New Selected Poems
Page 15
no truth in it since even now
the ground is clouding its ions and atoms.
The sun is up; day begins.
Someone else says dry as dust.
But this is outside Dublin in
summer: last night’s storm
left clay and water mixed together.
The afternoon is long and warm.
The branch of one tree angles to
its own heaviness. Everywhere,
everywhere it continues: language crossing
the impossible with
the proverbial –
until no one any longer wants
a world where as is not preferred
to its absence. Nor a fiddle not fit,
nor a whistle not clean,
nor rain not right again.
I am walking home. A quarter moon
rises in the whitebeams.
At the next turn houses appear,
mine among them.
I walk past leaves,
grass, one bicycle. I put my key in the lock.
In a little while I will say safe as.
Becoming Anne Bradstreet
It happens again
As soon as I take down her book and open it.
I turn the page.
My skies rise higher and hang young stars.
The ship’s rail freezes.
Mare Hibernicum leads to Anne Bradstreet’s coast.
A blackbird leaves her pine trees
And lands in my spruce trees.
I open my door on a Dublin street.
Her child/her words are staring up at me:
In better dress to trim thee was my mind,
But nought save home-spun cloth, i’ th’ house I find.
We say home truths
Because her words can be at home anywhere –
At the source, at the end and whenever
The book lies open and I am again
An Irish poet watching an English woman
Become an American poet.
Commissioned by the Folger Shakespeare Library
for the exhibition ‘Shakespeare’s Sisters’.
Cityscape
I have a word for it –
the way the surface waited all day
to be a silvery pause between sky and city –
which is elver.
And another one for how
the bay shelved cirrus clouds
piled up at the edge of the Irish Sea,
which is elver too.
The old Blackrock baths
have been neglected now for fifty years,
fine cracks in the tiles
visible as they never were when
I can I can I can
shouted Harry Vernon as
he dived from the highest board
curving down into salt and urine
his cry fading out
through the half century it took
to hear as a child that a glass eel
had been seen
entering the sea-water baths at twilight –
also known as elver –
and immediately
the word begins
a delicate migration –
a fine crazing healing in the tiles –
the sky deepening above a city
that has always been
unsettled between sluice gates and the Irish Sea
to which there now comes at dusk
a translucent visitor
yearning for the estuary.
A Woman Without a Country
As dawn breaks he enters
A room with the odour of acid.
He lays the copper plate on the table.
And reaches for the shaft of the burin.
Dublin wakes to horses and rain.
Street hawkers call.
All the news is famine and famine.
The flat graver, the round graver
The angle tint tool wait for him.
He bends to his work and begins.
He starts with the head, cutting in
To the line of the cheek, finding
The slope of the skull, incising
The shape of a face that becomes
A foundry of shadows, rendering –
With a deeper cut into copper –
The whole woman as a skeleton,
The rags of her skirt, her wrist
In a bony line forever
severing
Her body from its native air until
She is ready for the page,
For the street vendor, for
A new inventory which now
To loss and to laissez-faire adds
The odour of acid and the little,
Pitiless tragedy of being imagined.
He puts his tools away,
One by one; lays them out carefully
On the deal table, his work done.
Index of First Lines
A child 40
A famous battle happened in this valley. 189
A May morning 168
A neighbourhood. 128
A squeak of light. Ocean air looking 230
A tree on a moonless night 169
About holiday rooms there can be 124
After a friend has gone I like the feel of it: 72
After the wolves and before the elms 151
Alders are tasselled 96
All night the room breathes out its grief. 193
– and not simply by the fact that this shading of 118
And then the dark fell and ‘there has never’ 73
As dawn breaks he enters 233
At first 166
At first light the legislator 17
At twilight in 102
Beautiful land the patriot said 172
Bent over 65
Bold as crystal, bright as glass 19
Breakfast over, islanded by noise 43
Ceres went to hell 97
Country hands on the handlebars, 20
Dark falls on this mid-western town 129
Daughters of parsons and of army men. 154
Dawn on the river. 156
Did we live a double life? 183
Do you believe 184
Dressed in the colours of a country day – 5
Easter light in the convent garden 92
Flesh is heretic. 25
From my father’s head I sprung 3
Head of a woman. Half-life of a nation. 155
Here is the city – 153
Hester Bateman made a marriage spoon 175
How do you make a nation? 218
How on earth did it happen, I used to wonder 217
I am ready to go home 160
I can imagine if, 112
I decanted them – feather mosses, fan-shaped plants, 67
I dreamed we came to an iron gate. 161
I drove West 99
I found it among curios and silver, 148
I go down step by step. 110
I have a word for it – 233
I have been thinking at random 44
I have two daughters. 165
I have written this 50
I knew we had to grieve for the animals 209
I like this story – 137
I live near the coast. On these summer nights 111
I remember the way the big windows washed 66
I take it down 93
I was standing there 60
I won’t go back to it – 59
I wonder about you: whether the blue abrasions 90
‘Idle as trout in light Colonel Jones, 12
I’ve caught you out. You slut. You fat trout. 30
If no one in my family ever spoke of it, 225
If there was 188
In middle age you exchanged the sandals 6
In my last year in College 126
In the ancient, gruesome story, Philomel 204
In the Old Kingdom scholars found pottery 214
In the worst hour of the worst season 178
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In those years I owned a blue plate, 202
Intimate as underthings 70
Into this city of largesse 7
is what remained or what they thought 63
It came with the osprey, the cormorants, the air 201
It could be 101
It happens again 231
It is a winter afternoon. 106
It is Easter in the suburb. Clematis 77
It is her eyes 27
It never mattered that there was once a vast grieving: 210
It was a school where all the children wore darned worsted; 82
It was an Irish summer. It was wet. 158
It was early summer. Already 100
It was our first home – 180
It was the first gift he ever gave her 89
It was winter, lunar, wet. At dusk 199
Jean-Baptiste Chardin 57
Life, the story goes, 139
Like oil lamps we put them out the back, 83
Long ago 162
Look. 103
Memory 105
My mother died one summer – 211
My mother was married by the water. 226
My naked face; 28
My window pearls wet. 42
On Sundays, 170
Once in the West Pennines I was shown 219
One night in winter when a bitter frost 179
One summer 40
Our way of life 47
Poet to poet. I imagine you 186
Several things announced the fact to us 4
Sex and history. And skin and bone. 171
She came up the hill carrying water 95
So high 188
Somewhere up in the eaves it began. 185
Soon 221
That was the year the news was always bad 205
The air hoarded frost. The lilac was a ghost 205
The bickering of vowels on the buses, 81
The chimneys have been swept 68
The daffodils are out & how 120
The evening was the same as any other. 146
The first man had flint to spark. He had a wheel 49
The German girls who came to us that winter and 104
The linen map 133
The lovers in an Irish story never had good fortune. 182
The old pale ditch can still be seen 163
The only legend I have ever loved is 130
The radio is playing downstairs in the kitchen. 109
The stilled hub 38
The woman is as round 36
The woman sits and spins. She makes no sound. 206
The women who were singers in the West 117
The wounds are terrible. The paint is old. 123
There are dying arts and 135
There are outsiders, always. These stars – 108
They are making a new Ireland 207
They made money – 191
They stitched blooms from ivory tulle 91
This dry night, nothing unusual 11
This harbour was made by art and force. 152
This is dawn. 35
This is for you, goddess that you are. 215
This is my time: 37
This is St Louis. Where the rivers meet. 121
This is the day 177
This is the hour I love: the in-between, 70
This is the story of a man and woman 78
To write about age you need to take something and 220
Tonight the air smells of cut grass. 132
Town and country at each other’s throat – 14
Tryers of firesides, 138
Unpod 52
We always knew there was no Orpheus in Ireland. 194
We walk in sunshine to the Musée Marmottan. There, 213
We were married in summer 176
Well not for years—at least not then or then. 227
When he is ready he is raised and carried 84
When I saw my father 157
When the Peep-O-Day Boys were laying fires down in 119
Where are the lives we lived 180
Where in blind files 21
William Harnett was a famous realist. 202
Yesterday I knew no lullaby 13
You rise, you dawn 45
young woman who climbs the stairs, 194
Index of Titles
A Dream of Colony 161
A False Spring 96
A Habitable Grief 162
A Marriage for the Millennium 184
A Woman Painted on a Leaf 148
A Woman Without a Country 233
After a Childhood Away from Ireland 40
Against Love Poetry 176
Amber 210
An Elegy for my Mother In Which She Scarcely Appears 209
An Irish Childhood in England: 1951 81
An Old Steel Engraving 103
And Soul 211
Anna Liffey 139
Anorexic 25
Art of Empire 225
As 230
Athene’s Song 3
Atlantis – A Lost Sonnet 217
Beautiful Speech 126
Becoming Anne Bradstreet 231
Becoming the Hand of John Speed 218
Belfast vs Dublin 7
Bright-Cut Irish Silver 93
Child of Our Time 13
City of Shadows 157
Cityscape 232
Code 186
Cyclist with Cut Branches 20
Daphne Heard with Horror the Addresses of the God 100
‘Daphne with her thighs in bark’ 50
Daughters of Colony 154
Degas’s Laundresses 45
Distances 109
Domestic Interior 36
Domestic Violence 199
Embers 179
Endings 40
Energies 37
Envoi 77
Exile! Exile! 193
Fever 63
First Year 180
Fond Memory 82
From the Painting Back from Market by Chardin 5
Heroic 171
Histories 205
How It Was Once In Our Country 202
How the Dance Came to the City 201
How We Made a New Art on Old Ground 189
I Remember 66
Imago 155
In a Bad Light 121
In Coming Days 221
In Exile 104
In Her Own Image 27
In Our Own Country 207
In Which Hester Bateman, Eighteenth-Century English Silversmith, Takes an Irish Commission 175
In Which the Ancient History I Learn Is Not My Own 133
Inscriptions 124
Instructions 220
Irish Interior 206
Irish Poetry 194
Is It Still the Same 194
It’s a Woman’s World 47
Lace 65
Lava Cameo 137
Legends 138
Letters to the Dead 214
Limits 188
Limits 2 188
Lines for a Thirtieth Wedding Anniversary 185
Listen. This is the Noise of Myth 78
Love 129
Making Money 191
Making Up 28
March 1 1847. By the First Post 120
Midnight Flowers 110
Mise Eire 59
Monotony 38
Mother Ireland 166
Moths 132
My Country in Darkness 151
New Territory 4
Night Feed 35
Nocturne 72
O Fons Bandusiae 19
On This Earth 213
Once 182
Our Origins are in the Sea 111
Outside History 108
Patchwork or the Poet’s Craft 44
Quarantine 178
Re-reading Oliver Goldsmith’s ‘Deserted Village’ in a Changed Ireland 227
Self-Portrait on a Summer Evening 57
Silenced 204
Song 21
Still Life 202
Suburban Woman 14
Suburban Woman: A Detail 68
Thankëd be Fortune 183
That the Science of Cartography is Limited 118
The Achill Woman 95
The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me 89
The Blossom 168
The Bottle Garden 67
The Briar Rose 70
The Colonists 160
The Death of Reason 119
The Dolls Museum in Dublin 123
The Emigrant Irish 83
The Famine Road 12
The Glass King 84
The Harbour 152
The Journey 73
The Latin Lesson 92
The Laws of Love 17
The Long Evenings of their Leavetakings 226
The Lost Land 165
The Making of an Irish Goddess 97
The Mother Tongue 163
The Muse Mother 42
The Necessity for Irony 170
The New Pastoral 49
The Oral Tradition 60
The Parcel 135
The Photograph on My Father’s Desk 101
The Pinhole Camera 177
The Pomegranate 130
The Rooms of Other Women Poets 90
The Scar 156
The Shadow Doll 91
The Singers 117
The War Horse 11
The Woman Turns Herself into a Fish 52
The Women 70
Then 180
This Moment 128
Time and Violence 146
Tirade for the Mimic Muse 30
To Memory 215
Tree of Life 169
Unheroic 158
Violence Against Women 219