New Selected Poems
Page 3
The hour mercurial rainwater
Makes a mirror for sparrows.
It’s time we drowned our sorrows.
I tiptoe in.
I lift you up
Wriggling
In your rosy, zipped sleeper.
Yes, this is the hour
For the early bird and me
When finder is keeper.
I crook the bottle.
How you suckle!
This is the best I can be,
Housewife
To this nursery
Where you hold on,
Dear life.
A silt of milk.
The last suck.
And now your eyes are open,
Birth-coloured and offended.
Earth wakes.
You go back to sleep.
The feed is ended.
Worms turn.
Stars go in.
Even the moon is losing face.
Poplars stilt for dawn
And we begin
The long fall from grace.
I tuck you in.
Domestic Interior
for Kevin
The woman is as round
as the new ring
ambering her finger.
The mirror weds her.
She has long since been bedded.
There is
about it all
a quiet search for attention
like the unexpected shine
of a despised utensil.
The oils,
the varnishes,
the cracked light,
the worm of permanence –
all of them supplied by Van Eyck –
by whose edict she will stay
burnished, fertile,
on her wedding day,
interred in her joy.
Love, turn.
The convex of your eye
that is so loving, bright
and constant yet shows
only this woman in her varnishes,
who won’t improve in the light.
But there’s a way of life
that is its own witness:
Put the kettle on, shut the blind.
Home is a sleeping child,
an open mind
and our effects,
shrugged and settled
in the sort of light
jugs and kettles
grow important by.
Energies
This is my time:
the twilight closing in,
a hissing on the ring,
stove noises, kettle steam
and children’s kisses.
But the energy of flowers!
Their faces are so white –
my garden daisies –
they are so tight-fisted,
such economies of light.
In the dusk they have made hay:
in a banked radiance,
in an acreage of brightness
they are misering the day
while mine delays away
in chores left to do:
the soup, the bath, the fire
then bed-time,
up the stairs –
and there, there
the buttery curls,
the light,
the bran-fur of the teddy bear,
the fist like a night-time daisy,
damp and tight.
Monotony
The stilled hub
and polar drab
of the suburb
closes in.
In the round
of the staircase,
my arms sheafing nappies,
I grow in and down
to an old spiral,
a well of questions,
an oracle:
will it tell me
am I
at these altars,
warm shrines,
washing machines, dryers
with their incense
of men and infants,
priestess
or sacrifice?
My late tasks
wait like children:
milk bottles,
the milkman’s note.
Cold air
clouds the rinsed,
milky glass,
blowing clear
with a hint
of winter constellations:
will I find
my answer where
Virgo reaps?
Her arms sheafing
the hemisphere,
hour after frigid hour,
her virgin stars,
her maidenhead
married to force
harry us
to wed our gleams
to brute routines:
solstices,
small families.
Endings
A child
shifts in a cot.
No matter what happens now
I’ll never fill one again.
It’s a night
white things ember in:
jasmine and the shine –
flowering, opaline –
of the apple trees.
If I lean
I can see
what it is the branches end in:
The leaf.
The reach.
The blossom.
The abandon.
After a Childhood Away from Ireland
One summer
we slipped in at dawn
on plum-coloured water
in the sloppy quiet.
The engines
of the ship stopped.
There was an eerie
drawing near,
a noiseless coming head-on
of red roofs, walls,
dogs, barley stooks.
Then we were there.
Cobh.
Coming home.
I had heard of this:
the ground the emigrants
resistless, weeping
laid their cheeks to,
put their lips to kiss.
Love is also memory.
I only stared.
What I had lost
was not land
but the habit of land:
whether of growing out of
or settling back on,
or being
defined by.
I climb
to your nursery.
I stand listening
to the dissonances
of the summer’s day ending.
I bend to kiss you.
Your cheeks
are brick pink.
The Muse Mother
My window pearls wet.
The bare rowan tree
berries rain.
I can see
from where I stand
a woman hunkering –
her busy hand
worrying a child’s face,
working a nappy liner
over his sticky loud
round of a mouth.
Her hand’s a cloud
across his face
making light and rain,
smiles and a frown,
a smile again.
She jockeys him to her hip,
pockets the nappy liner,
collars rain on her nape
and moves away
but my mind stays fixed:
if I could only decline her –
lost noun
out of context,
stray figure of speech –
from this rainy street
again to her roots,
she might teach me
a new language:
to be a sibyl
able to sing the past
in pure syllables,
limning hymns sung
to belly wheat or a woman –
able to speak at last
my mother tongue.
Woman in Kitchen
Breakfast over, islanded by noise,
she watches the machines go fast
and slow.
She stands among them as they shake the house.
They move. Their destination is specific.
She has nowhere definite to go:
she might be a pedestrian in traffic.
White surfaces retract. White
sideboards light the white of walls.
Cups wink white in their saucers.
The light of day bleaches as it falls
on cups and sideboards. She could use
the room to tap with if she lost her sight.
Machines jigsaw everything she knows.
And she is everywhere among their furor:
the tropic of the dryer tumbling clothes.
The round lunar window of the washer.
The kettle in the toaster is a kingfisher
swooping for trout above the river’s mirror.
The wash done, the kettle boiled, the sheets
spun and clean, the dryer stops dead.
The silence is a death. It starts to bury
the room in white spaces. She turns to spread
a cloth on the board and irons sheets
in a room white and quiet as a mortuary.
Patchwork or the Poet’s Craft
I have been thinking at random
on the universe
or rather, how nothing in the universe
is random –
(there’s nothing like presumption late at night.)
My sumptuous
trash bag of colours –
Laura Ashley cottons –
waits to be cut
and stitched and patched
but there’s a mechanical feel
about the handle
of my second-hand sewing machine,
with its flowers
and Singer painted orange on it.
And its iron wheel.
My back is to the dark.
Somewhere out there
are stars and bits of stars
and little bits of bits.
And swiftnesses and brightnesses and drift.
But is it craft or art?
I will be here
till midnight,
cross-legged in the dining-room,
logging triangles and diamonds,
cutting and aligning,
finding greens in pinks
and burgundies in whites
until I finish it.
There’s no reason in it.
Only when it’s laid
right across the floor,
sphere on square
and seam on seam,
in a good light –
a night-sky spread –
will it start to hit me.
These are not bits.
They are pieces.
And the pieces fit.
Degas’s Laundresses
You rise, you dawn
roll-sleeved Aphrodites,
out of a camisole brine,
a linen pit of stitches,
silking the fitted sheets
away from you like waves.
You seam dreams in the folds
of wash from which freshes
the whiff and reach of fields
where it bleached and stiffened.
Your chat’s sabbatical:
brides, wedding outfits,
a pleasure of leisured women
are sweated into the folds,
the neat heaps of linen.
Now the drag of the clasp.
Your wrists basket your waist.
You round to the square weight.
Wait. There behind you.
A man. There behind you.
Whatever you do don’t turn.
Why is he watching you?
Whatever you do don’t turn.
Whatever you do don’t turn.
See he takes his ease
staking his easel so,
slowly sharpening charcoal,
closing his eyes just so,
slowly smiling as if
so slowly he is
unbandaging his mind.
Surely a good laundress
would understand its twists,
its white turns,
its blind designs –
it’s your winding sheet.
It’s a Woman’s World
Our way of life
has hardly changed
since a wheel first
whetted a knife.
Maybe flame
burns more greedily
and wheels are steadier
but we’re the same
who milestone
our lives
with oversights –
living by the lights
of the loaf left
by the cash register,
the washing powder
paid for and wrapped,
the wash left wet:
like most historic peoples
we are defined
by what we forget,
by what we will never be –
star-gazers,
fire-eaters.
It’s our alibi
for all time:
as far as history goes
we were never
on the scene of the crime.
So when the king’s head
gored its basket –
grim harvest –
we were gristing bread
or getting the recipe
for a good soup
to appetise
our gossip.
It’s still the same.
By night our windows
moth our children
to the flame
of hearth not history.
And still no page
scores the low music
of our outrage.
Appearances
still reassure:
that woman there
craned to the starry mystery
is merely getting a breath
of evening air,
while this one here –
her mouth
a burning plume –
she’s no fire-eater,
just my frosty neighbour
coming home.
The New Pastoral
The first man had flint to spark. He had a wheel
to read his world
I’m in the dark.
I am a lost, last inhabitant –
displaced person
in a pastoral chaos.
All day I listen to
the loud distress, the switch and tick of
new herds.
But I’m no shepherdess.
Can I unbruise these sprouts or clean this mud flesh
till it roots again?
Can I make whole
this lamb’s knuckle, butchered from its last crooked suckling?
I could be happy here,
I could be something more than a refugee
were it not for this lamb unsuckled, for the nonstop
switch and tick
telling me
there was a past,
there was a pastoral,
and these chance sights
what are they all
but amnesias of a rite
I danced once on a frieze?
‘Daphne with her thighs in bark’
I have written this
so that,
in the next myth,
my sister will be wiser.
Let her learn from me:
the opposite of passion
is not virtue
but routine.
Look at me
I can be cooking,
making coffee,
scrubbing wood, perhaps,
and back it comes:
the crystalline, the otherwhere,
the wood
where I was
when he began the chase.
And how I ran from him!
Pan-thighed,
satyr-faced he was.
The trees reached out to me.
I silvered and
I quivered. I shook out
my foil of quick leaves.
He snouted past.
What a fool I was!
I shall be here forever,
setting out the tea,
among the coppers and the branching alloys and
the tin shine of this kitchen;
laying saucers on the pine table.
Save face, sister.
Fall. Stumble.
Rut with him.
His rough heat will keep you warm and
you will be better off than me,
with your memories
down the garden,
at the start of March,
unable to keep your eyes
off the chestnut tree –
just the way
it thrusts and hardens
The Woman Turns Herself into a Fish
Unpod
the bag,
the seed.
Slap
the flanks back.
Flatten
paps.
Make finny
scaled
and chill
the slack
and dimple
of the rump.
Pout
the mouth,
brow the eyes
and now
and now