New and Selected Poems (23 page)

III

 

What looks the strongest has outlived its term
.

The future lies with what’s affirmed from under
.

These things that corroborated us when we dwelt

under the aegis of our stealthy patron,

the guardian angel of passivity,

now sink a fang of menace in my shoulder.

I repeat the word ‘stricken’ to myself

and stand bareheaded under the banked clouds

edged more and more with brassy thunderlight.

I yearn for hammerblows on clinkered planks,

the uncompromised report of driven thole-pins,

to know there is one among us who never swerved

from all his instincts told him was right action,

who stood his ground in the indicative,

whose boat will lift when the cloudburst happens.

Statues with exposed hearts and barbed-wire crowns

Still stood in alcoves, hares flitted beneath

The dozing bellies of jets, our menu-writers

And punks with aerosol sprays held their own

With the best of them. Satellite link-ups

Wafted over us the blessings of popes, heliports

Maintained a charmed circle for idols on tour

And casualties on their stretchers. We sleepwalked

The line between panic and formulae, screentested

Our first native models and the last of the mummers,

Watching ourselves at a distance, advantaged

And airy as a man on a springboard

Who keeps limbering up because the man cannot dive

   

 

And then in the foggy midlands it appeared,

Our mud vision, as if a rose window of mud

Had invented itself out of the glittery damp,

A gossamer wheel, concentric with its own hub

Of nebulous dirt, sullied yet lucent.

We had heard of the sun standing still and the sun

That changed colour, but we were vouchsafed

Original clay, transfigured and spinning.

And then the sunsets ran murky, the wiper

Could never entirely clean off the windscreen,

Reservoirs tasted of silt, a light fuzz

Accrued in the hair and the eyebrows, and some

Took to wearing a smudge on their foreheads

To be prepared for whatever. Vigils

Began to be kept around puddled gaps,

On altars bulrushes ousted the lilies

And a rota of invalids came and went

On beds they could lease placed in range of the shower.

   

 

A generation who had seen a sign!

Those nights when we stood in an umber dew and smelled

Mould in the verbena, or woke to a light

Furrow-breath on the pillow, when the talk

Was all about who had seen it and our fear

Was touched with a secret pride, only ourselves

Could be adequate then to our lives. When the rainbow

Curved flood-brown and ran like a water-rat’s back

So that drivers on the hard shoulder switched off to watch,

We wished it away, and yet we presumed it a test

That would prove us beyond expectation.

   

 

We lived, of course, to learn the folly of that.

One day it was gone and the east gable

Where its trembling corolla had balanced

Was starkly a ruin again, with dandelions

Blowing high up on the ledges, and moss

That slumbered on through its increase. As cameras raked

The site from every angle, experts

Began their
post factum
jabber and all of us

Crowded in tight for the big explanations.

Just like that, we forgot that the vision was ours,

Our one chance to know the incomparable

And dive to a future. What might have been origin

We dissipated in news. The clarified place

Had retrieved neither us nor itself – except

You could say we survived. So say that, and watch us

Who had our chance to be mud-men, convinced and estranged,

Figure in our own eyes for the eyes of the world.

Once we presumed to found ourselves for good

Between its blue hills and those sandless shores

Where we spent our desperate night in prayer and vigil,

   

 

Once we had gathered driftwood, made a hearth

And hung our cauldron like a firmament,

The island broke beneath us like a wave.

   

 

The land sustaining us seemed to hold firm

Only when we embraced it
in extremis
.

All I believe that happened there was vision.

Act of Union,
1

After a Killing,
1

Afterwards, An,
1

Alphabets,
1

Anahorish,
1

Artist, An,
1

At the Water’s Edge,
1

Badgers,
1

Blackberry-Picking,
1

Bog Oak,
1

Bog Queen,
1

Bogland,
1

Bone Dreams,
1

Broagh,
1

Bye-Child,
1

Casualty,
1

Chekhov on Sakhalin,
1

Clearances,
1

Cleric, The,
1

Cloistered,
1

Constable Calls, A,
1

Death of a Naturalist,
1

Digging,
1

Disappearing Island, The,
1

Dream of Jealousy, A,
1

Drifting Off,
1

Drink of Water, A,
1

England’s Difficulty,
1

Exposure,
1

Field Work (
from
),
1

First Flight, The,
1

First Kingdom, The,
1

Follower,
1

For Bernard and Jane McCabe,
1

Fosterage,
1

From the Canton of

Expectation,
1

From the Frontier of Writing,
1

From the Republic of Conscience,
1

Funeral Rites,
1

Gifts of Rain,
1

Glanmore Sonnets,
1

Granite Chip,
1

Grauballe Man, The,
1

Guttural Muse, The,
1

Hailstones,
1

Harvest Bow, The,
1

Haw Lantern, The,
1

Hazel Stick for Catherine Ann, A,
1

Hercules and Antaeus,
1

Holly,
1

Incertus,
1

In Illo Tempore,
1

In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge,
1

In the Beech,
1

King of the Ditchbacks, The,
1

Kite for Michael and Christopher, A,
1

Limbo,
1

Making Strange,
1

Master, The,
1

Mid-Term Break,
1

Milk Factory, The,
1

Ministry of Fear,
1

Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication,
1

Mud Vision, The,
1

Nesting-Ground,
1

New Song, A,
1

Night Drive,
1

North,
1

Old Smoothing Iron,
1

On the Road,
1

Oracle,
1

Other Side, The,
1

Otter, The,
1

Oysters,
1

Peninsula, The,
1

Personal Helicon,
1

Poem,
1

Punishment,
1

Railway Children, The,
1

Relic of Memory,
1

Requiem for the Croppies,
1

Sandstone Keepsake,
1

Scribes, The,
1

Seed Cutters, The,
1

Shelf Life (
from
),
1

Sibyl,
1

Singer’s House, The,
1

Singing School (
from
),
1

Skunk, The,
1

Sloe Gin,
1

Song,
1

Spoonbait, The,
1

Station Island,
1

Stations of the West, The,
1

Stone from Delphi,
1

Stone Verdict, The,
1

Strand at Lough Beg, The,
1

Strange Fruit,
1

Summer Home,
1

Summer 1969,
1

Sunlight,
1

Sweeney Astray,
1

Sweeney in Connacht,
1

Sweeney Praises the Trees,
1

Sweeney Redivivus (
from
),
1

Sweeney’s Lament on Ailsa Craig,
1

Sweeney’s Last Poem,
1

Terminus,
1

Thatcher,
1

Tollund Man, The,
1

Toome Road, The,
1

Trial Runs,
1

Triptych,
1

Underground, The,
146

Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces,
1

Visitant,
1

Wedding Day,
1

Westering,
1

Whatever You Say Say Nothing (
from
),
1

Wife’s Tale, The,
1

Wishing Tree, The,
1

Wolfe Tone,
1