New Selected Poems
Page 9
every year.
I was nearly an English child.
I could list the English kings.
I could name the famous battles.
I was learning to recognise
God’s grace in history.
And the waters
of the Irish sea,
their shallow weave
and cross-grained blue green
had drained away
to the pale gaze
of a doll’s china eyes –
a stare without recognition or memory.
We have no oracles,
no rocks or olive trees,
no sacred path to the temple
and no priestesses.
The teacher’s voice had a London accent.
This was London. 1952.
It was Ancient History Class.
She put the tip
of the wooden
pointer on the map.
She tapped over ridges and driedout
rivers and cities buried in
the sea and sea-scapes which
had once been land.
And stopped.
Remember this, children.
The Roman Empire was
the greatest Empire
ever known –
until our time of course –
while the Delphic Oracle
was reckoned to be
the exact centre
of the earth.
Suddenly
I wanted
to stand in front of it.
I wanted to trace over
and over the weave of my own country.
To read out names
I was close to forgetting.
Wicklow. Kilruddery. Dublin.
To ask
where exactly
was my old house?
Its brass One and Seven.
Its flight of granite steps.
Its lilac tree whose scent
stayed under your fingernails
for days.
For days –
she was saying – even months,
the ancients travelled
to the Oracle.
They brought sheep and killed them.
They brought questions about tillage and war.
They rarely left with more
than an ambiguous answer.
The Parcel
There are dying arts and
one of them is
the way my mother used to make up a parcel.
Paper first. Mid-brown and coarse-grained as wood.
The worst sort for covering a Latin book neatly
or laying flat at Christmas on a pudding bowl.
It was a big cylinder. She snipped it open
and it unrolled quickly across the floor.
All business, all distance.
Then the scissors.
Not a glittering let-up but a dour
pair, black thumb-holes,
the shears themselves the colour of the rained-
on steps a man with a grindstone climbed up
in the season of lilac and snapdragon
and stood there arguing the rate for
sharpening the lawnmower and the garden pair
and this one. All-in.
The ball of twine was coarsely braided
and only a shade less yellow than
the flame she held under the blunt
end of the sealing-wax until
it melted and spread into a brittle
terracotta medal.
Her hair dishevelled, her tongue between her teeth,
she wrote the address in the quarters
twine had divided the surface into.
Names and places. Crayon and fountain-pen.
The town underlined once. The country twice.
It’s ready for the post
she would say and if we want to know
where it went to –
a craft lost before we missed it – watch it go
into the burlap sack for collection.
See it disappear. Say
this is how it died
out: among doomed steamships and out-dated trains,
the tracks for them disappearing before our eyes,
next to station names we can’t remember
on a continent we no longer
recognise. The sealing-wax cracking.
The twine unravelling. The destination illegible.
Lava Cameo
a brooch carved on volcanic rock
I like this story –
My grandfather was a sea-captain.
My grandmother always met him when his ship docked.
She feared the women at the ports –
except that it is not a story,
more a rumour or a folk memory,
something thrown out once in a random conversation;
a hint merely.
If I say wool and lace for her skirt and
crêpe for her blouse
in the neck of which is pinned a cameo,
carved out of black, volcanic rock;
if I make her pace the Cork docks, stopping
to take down her parasol as a gust catches
the silk tassels of it –
then consider this:
there is a way of making free with the past,
a pastiche of what is
real and what is
not, which can only be
justified if you think of it
not as sculpture but syntax:
a structure extrinsic to meaning which uncovers
the inner secret of it.
She will die at thirty-one in a fever ward.
He will drown nine years later in the Bay of Biscay.
They will never even be
sepia and so I put down
the gangplank now between the ship and the ground.
In the story, late afternoon has become evening.
They kiss once, their hands touch briefly.
Please.
Look at me, I want to say to her: show me
the obduracy of an art which can
arrest a profile in the flux of hell.
Inscribe catastrophe.
Legends
for Eavan Frances
Tryers of firesides,
twilights. There are no tears in these.
Instead, they begin the world again,
making the mountain ridges blue
and the rivers clear and the hero fearless –
and the outcome always undecided
so the next teller can say begin and
again and astonish children.
Our children are our legends.
You are mine. You have my name.
My hair was once like yours.
And the world
is less bitter to me
because you will re-tell the story.
III Anna Liffey
Anna Liffey
Life, the story goes,
Was the daughter of Cannan,
And came to the plain of Kildare.
She loved the flat-lands and the ditches
And the unreachable horizon.
She asked that it be named for her.
The river took its name from the land.
The land took its name from a woman.
A woman in the doorway of a house.
A river in the city of her birth.
There, in the hills above my house,
The river Liffey rises, is a source.
It rises in rush and ling heather and
Black peat and bracken and strengthens
To claim the city it narrated.
Swans. Steep falls. Small towns.
The smudged air and bridges of Dublin.
Dusk is coming.
Rain is moving east from the hills.
If I could see myself
I would see
A woman in a doorway
Wearing the colours that go with red hair.
; Although my hair is no longer red.
I praise
The gifts of the river.
Its shiftless and glittering
Re-telling of a city,
Its clarity as it flows,
In the company of runt flowers and herons,
Around a bend at Islandbridge
And under thirteen bridges to the sea.
Its patience at twilight –
Swans nesting by it,
Neon wincing into it.
Maker of
Places, remembrances,
Narrate such fragments for me:
One body. One spirit.
One place. One name.
The city where I was born.
The river that runs through it.
The nation which eludes me.
Fractions of a life
It has taken me a lifetime
To claim.
I came here in a cold winter.
I had no children. No country.
I did not know the name for my own life.
My country took hold of me.
My children were born.
I walked out in a summer dusk
To call them in.
One name. Then the other one.
The beautiful vowels sounding out home.
Make of a nation what you will
Make of the past
What you can –
There is now
A woman in a doorway.
It has taken me
All my strength to do this.
Becoming a figure in a poem.
Usurping a name and a theme.
A river is not a woman.
Although the names it finds,
The history it makes
And suffers –
The Viking blades beside it,
The muskets of the Redcoats,
The flames of the Four Courts
Blazing into it
Are a sign.
Any more than
A woman is a river,
Although the course it takes,
Through swans courting and distraught willows,
Its patience
Which is also its powerlessness,
From Callary to Islandbridge,
And from source to mouth,
Is another one.
And in my late forties
Past believing
Love will heal
What language fails to know
And needs to say –
What the body means –
I take this sign
And I make this mark:
A woman in the doorway of her house.
A river in the city of her birth.
The truth of a suffered life.
The mouth of it.
The seabirds come in from the coast.
The city wisdom is they bring rain.
I watch them from my doorway.
I see them as arguments of origin –
Leaving a harsh force on the horizon
Only to find it
Slanting and falling elsewhere.
Which water –
The one they leave or the one they pronounce –
Remembers the other?
I am sure
The body of an ageing woman
Is a memory
And to find a language for it
Is as hard
As weeping and requiring
These birds to cry out as if they could
Recognise their element
Remembered and diminished in
A single tear.
An ageing woman
Finds no shelter in language.
She finds instead
Single words she once loved
Such as ‘summer’ and ‘yellow’
And ‘sexual’ and ‘ready’
Have suddenly become dwellings
For someone else –
Rooms and a roof under which someone else
Is welcome, not her. Tell me,
Anna Liffey,
Spirit of water,
Spirit of place,
How is it on this
Rainy autumn night
As the Irish sea takes
The names you made, the names
You bestowed, and gives you back
Only wordlessness?
Autumn rain is
Scattering and dripping
From car-ports
And clipped hedges.
The gutters are full.
When I came here
I had neither
Children nor country.
The trees were arms.
The hills were dreams.
I was free
To imagine a spirit
In the blues and greens,
The hills and fogs
Of a small city.
My children were born.
My country took hold of me.
A vision in a brick house.
Is it only love
That makes a place?
I feel it change.
My children are
Growing up, getting older.
My country holds on
To its own pain.
I turn off
The harsh yellow
Porch light and
Stand in the hall.
Where is home now?
Follow the rain
Out to the Dublin hills.
Let it become the river.
Let the spirit of place be
A lost soul again.
In the end
It will not matter
That I was a woman. I am sure of it.
The body is a source. Nothing more.
There is a time for it. There is a certainty
About the way it seeks its own dissolution.
Consider rivers.
They are always en route to
Their own nothingness. From the first moment
They are going home. And so
When language cannot do it for us,
Cannot make us know love will not diminish us,
There are these phrases
Of the ocean
To console us.
Particular and unafraid of their completion.
In the end
Everything that burdened and distinguished me
Will be lost in this:
I was a voice.
Time and Violence
The evening was the same as any other.
I came out and stood on the step.
The suburb was closed in the weather
of an early spring and the shallow tips
and washed-out yellows of narcissi
resisted dusk. And crocuses and snowdrops.
I stood there and felt the melancholy
of growing older in such a season,
when all I could be certain of was simply
in this time of fragrance and refrain,
whatever else might flower before the fruit,
and be renewed, I would not. Not again.
A car splashed by in the twilight.
Peat smoke stayed in the windless
air overhead and I might have missed it:
a presence. Suddenly. In the very place
where I would stand in other dusks, and look
to pick out my child from the distance,
was a shepherdess, her smile cracked,
her arm injured from the mantelpieces
and pastorals where she posed with her crook.
Then I turned and saw in the spaces
of the night sky constellations appear,
one by one, over roof-tops and houses,
and Cassiopeia trapped: stabbed where
her thigh met her groin and her hand
her glittering wrist, with the pin-point of a star.
And by the road where rain made standing
pools of water underneath cherry trees,
and blossoms swam on their images,
was a mermaid with in
vented tresses,
her breasts printed with the salt of it and all
the desolation of the North Sea in her face.
I went nearer. They were disappearing.
Dusk had turned to night but in the air –
did I imagine it? – a voice was saying:
This is what language did to us. Here
is the wound, the silence, the wretchedness
of tides and hillsides and stars where
we languish in a grammar of sighs,
in the high-minded search for euphony,
in the midnight rhetoric of poesie.
We cannot sweat here. Our skin is icy.
We cannot breed here. Our wombs are empty.
Help us to escape youth and beauty.
Write us out of the poem. Make us human
in cadences of change and mortal pain
and words we can grow old and die in.
A Woman Painted on a Leaf
I found it among curios and silver,
in the pureness of wintry light.
A woman painted on a leaf.
Fine lines drawn on a veined surface
in a hand-made frame.
This is not my face. Neither did I draw it.
A leaf falls in a garden.
The moon cools its aftermath of sap.
The pith of summer dries out in starlight.
A woman is inscribed there.
This is not death. It is the terrible
suspension of life.
I want a poem
I can grow old in. I want a poem I can die in.
I want to take
this dried-out face,
as you take a starling from behind iron,
and return it to its element of air, of ending –