

mothy, alluring.

   

 

I am haunted

by his stealthy rustling,

the unexpected spoor,

the pollen settling.