New Selected Poems
Page 6
from churching to milk fever, from tongue-tied princess
to the queen of a mulish king – and now this.
They were each other’s fantasy in youth.
No splintering at all about that mouth
when they were flesh and muscle, woman and man,
fire and kindling. See that silk divan?
Enough said. Now the times themselves
are his asylum: these are the Middle Ages, sweet
and savage era of the saving grace; indulgences
are two a penny; under the stonesmith’s hand
stone turns into lace. I need his hand now.
Outside my window October soaks the stone;
you can hear it; you’d almost think
the brick was drinking it; the rowan drips
and history waits. Let it wait. I want
no elsewheres: the clover-smelling, stove-warm
air of autumn catches cold; the year turns;
the leaves fall; the poem hesitates:
If we could see ourselves, not as we do –
in mirrors, self-deceptions, self-regardings –
but as we ought to be and as we have been:
poets, lute-stringers, makyres and abettors
of our necessary art, soothsayers of the ailment
and disease of our times, sweet singers,
truth tellers, intercessors for self-knowledge –
what would we think of these fin-de-siècle
half-hearted penitents we have become
at the sick-bed of the century: hand-wringing
elegists with an ill-concealed greed
for the inheritance?
My prince, demented
in a crystal past, a lost France, I elect you emblem
and ancestor of our lyric: it fits you like a glove –
doesn’t it? – the part; untouchable, outlandish,
esoteric, inarticulate and out of reach
of human love: studied every day by your wife,
an ordinary honest woman out of place
in all this, wanting nothing more than the man
she married, all her sorrows in her stolid face.
from OUTSIDE HISTORY
1990
I Object Lessons
The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me
It was the first gift he ever gave her,
buying it for five francs in the Galeries
in pre-war Paris. It was stifling.
A starless drought made the nights stormy.
They stayed in the city for the summer.
They met in cafés. She was always early.
He was late. That evening he was later.
They wrapped the fan. He looked at his watch.
She looked down the Boulevard des Capucines.
She ordered more coffee. She stood up.
The streets were emptying. The heat was killing.
She thought the distance smelled of rain and lightning.
These are wild roses, appliqued on silk by hand,
darkly picked, stitched boldly, quickly.
The rest is tortoiseshell and has the reticent,
clear patience of its element. It is
a worn-out, underwater bullion and it keeps,
even now, an inference of its violation.
The lace is overcast as if the weather
it opened for and offset had entered it.
The past is an empty café terrace.
An airless dusk before thunder. A man running.
And no way now to know what happened then –
none at all – unless, of course, you improvise:
The blackbird on this first sultry morning,
in summer, finding buds, worms, fruit,
feels the heat. Suddenly she puts out her wing –
the whole, full flirtatious span of it.
The Rooms of Other Women Poets
I wonder about you: whether the blue abrasions
of daylight, falling as dusk across your page,
make you reach for the lamp. I sometimes think
I see that gesture in the way you use language.
And whether you think, as I do, that wild flowers
dried and fired on the ironstone rim of
the saucer underneath your cup, are a sign of
a savage, old calligraphy: you will not have it.
The chair you use, for instance, may be cane
soaked and curled in spirals, painted white
and eloquent, or iron mesh and the table
a horizon of its own on plain, deal trestles,
bearing up unmarked, steel-cut foolscap,
a whole quire of it; when you leave I know
you look at them and you love their air of
unaggressive silence as you close the door.
The early summer, its covenant, its grace,
is everywhere: even shadows have leaves.
Somewhere you are writing or have written in
a room you came to as I come to this
room with honeyed corners, the interior sunless,
the windows shut but clear so I can see
the bay windbreak, the laburnum hang fire, feel
the ache of things ending in the jasmine darkening early.
The Shadow Doll
This was sent to the bride-to-be in Victorian times, by her dressmaker. It consisted in a porcelain doll, under a dome of glass, modelling the proposed wedding dress.
They stitched blooms from ivory tulle
to hem the oyster gleam of the veil.
They made hoops for the crinoline.
Now, in summary and neatly sewn –
a porcelain bride in an airless glamour –
the shadow doll survives its occasion.
Under glass, under wraps, it stays
even now, after all, discreet about
visits, fevers, quickenings and lusts
and just how, when she looked at
the shell-tone spray of seed pearls,
the bisque features, she could see herself
inside it all, holding less than real
stephanotis, rose petals, never feeling
satin rise and fall with the vows
I kept repeating on the night before –
astray among the cards and wedding gifts –
the coffee pots and the clocks and
the battered tan case full of cotton
lace and tissue-paper, pressing down, then
pressing down again. And then, locks.
The Latin Lesson
Easter light in the convent garden.
The eucalyptus tree glitters in it.
A bell rings for
the first class.
Today the Sixth Book of the Aeneid.
An old nun calls down the corridor.
Manners, girls. Where
are your manners?
Last night in his Lenten talk
the local priest asked us to remember
everything is put here
for a purpose:
even eucalyptus leaves are suitable
for making oil from to steep wool in,
to sweeten our blankets
and gaberdines.
My forefinger crawls on the lines.
A storm light comes in from the bay.
How beautiful the words
look, how
vagrant and strange on the page
before we crush them for their fragrance
and crush them again
to discover
the pathway to hell and that these
shadows in their shadow-bodies,
chittering and mobbing
on the far
shore, signalling their hunger for
the small usefulness of a life, are
the dead. And how
before the bell
will I hail the black keel and flatter the dark
boatman and cross the river and still
keep
a civil tongue
in my head?
Bright-Cut Irish Silver
I take it down
from time to time, to feel
the smooth path of silver meet the cicatrice of skill.
These scars, I tell myself, are learned.
This gift for wounding an artery of rock
was passed on from father to son, to the father
of the next son;
is an aptitude
for injuring earth while inferring it in curves and surfaces;
is this cold potency which has come,
by time and chance,
into my hands.
II Outside History
A sequence
I The Achill Woman
She came up the hill carrying water.
She wore a half-buttoned, wool cardigan,
a tea-towel round her waist.
She pushed the hair out of her eyes with
her free hand and put the bucket down.
The zinc-music of the handle on the rim
tuned the evening. An Easter moon rose.
In the next-door field a stream was
a fluid sunset; and then, stars.
I remember the cold rosiness of her hands.
She bent down and blew on them like broth.
And round her waist, on a white background,
in coarse, woven letters, the words ‘glass cloth’.
And she was nearly finished for the day.
And I was all talk, raw from college –
week-ending at a friend’s cottage
with one suitcase and the set text
of the Court poets of the Silver Age.
We stayed putting down time until
the evening turned cold without warning.
She said goodnight and started down the hill.
The grass changed from lavender to black.
The trees turned back to cold outlines.
You could taste frost
but nothing now can change the way I went
indoors, chilled by the wind
and made a fire
and took down my book
and opened it and failed to comprehend
the harmonies of servitude,
the grace music gives to flattery
and language borrows from ambition –
and how I fell asleep
oblivious to
the planets clouding over in the skies,
the slow decline of the spring moon,
the songs crying out their ironies.
II A False Spring
Alders are tasselled.
Flag-iris is already out on the canal.
From my window I can see
the College gardens, crocuses stammering
in pools of rain, plum blossom
on the branches.
I want to find her,
the woman I once was,
who came out of that reading-room
in a hard January, after studying
Aeneas in the underworld,
how his old battle-foes spotted him there –
how they called and called and called
only to have it be
a yell of shadows, an O vanishing in
the polished waters
and the topsy-turvy seasons of hell –
her mind so frail her body was its ghost.
I want to tell her she can rest,
she is embodied now.
But narcissi,
opening too early,
are all I find.
I hear the bad sound of these south winds,
the rain coming from some region which has lost sight
of our futures, leaving us
nothing to look forward to except
what one serious frost can accomplish.
III The Making of an Irish Goddess
Ceres went to hell
with no sense of time.
When she looked back
all that she could see was
the arteries of silver in the rock,
the diligence of rivers always at one level,
wheat at one height,
leaves of a single colour,
the same distance in the usual light;
a seasonless, unscarred earth.
But I need time –
my flesh and that history –
to make the same descent.
In my body,
neither young now nor fertile,
and with the marks of childbirth
still on it,
in my gestures –
the way I pin my hair to hide
the stitched, healed blemish of a scar –
must be
an accurate inscription
of that agony:
the failed harvests,
the fields rotting to the horizon,
the children devoured by their mothers
whose souls, they would have said,
went straight to hell,
followed by their own.
There is no other way:
myth is the wound we leave
in the time we have
which in my case is this
March evening
at the foothills of the Dublin mountains,
across which the lights have changed all day,
holding up my hand,
sickle-shaped, to my eyes
to pick out
my own daughter from
all the other children in the distance;
her back turned to me.
IV White Hawthorn in the West of Ireland
I drove West
in the season between seasons.
I left behind suburban gardens.
Lawnmowers. Small talk.
Under low skies, past splashes of coltsfoot,
I assumed
the hard shyness of Atlantic light
and the superstitious aura of hawthorn.
All I wanted then was to fill my arms with
sharp flowers,
to seem, from a distance, to be part of
that ivory, downhill rush. But I knew,
I had always known
the custom was
not to touch hawthorn.
Not to bring it indoors for the sake of
the luck
such constraint would forfeit –
a child might die, perhaps, or an unexplained
fever speckle heifers. So I left it
stirring on those hills
with a fluency
only water has. And, like water, able
to re-define land. And free to seem to be –
for anglers,
and for travellers astray in
the unmarked lights of a May dusk –
the only language spoken in those parts.
V Daphne Heard with Horror the Addresses of the God
It was early summer. Already
the conservatory was all steam and greenness.
I would have known the stephanotis by
its cut-throat sweetness anywhere.
We drank tea. You were telling me
a story you had heard as a child,
about the wedding of a local girl,
long ago, and a merchant from Argyll.
I thought the garden looked so at ease.
The roses were beginning on one side.
The laurel hedge was nothing but itself,
and all of it so free of any need
for nymphs, goddesses, wounded presences –
the fleet river-daughters who took root
and can be seen in the woods in
unmistakable shapes of weeping.
You were still speaking. By the time
I paid attention they were well married:
the bridegroom had his bride on the ship.
The sails were ready to be set. You said
small craft went with her to the ship and,
as it sailed out, well-wishers
took in
armfuls, handfuls, from the boats
white roses and threw them on the water.
We cleared up then, saying how
the greenfly needed spraying, the azaleas
were over; and you went inside. I
stayed in the heat looking out at
the garden in its last definition.
Freshening and stirring. A suggestion,
behind it all, of darkness. In the shadow,
beside the laurel hedge, its gesture.
VI The Photograph on My Father’s Desk
It could be
any summer afternoon.
The sun is warm on
the fruitwood garden seat.
Fuchsia droops.
Thrushes move to get
windfalls underneath the crab apple tree.
The woman
holds her throat like a wound.
She wears
mutton-coloured gaberdine with
a scum of lace
just above her boot
which is pointed at
this man coming down the path with
his arms wide open. Laughing.
The garden fills up
with a burned silence.
The talk has stopped.
The spoon which just now