New Selected Poems (1988-2013)

by Seamus Heaney

Every flibbertigibbet in the town,

  Old birds and boozers, late-night pissers, kissers,

  All have a go at sitting on it some time.

  It’s the way the air behind them’s winged and full,

  The way a graft has seized their shoulder-blades

  That makes them happy. Once out of nature,

  They’re going to come back in leaf and bloom

  And angel step. Or something like that. Leaves

  On a bloody chair! Would you believe it?

  2

  Next thing I see the chair in a white prison

  With Socrates sitting on it, bald as a coot,

  Discoursing in bright sunlight with his friends.

  His time is short. The day his trial began

  A verdant boat sailed for Apollo’s shrine

  In Delos, for the annual rite

  Of commemoration. Until its wreathed

  And creepered rigging re-enters Athens

  Harbour, the city’s life is holy.

  No executions. No hemlock bowl. No tears

  And none now as the poison does its work

  And the expert jailer talks the company through

  The stages of the numbness. Socrates

  At the centre of the city and the day

  Has proved the soul immortal. The bronze leaves

  Cannot believe their ears, it is so silent.

  Soon Crito will have to close his eyes and mouth,

  But for the moment everything’s an ache

  Deferred, foreknown, imagined and most real.

  3

  My father’s ploughing one, two, three, four sides

  Of the lea ground where I sit all-seeing

  At centre field, my back to the thorn tree

  They never cut. The horses are all hoof

  And burnished flank, I am all foreknowledge.

  Of the poem as a ploughshare that turns time

  Up and over. Of the chair in leaf

  The fairy thorn is entering for the future.

  Of being here for good in every sense.

  The Swing

  Fingertips just tipping you would send you

  Every bit as far – once you got going –

  As a big push in the back.

  Sooner or later,

  We all learned one by one to go sky high,

  Backward and forward in the open shed,

  Toeing and rowing and jack-knifing through air.

  *

  Not Fragonard. Nor Brueghel. It was more

  Hans Memling’s light of heaven off green grass,

  Light over fields and hedges, the shed-mouth

  Sunstruck and expectant, the bedding-straw

  Piled to one side, like a Nativity

  Foreground and background waiting for the figures.

  And then, in the middle ground, the swing itself

  With an old lopsided sack in the loop of it,

  Perfectly still, hanging like pulley-slack,

  A lure let down to tempt the soul to rise.

  *

  Even so, we favoured the earthbound. She

  Sat there as majestic as an empress

  Steeping her swollen feet one at a time

  In the enamel basin, feeding it

  Every now and again with an opulent

  Steaming arc from a kettle on the floor

  Beside her. The plout of that was music

  To our ears, her smile a mitigation.

  Whatever light the goddess had once shone

  Around her favourite coming from the bath

  Was what was needed then: there should have been

  Fresh linen, ministrations by attendants,

  Procession and amazement. Instead, she took

  Each rolled elastic stocking and drew it on

  Like the life she would not fail and was not

  Meant for. And once, when she’d scoured the basin,

  She came and sat to please us on the swing,

  Neither out of place nor in her element,

  Just tempted by it for a moment only,

  Half-retrieving something half-confounded.

  Instinctively we knew to let her be.

  *

  To start up by yourself, you hitched the rope

  Against your backside and backed on into it

  Until it tautened, then tiptoed and drove off

  As hard as possible. You hurled a gathered thing

  From the small of your own back into the air.

  Your head swept low, you heard the whole shed creak.

  *

  We all learned one by one to go sky high.

  Then townlands vanished into aerodromes,

  Hiroshima made light of human bones,

  Concorde’s neb migrated towards the future.

  So who were we to want to hang back there

  In spite of all?

  In spite of all, we sailed

  Beyond ourselves and over and above

  The rafters aching in our shoulderblades,

  The give and take of branches in our arms.

  Two Stick Drawings

  1

  Claire O’Reilly used her granny’s stick –

  A crook-necked one – to snare the highest briars

  That always grew the ripest blackberries.

  When it came to gathering, Persephone

  Was in the halfpenny place compared to Claire.

  She’d trespass and climb gates and walk the railway

  Where sootflakes blew into convolvulus

  And the train tore past with the stoker yelling

  Like a balked king from his iron chariot.

  2

  With its drover’s canes and blackthorns and ashplants,

  The ledge of the back seat of my father’s car

  Had turned into a kind of stick-shop window,

  But the only one who ever window-shopped

  Was Jim of the hanging jaw, for Jim was simple

  And rain or shine he’d make his desperate rounds

  From windscreen to back window, hands held up

  To both sides of his face, peering and groaning.

  So every now and then the sticks would be

  Brought out for him and stood up one by one

  Against the front mudguard; and one by one

  Jim would take the measure of them, sight

  And wield and slice and poke and parry

  The unhindering air; until he found

  The true extension of himself in one

  That made him jubilant. He’d run and crow,

  Stooped forward, with his right elbow stuck out

  And the stick held horizontal to the ground,

  Angled across in front of him, as if

  He were leashed to it and it drew him on

  Like a harness rod of the inexorable.

  A Call

  ‘Hold on,’ she said, ‘I’ll just run out and get him.

  The weather here’s so good, he took the chance

  To do a bit of weeding.’

  So I saw him

  Down on his hands and knees beside the leek rig,

  Touching, inspecting, separating one

  Stalk from the other, gently pulling up

  Everything not tapered, frail and leafless,

  Pleased to feel each little weed-root break,

  But rueful also …

  Then found myself listening to

  The amplified grave ticking of hall clocks

  Where the phone lay unattended in a calm

  Of mirror glass and sunstruck pendulums …

  And found myself then thinking: if it were nowadays,

  This is how Death would summon Everyman.

  Next thing he spoke and I nearly said I loved him.

  The Errand

  ‘On you go now! Run, son, like the devil

  And tell your mother to try

  To find me a bubble for the spirit level

  And a new knot for this tie.’

  But still he was glad,
I know, when I stood my ground,

  Putting it up to him

  With a smile that trumped his smile and his fool’s errand,

  Waiting for the next move in the game.

  A Dog Was Crying Tonight in Wicklow Also

  in memory of Donatus Nwoga

  When human beings found out about death

  They sent the dog to Chukwu with a message:

  They wanted to be let back to the house of life.

  They didn’t want to end up lost forever

  Like burnt wood disappearing into smoke

  Or ashes that get blown away to nothing.

  Instead, they saw their souls in a flock at twilight

  Cawing and headed back for the same old roosts

  And the same bright airs and wing-stretchings each morning.

  Death would be like a night spent in the wood:

  At first light they’d be back in the house of life.

  (The dog was meant to tell all this to Chukwu).

  But death and human beings took second place

  When he trotted off the path and started barking

  At another dog in broad daylight just barking

  Back at him from the far bank of a river.

  And that is how the toad reached Chukwu first,

  The toad who’d overheard in the beginning

  What the dog was meant to tell. ‘Human beings,’ he said

  (And here the toad was trusted absolutely),

  ‘Human beings want death to last forever.’

  Then Chukwu saw the people’s souls in birds

  Coming towards him like black spots off the sunset

  To a place where there would be neither roosts nor trees

  Nor any way back to the house of life.

  And his mind reddened and darkened all at once

  And nothing that the dog would tell him later

  Could change that vision. Great chiefs and great loves

  In obliterated light, the toad in mud,

  The dog crying out all night behind the corpse house.

  The Strand

  The dotted line my father’s ashplant made

  On Sandymount Strand

  Is something else the tide won’t wash away.

  The Walk

  Glamoured the road, the day, and him and her

  And everywhere they took me. When we stepped out

  Cobbles were riverbed, the Sunday air

  A high stream-roof that moved in silence over

  Rhododendrons in full bloom, foxgloves

  And hemlock, robin-run-the-hedge, the hedge

  With its deckled ivy and thick shadows –

  Until the riverbed itself appeared,

  Gravelly, shallowy, summery with pools,

  And made a world rim that was not for crossing.

  Love brought me that far by the hand, without

  The slightest doubt or irony, dry-eyed

  And knowledgeable, contrary as be damned;

  Then just kept standing there, not letting go.

  *

  So here is another longshot. Black and white.

  A negative this time, in dazzle-dark,

  Smudge and pallor where we make out you and me,

  The selves we struggled with and struggled out of,

  Two shades who have consumed each other’s fire,

  Two flames in sunlight that can sear and singe,

  But seem like wisps of enervated air,

  After-wavers, feathery ether-shifts …

  Yet apt still to rekindle suddenly

  If we find along the way charred grass and sticks

  And an old fire-fragrance lingering on,

  Erotic woodsmoke, witchery, intrigue,

  Leaving us none the wiser, just better primed

  To speed the plough again and feed the flame.

  At the Wellhead

  Your songs, when you sing them with your two eyes closed

  As you always do, are like a local road

  We’ve known every turn of in the past –

  That midge-veiled, high-hedged side-road where you stood

  Looking and listening until a car

  Would come and go and leave you lonelier

  Than you had been to begin with. So, sing on,

  Dear shut-eyed one, dear far-voiced veteran,

  Sing yourself to where the singing comes from,

  Ardent and cut off like our blind neighbour

  Who played the piano all day in her bedroom.

  Her notes came out to us like hoisted water

  Ravelling off a bucket at the wellhead

  Where next thing we’d be listening, hushed and awkward.

  *

  That blind-from-birth, sweet-voiced, withdrawn musician

  Was like a silver vein in heavy clay.

  Night water glittering in the light of day.

  But also just our neighbour, Rosie Keenan.

  She touched our cheeks. She let us touch her braille

  In books like books wallpaper patterns came in.

  Her hands were active and her eyes were full

  Of open darkness and a watery shine.

  She knew us by our voices. She’d say she ‘saw’

  Whoever or whatever. Being with her

  Was intimate and helpful, like a cure

  You didn’t notice happening. When I read

  A poem with Keenan’s well in it, she said,

  ‘I can see the sky at the bottom of it now.’

  At Banagher

  Then all of a sudden there appears to me

  The journeyman tailor who was my antecedent:

  Up on a table, cross-legged, ripping out

  A garment he must recut or resew,

  His lips tight back, a thread between his teeth,

  Keeping his counsel always, giving none,

  His eyelids steady as wrinkled horn or iron.

  Self-absenting, both migrant and ensconced;

  Admitted into kitchens, into clothes

  His touch has the power to turn to cloth again –

  All of a sudden he appears to me,

  Unopen, unmendacious, unillumined.

  *

  So more power to him on the job there, ill at ease

  Under my scrutiny in spite of years

  Of being inscrutable as he threaded needles

  Or matched the facings, linings, hems and seams.

  He holds the needle just off centre, squinting,

  And licks the thread and licks and sweeps it through,

  Then takes his time to draw both ends out even,

  Plucking them sharply twice. Then back to stitching.

  Does he ever question what it all amounts to

  Or ever will? Or care where he lays his head?

  My Lord Buddha of Banagher, the way

  Is opener for your being in it.

  Tollund

  That Sunday morning we had travelled far.

  We stood a long time out in Tollund Moss:

  The low ground, the swart water, the thick grass

  Hallucinatory and familiar.

  A path through Jutland fields. Light traffic sound.

  Willow bushes; rushes; bog-fir grags

  In a swept and gated farmyard; dormant quags.

  And silage under wraps in its silent mound.

  It could have been a still out of the bright

  ‘Townland of Peace’, that poem of dream farms

  Outside all contention. The scarecrow’s arms

  Stood open opposite the satellite

  Dish in the paddock, where a standing stone

  Had been resituated and landscaped,

  With tourist signs in futhark runic script

  In Danish and in English. Things had moved on.

  It could have been Mulhollandstown or Scribe.

  The by-roads had their names on them in black

  And white; it was user-friendly outback

  Where we stood footloose, at home beyond the tribe,

&n
bsp; More scouts than strangers, ghosts who’d walked abroad

  Unfazed by light, to make a new beginning

  And make a go of it, alive and sinning,

  Ourselves again, free-willed again, not bad.

  September 1994

  Postscript

  And some time make the time to drive out west

  Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,

  In September or October, when the wind

  And the light are working off each other

  So that the ocean on one side is wild

  With foam and glitter, and inland among stones

  The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit

  By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,

  Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,

  Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads

  Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.

  Useless to think you’ll park and capture it

  More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,

  A hurry through which known and strange things pass

  As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways

  And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

  from Beowulf

  [lines 1–163]

  So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by

  and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.

  We have heard of those princes’ heroic campaigns.

  There was Shield Sheafson, scourge of many tribes,

  a wrecker of mead-benches, rampaging among foes.

  This terror of the hall-troops had come far.

  A foundling to start with, he would flourish later on

  as his powers waxed and his worth was proved.