New Selected Poems
Page 12
listening to our child crying, as if to birdsong,
with ice on the windowsills
and the grass eking out
the last crooked hour of starlight.
X A Marriage for the Millennium
Do you believe
that Progress is a woman?
A spirit seeking for its opposite?
For a true marriage to ease her quick heartbeat?
I asked you this
as you sat with your glass of red wine
and your newspaper of yesterday’s events.
You were drinking and reading, and did not hear me.
Then I closed the door
and left the house behind me and began
driving the whole distance of our marriage,
away from the suburb towards the city.
One by one
the glowing windows went out.
Television screens cooled down more slowly.
Ceramic turned to glass, circuits to transistors.
Old rowans were saplings.
Roads were no longer wide.
Children disappeared from their beds.
Wives, without warning, suddenly became children.
Computer games became codes again.
The codes were folded
back into the futures of their makers.
Their makers woke from sleep, weeping for milk.
When I came to the street we once lived on
with its iron edges out of another century
I stayed there only a few minutes.
Then I was in the car, driving again.
I was ready to tell you when I got home
that high above that street in a room
above the laid-out hedges and wild lilac
nothing had changed
them, nothing ever would.
The man with his creased copy of the newspaper.
Or the young woman talking to him. Talking to him.
Her heart eased by this.
XI Lines for a Thirtieth Wedding Anniversary
Somewhere up in the eaves it began.
High in the roof – in a sort of vault
between the slates and gutter – a small leak.
Through it, rain which came from the east,
in from the lights and foghorns of the coast,
water with a ghost of ocean salt in it,
spilled down on the path below
over and over and over years
stone began to alter,
its grain searched out, worn in:
granite rounding down, giving way
taking into its own inertia that
information water brought – of ships,
wings, fog and phosphor in the harbour.
It happened under our lives, the rain,
the stone. We hardly noticed. Now
this is the day to think of it, to wonder.
All those years, all those years together –
the stars in a frozen arc overhead,
the quick noise of a thaw in the air,
the blue stare of the hills – through it all
this constancy: what wears, what endures.
II Code
Code
An Ode to Grace Murray Hopper 1906–88 maker of a computer compiler and verifier of COBOL
Poet to poet. I imagine you
at the edge of language, at the start of summer
in Wolfeboro New Hampshire, writing code.
You have no sense of time. No sense of minutes even.
They cannot reach inside your world,
your grey workstation,
with when yet now never and once.
You have missed the other seven.
This is the eighth day of creation.
The peacock has been made, the rivers stocked.
The rainbow has leaned down to clothe the trout.
The earth has found its pole, the moon its tides.
Atoms, energies have done their work,
have made the world, have finished it, have rested.
And we call this Creation. And you missed it.
The line of my horizon, solid blue
appears at last fifty years away
from your fastidious, exact patience:
The first sign that night will be day
is a stir of leaves in this Dublin suburb
and air and invertebrates and birds,
as the earth resorts again
to its explanations:
Its shadows. Its reflections. Its words.
You are west of me and in the past.
Dark falls. Light is somewhere else.
The fireflies come out above the lake.
You are compiling binaries and zeroes.
The given world is what you can translate.
And you divide the lesser from the greater.
Let there be language –
even if we use it differently:
I never made it timeless as you have.
I never made it numerate as you did.
And yet I use it here to imagine
how at your desk in the twilight
legend, history and myth of course,
are gathering in Wolfeboro New Hampshire,
as if to a memory. As if to a source.
Maker of the future, if the past
is fading from view with the light
outside your window and the single file
of elements and animals, and all the facts
of origin and outcome, which will never find
their way to you or shelter in your syntax –
it makes no difference:
We are still human. There is still light
in my suburb and you are in my mind –
head bowed, old enough to be my mother –
writing code before the daylight goes.
I am writing at a screen as blue
as any hill, as any lake, composing this
to show you how the world begins again:
One word at a time.
One woman to another.
Limits
So high
in their leafy silence
over Kells, over Durrow
as the Vikings
raged south –
the old monks
made the alphabet
wild:
they dipped iron
into azure and
indigo: they gave strange
wings to their o’s
and e’s: their vowels
clung on with
talons and the thin,
ribbed wolves
which had gone north
left their frozen winters
and were lured back
to their consonants.
Limits 2
If there was
a narrative to my life
in those years, then
let this
be the sound of it –
the season in, season out
sound of
the grind of
my neighbours’ shears.
Beautiful air of August,
music of limitation, of
the clipped
shadow and
the straightened border,
of rain on the Dublin hills,
of my children sleeping in
a simpler world:
an iron edge
the origin of order.
How We Made a New Art on Old Ground
A famous battle happened in this valley.
You never understood the nature poem.
Till now. Till this moment – if these statements
seem separate, unrelated, follow this
silence to its edge and you will hear
the history of air: the crispness of a fern
or the upward cut and turn around of
a fieldfare or thrush written on it.
The other history is silent: the estuary
is over there. The issue was de
cided here:
Two kings prepared to give no quarter.
Then one king and one dead tradition.
Now the humid dusk, the old wounds
wait for language, for a different truth:
When you see the silk of the willow
and the wider edge of the river turn
and grow dark and then darker, then
you will know that the nature poem
is not the action nor its end: it is
this rust on the gate beside the trees, on
the cattle grid underneath our feet,
on the steering wheel shaft: it is
an aftermath, an overlay and even in
its own modest way, an art of peace:
I try the word distance and it fills with
sycamores, a summer’s worth of pollen.
And as I write valley straw, metal
blood, oaths, armour are unwritten.
Silence spreads slowly from these words
to those ilex trees half in, half out
of shadows falling on the shallow ford
of the south bank beside Yellow Island
as twilight shows how this sweet corrosion
begins to be complete: what we see
is what the poem says:
evening coming – cattle, cattle-shadows –
and whin bushes and a change of weather
about to change them all: what we see is how
the place and the torment of the place are
for this moment free of one another.
Making Money
At the turn of the century, the paper produced there was of such high quality that it was exported for use as bank-note paper.
‘Dundrum and its Environs’
They made money –
maybe not the way
you think it should be done
but they did it anyway.
At the end of summer
the rains came and braided
the river Slang as it ran down and down
the Dublin mountains and into faster water
and stiller air as if a storm was coming in.
And the mill wheel turned so the mill
could make paper and the paper money.
And the cottage doors opened and the women
came out in the ugly first hour
after dawn and began
to cook the rags they put
hemp waste, cotton lint, linen, flax and fishnets
from boxes delivered every day on
the rag wagon on a rolling boil. And the steam rose
up from the open coils where a shoal slipped through
in an April dawn. And in the backwash they added
alkaline and caustic and soda ash and suddenly
they were making money.
A hundred years ago
this is the way they came to the plum-brown
headlong weir and the sedge drowned in it
and their faces about to be as they looked down
once quickly on
their way to the mill, to the toil
of sifting and beating and settling and fraying
the weighed-out fibres. And they see how easily
the hemp has forgotten the Irish sea at
neap tide and how smooth the weave is now in
their hands. And they do not and they never will
see the small boundaries all this will buy
or the poisoned kingdom with its waterways
and splintered locks or the peacocks who will walk
this paper up and down in the windless gardens
of a history no one can stop happening now.
Nor the crimson and indigo features
of the prince who will stare out from
the surfaces they have made on
the ruin of a Europe
he cannot see from the surface
of a wealth he cannot keep
if you can keep
your composure in the face of this final proof that
the past is not made out of time, out of memory,
out of irony but is also
a crime we cannot admit and will not atone
it will be dawn again in the rainy autumn of the year.
The air will be a skinful of water –
the distance between storms –
again. The wagon of rags will arrive.
The foreman will buy it. The boxes will be lowered to the path
the women are walking up
as they always did, as they always will now.
Facing the paradox. Learning to die of it.
Exile! Exile!
All night the room breathes out its grief.
Exhales through surfaces. The sideboard.
The curtains. The stale air stalled there.
The kiln-fired claws of the china bird.
This is the hour when every ornament
unloads its atoms of pretence. Stone.
Brass. Bronze. What they represent is
set aside in the dark. They become again
a spacious morning in the Comeraghs.
An iron gate; a sudden downpour; a well in
the corner of a farmyard; a pool of rain
into which an Irish world has fallen.
Out there the Americas stretch to the horizons.
They burn in the cities and darken over wheat.
They go to the edge, to the rock, to the coast,
to where the moon abrades a shabby path eastward.
O land of opportunity, you are
not the suppers with meat, nor
the curtains with lace nor the unheard of
fire in the grate on summer afternoons, you are
this room, this dish of fruit which
has never seen its own earth. Or had rain
fall on it all one night and the next. And has grown,
in consequence, a fine, crazed skin of porcelain.
Is It Still the Same
young woman who climbs the stairs,
who closes a child’s door,
who goes to her table
in a room at the back of a house?
The same unlighted corridor?
The same night air
over the wheelbarrows and rain-tanks?
The same inky sky and pin-bright stars?
You can see nothing of her, but her head
bent over the page, her hand moving,
moving again, and her hair.
I wrote like that once.
But this is different.
This time, when she looks up, I will be there.
Irish Poetry
for Michael Hartnett
We always knew there was no Orpheus in Ireland.
No music stored at the doors of hell.
No god to make it.
No wild beasts to weep and lie down to it.
But I remember an evening when the sky
was underworld-dark at four,
when ice had seized every part of the city
and we sat talking –
the air making a wreath for our cups of tea.
And you began to speak of our own gods.
Our heartbroken pantheon.
No Attic light for them and no Herodotus.
But thin rain and dogfish and the stopgap
of the sharp cliffs
they spent their winters on.
And the pitch-black Atlantic night.
How the sound
of a bird’s wing in a lost language sounded.
You made the noise for me.
Made it again.
Until I could see the flight of it: suddenly
the silvery lithe rivers of the south-west
lay down in silence
and the savage acres no one could predict
were all at ease, soothed and quiet and
listening to you, as I was. As if to music, as if to peace.
from DOMESTIC VIOLENCE
2007
Do
mestic Violence
1 Domestic Violence
1
It was winter, lunar, wet. At dusk
pewter seedlings became moonlight orphans.
Pleased to meet you meat to please you
said the butcher’s sign in the window in the village.
Everything changed the year that we got married.
And after that we moved out to the suburbs.
How young we were, how ignorant, how ready
to think the only history was our own.
And there was a couple who quarrelled into the night,
their voices high, sharp:
nothing is ever entirely
right in the lives of those who love each other.
2
In that season suddenly our island
broke out its old sores for all to see.
We saw them too.
We stood there wondering how
the salt horizons and the Dublin hills,
the rivers, table mountains, Viking marshes
we thought we knew
had been made to shiver
into our ancient twelve by fifteen television
which gave them back as grey and greyer tears
and killings, killings, killings,
then moonlight-coloured funerals:
nothing we said
not then, not later,
fathomed what it is
is wrong in the lives of those who hate each other.
3
And if the provenance of memory is
only that – remember, not atone –
and if I can be safe in
the weak spring light in that kitchen, then
why is there another kitchen, spring light
always darkening in it and
a woman whispering to a man
over and over what else could we have done?