The Penguin Book of English Verse

by Paul Keegan

  To which one needed a key…

  ¶

  Would come down, would ever come down

  With a smile like thin gruel, and never too much to say.

  How he shrank through the years.

  How you towered over him in the narrow cage.

  How he shrinks now…

  ¶

  But come. Grief must have its term? Guilt too, then.

  And it seems there is no limit to the resourcefulness of recollection.

  So that a man might say and think:

  When the world was at its darkest,

  When the black wings passed over the rooftops

  (And who can divine His purposes?) even then

  There was always, always a fire in this hearth.

  You see this cupboard? A priest-hole!

  And in that lumber-room whole generations have been housed and fed.

  Oh, if I were to begin, if I were to begin to tell you

  The half, the quarter, a mere smattering of what we went through!

  ¶

  His wife nods, and a secret smile,

  Like a breeze with enough strength to carry one dry leaf

  Over two pavingstones, passes from chair to chair.

  Even the enquirer is charmed.

  He forgets to pursue the point.

  It is not what he wants to know.

  It is what he wants not to know.

  It is not what they say.

  It is what they do not say.

  TONY HARRISON The Earthen Lot

  ‘From Isphahan to Northumberland, there is no building that does not show the influence of that oppressed and neglected herd of men.’

  William Morris, The Art of the People

  Sand, caravans, and teetering sea-edge graves.

  The seaward side’s for those of lowly status.

  Not only gales gnaw at their names, the waves

  jostle the skulls and bones from their quietus.

  The Church is a solid bulwark for their betters

  against the scouring sea-salt that erodes

  these chiselled sandstone formal Roman letters

  to flowing calligraphic Persian odes,

  singing of sherbert, sex in Samarkand,

  with Hafiz at the hammams and harems,

  O anywhere but bleak Northumberland

  with responsibilities for others’ dreams!

  Not for the Northern bard the tamarinds

  where wine is always cool, and kusi hot –

  his line from Omar scrivened by this wind’s:

  Some could articulate, while others not.

  TONY HARRISON Continuous

  James Cagney was the one up both our streets.

  His was the only art we ever shared.

  A gangster film and choc ice were the treats

  that showed about as much love as he dared.

  He’d be my own age now in ’49!

  The hand that glinted with the ring he wore,

  his father’s, tipped the cold bar into mine

  just as the organist dropped through the floor.

  He’s on the platform lowered out of sight

  to organ music, this time on looped tape,

  into a furnace with a blinding light

  where only his father’s ring will keep its shape.

  I wear it now to Cagneys on my own

  and sense my father’s hand cupped round my treat –

  they feel as though they’ve been chilled to the bone

  from holding my ice cream all through White Heat.

  DEREK MAHON Courtyards in Delft

  Pieter de Hooch, 1659

  Oblique light on the trite, on brick and tile –

  Immaculate masonry, and everywhere that

  Water tap, that broom and wooden pail

  To keep it so. House-proud, the wives

  Of artisans pursue their thrifty lives

  Among scrubbed yards, modest but adequate.

  Foliage is sparse, and clings. No breeze

  Ruffles the trim composure of those trees.

  No spinet-playing emblematic of

  The harmonies and disharmonies of love;

  No lewd fish, no fruit, no wide-eyed bird

  About to fly its cage while a virgin

  Listens to her seducer, mars the chaste

  Precision of the thing and the thing made.

  Nothing is random, nothing goes to waste:

  We miss the dirty dog, the fiery gin.

  That girl with her back to us who waits

  For her man to come home for his tea

  Will wait till the paint disintegrates

  And ruined dykes admit the esurient sea;

  Yet this is life too, and the cracked

  Out-house door a verifiable fact

  As vividly mnemonic as the sunlit

  Railings that front the houses opposite.

  I lived there as a boy and know the coal

  Glittering in its shed, late-afternoon

  Lambency informing the deal table,

  The ceiling cradled in a radiant spoon.

  I must be lying low in a room there,

  A strange child with a taste for verse,

  While my hard-nosed companions dream of war

  On parched veldt and fields of rain-swept gorse;

  For the pale light of that provincial town

  Will spread itself, like ink or oil,

  Over the not yet accurate linen

  Map of the world which occupies one wall

  And punish nature in the name of God.

  If only, now, the Maenads, as of right,

  Came smashing crockery, with fire and sword,

  We could sleep easier in our beds at night.

  1983PAUL MULDOON Quoof

  How often have I carried our family word

  for the hot water bottle

  to a strange bed,

  as my father would juggle a red-hot half-brick

  in an old sock

  to his childhood settle.

  I have taken it into so many lovely heads

  or laid it between us like a sword.

  An hotel room in New York City

  with a girl who spoke hardly any English,

  my hand on her breast

  like the smouldering one-off spoor of the yeti

  or some other shy beast

  that has yet to enter the language.

  PAUL MULDOON The Frog

  Comes to mind as another small upheaval

  amongst the rubble.

  His eye matches exactly the bubble

  in my spirit-level.

  I set aside hammer and chisel

  and take him on the trowel.

  The entire population of Ireland

  springs from a pair left to stand

  overnight in a pond

  in the gardens of Trinity College,

  two bottles of wine left there to chill

  after the Act of Union.

  There is, surely, in this story

  a moral. A moral for our times.

  What if I put him to my head

  and squeezed it out of him,

  like the juice of freshly squeezed limes,

  or a lemon sorbet?

  TOM PAULIN Desertmartin

  At noon, in the dead centre of a faith,

  Between Draperstown and Magherafelt,

  This bitter village shows the flag

  In a baked absolute September light.

  Here the Word has withered to a few

  Parched certainties, and the charred stubble

  Tightens like a black belt, a crop of Bibles.

  Because this is the territory of the Law

  I drive across it with a powerless knowledge –

  The owl of Minerva in a hired car.

  A Jock squaddy glances down the street

  And grins, happy and expendable,

  Like a brass cartridge. He is a useful thing,

  Almost at home, and yet not quite, not quite.
/>
  It’s a limed nest, this place. I see a plain

  Presbyterian grace sour, then harden,

  As a free strenuous spirit changes

  To a servile defiance that whines and shrieks

  For the bondage of the letter: it shouts

  For the Big Man to lead his wee people

  To a clean white prison, their scorched tomorrow.

  Masculine Islam, the rule of the Just,

  Egyptian sand dunes and geometry,

  A theology of rifle-butts and executions:

  These are the places where the spirit dies.

  And now, in Desertmartin’s sandy light,

  I see a culture of twigs and bird-shit

  Waving a gaudy flag it loves and curses.

  1984SEAMUS HEANEY Widgeon

  for Paul Muldoon

  It had been badly shot.

  While he was plucking it

  he found, he says, the voice box –

  like a flute stop

  in the broken windpipe –

  and blew upon it

  unexpectedly

  his own small widgeon cries.

  SEAMUS HEANEY from Station Island

  VII

  I had come to the edge of the water,

  soothed by just looking, idling over it

  as if it were a clear barometer

  or a mirror, when his reflection

  did not appear but I sensed a presence

  entering into my concentration

  on not being concentrated as he spoke

  my name. And though I was reluctant

  I turned to meet his face and the shock

  is still in me at what I saw. His brow

  was blown open above the eye and blood

  had dried on his neck and cheek. ‘Easy now,’

  he said, ‘it’s only me. You’ve seen men as raw

  after a football match… What time it was

  when I was wakened up I still don’t know

  but I heard this knocking, knocking, and it

  scared me, like the phone in the small hours,

  so I had the sense not to put on the light

  but looked out from behind the curtain.

  I saw two customers on the doorstep

  and an old landrover with the doors open

  parked on the street so I let the curtain drop;

  but they must have been waiting for it to move

  for they shouted to come down into the shop.

  She started to cry then and roll round the bed,

  lamenting and lamenting to herself,

  not even asking who it was. “Is your head

  astray, or what’s come over you?” I roared, more

  to bring myself to my senses

  than out of any real anger at her

  for the knocking shook me, the way they kept it up,

  and her whingeing and half-screeching made it worse.

  All the time they were shouting, “Shop!

  Shop!” so I pulled on my shoes and a sportscoat

  and went back to the window and called out,

  “What do you want? Could you quieten the racket

  or I’ll not come down at all.” “There’s a child not well.

  Open up and see what you have got – pills

  or a powder or something in a bottle,”

  one of them said. He stepped back off the footpath

  so I could see his face in the street lamp

  and when the other moved I knew them both.

  But bad and all as the knocking was, the quiet

  hit me worse. She was quiet herself now,

  lying dead still, whispering to watch out.

  At the bedroom door I switched on the light.

  “It’s odd they didn’t look for a chemist.

  Who are they anyway at this time of the night?”

  she asked me, with the eyes standing in her head.

  “I know them to see,” I said, but something

  made me reach and squeeze her hand across the bed

  before I went downstairs into the aisle

  of the shop. I stood there, going weak

  in the legs. I remember the stale smell

  of cooked meat or something coming through

  as I went to open up. From then on

  you know as much about it as I do.’

  ‘Did they say nothing?’ ‘Nothing. What would they say?’

  ‘Were they in uniform? Not masked in any way?’

  ‘They were barefaced as they would be in the day,

  shites thinking they were the be-all and the end-all.’

  ‘Not that it is any consolation

  but they were caught,’ I told him, ‘and got jail.’

  Big-limbed, decent, open-faced, he stood

  forgetful of everything now except

  whatever was welling up in his spoiled head,

  beginning to smile. ‘You’ve put on weight

  since you did your courting in that big Austin

  you got the loan of on a Sunday night.’

  Through life and death he had hardly aged.

  There always was an athlete’s cleanliness

  shining off him and except for the ravaged

  forehead and the blood, he was still that same

  rangy midfielder in a blue jersey

  and starched pants, the one stylist on the team,

  the perfect, clean, unthinkable victim.

  ‘Forgive the way I have lived indifferent –

  forgive my timid circumspect involvement,’

  I surprised myself by saying. ‘Forgive

  my eye,’ he said, ‘all that’s above my head.’

  And then a stun of pain seemed to go through him

  and he trembled like a heatwave and faded.

  DOUGLAS DUNN from Elegies 1985

  The Sundial

  You stood with your back to me.

  By that crumbling sundial,

  Leaving your book on it –

  Time, love, and literature!