Damson
Gules and cement dust. A matte tacky blood
On the bricklayer’s knuckles, like the damson stain
That seeped through his packed lunch.
A full hod stood
Against the mortared wall, his big bright trowel
In his left hand (for once) was pointing down
As he marvelled at his right, held high and raw:
King of the castle, scaffold-stepper, shown
Bleeding to the world.
Wound that I saw
In glutinous colour fifty years ago –
Damson as omen, weird, a dream to read –
Is weeping with the held-at-arm’s-length dead
From everywhere and nowhere, here and now.
*
Over and over, the slur, the scrape and mix
As he trowelled and retrowelled and laid down
Courses of glum mortar. Then the bricks
Jiggled and settled, tocked and tapped in line.
I loved especially the trowel’s shine,
Its edge and apex always coming clean
And brightening itself by mucking in.
It looked light but felt heavy as a weapon,
Yet when he lifted it there was no strain.
It was all point and skim and float and glisten
Until he washed and lapped it tight in sacking
Like a cult blade that had to be kept hidden.
*
Ghosts with their tongues out for a lick of blood
Are crowding up the ladder, all unhealed,
And some of them still rigged in bloody gear.
Drive them back to the doorstep or the road
Where they lay in their own blood once, in the hot
Nausea and last gasp of dear life.
Trowel-wielder, woundie, drive them off
Like Odysseus in Hades lashing out
With his sword that dug the trench and cut the throat
Of the sacrificial lamb.
But not like him –
Builder, not sacker, your shield the mortar board –
Drive them back to the wine-dark taste of home,
The smell of damsons simmering in a pot,
Jam ladled thick and steaming down the sunlight.
Weighing In
The 56 lb weight. A solid iron Unit of negation. Stamped and cast
With an inset, rung-thick, moulded, short crossbar
For a handle. Squared-off and harmless-looking
Until you tried to lift it, then a socket-ripping,
Life-belittling force –
Gravity’s black box, the immovable
Stamp and squat and square-root of dead weight.
Yet balance it
Against another one placed on a weighbridge –
On a well-adjusted, freshly greased weighbridge –
And everything trembled, flowed with give and take.
*
And this is all the good tidings amount to:
This principle of bearing, bearing up
And bearing out, just having to
Balance the intolerable in others
Against our own, having to abide
Whatever we settled for and settled into
Against our better judgement. Passive
Suffering makes the world go round.
Peace on earth, men of good will, all that
Holds good only as long as the balance holds,
The scales ride steady and the angels’ strain
Prolongs itself at an unearthly pitch.
*
To refuse the other cheek. To cast the stone.
Not to do so some time, not to break with
The obedient one you hurt yourself into
Is to fail the hurt, the self, the ingrown rule.
Prophesy who struck thee! When soldiers mocked
Blindfolded Jesus and he didn’t strike back
They were neither shamed nor edified, although
Something was made manifest – the power
Of power not exercised, of hope inferred
By the powerless forever. Still, for Jesus’ sake,
Do me a favour, would you, just this once?
Prophesy, give scandal, cast the stone.
*
Two sides to every question, yes, yes, yes …
But every now and then, just weighing in
Is what it must come down to, and without
Any self-exculpation or self-pity.
Alas, one night when follow-through was called for
And a quick hit would have fairly rankled,
You countered that it was my narrowness
That kept me keen, so got a first submission.
I held back when I should have drawn blood
And that way (mea culpa) lost an edge.
A deep mistaken chivalry, old friend.
At this stage only foul play cleans the slate.
St Kevin and the Blackbird
And then there was St Kevin and the blackbird. The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside
His cell, but the cell is narrow, so
One turned-up palm is out the window, stiff
As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands
And lays in it and settles down to nest.
Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked
Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked
Into the network of eternal life,
Is moved to pity: now he must hold his hand
Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks
Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.
*
And since the whole thing’s imagined anyhow,
Imagine being Kevin. Which is he?
Self-forgetful or in agony all the time
From the neck on out down through his hurting forearms?
Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees?
Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth
Crept up through him? Is there distance in his head?
Alone and mirrored clear in love’s deep river,
‘To labour and not to seek reward,’ he prays,
A prayer his body makes entirely
For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird
And on the riverbank forgotten the river’s name.
from The Flight Path
IV
The following for the record, in the light
Of everything before and since:
One bright May morning, nineteen seventy-nine,
Just off the red-eye special from New York,
I’m on the train for Belfast. Plain, simple
Exhilaration at being back: the sea
At Skerries, the nuptial hawthorn bloom,
The trip north taking sweet hold like a chain
On every bodily sprocket.
Enter then –
As if he were some film noir border guard –
Enter this one I’d last met in a dream,
More grimfaced now than in the dream itself
When he’d flagged me down at the side of a mountain road,
Come up and leant his elbow on the roof
And explained through the open window of the car
That all I’d have to do was drive a van
Carefully in to the next customs post
At Pettigo, switch off, get out as if
I were on my way with dockets to the office –
But then instead I’d walk ten yards more down
Towards the main street and get in with – here
Another schoolfriend’s name, a wink and smile,
I’d know him all right, he’d be in a Ford
And I’d be home in three hours’ time, as safe
As houses …
So he enters and sits down
Opposite and goes for me head on.
‘When, for fuck’s sake, are you going to write
Something for us? ‘If
I do write something,
Whatever it is, I’ll be writing for myself.’
And that was that. Or words to that effect.
The jail walls all those months were smeared with shite.
Out of Long Kesh after his dirty protest
The red eyes were the eyes of Ciaran Nugent
Like something out of Dante’s scurfy hell,
Drilling their way through the rhymes and images
Where I too walked behind the righteous Virgil,
As safe as houses and translating freely:
When he had said all this, his eyes rolled
And his teeth, like a dog’s teeth clamping round a bone,
Bit into the skull and again took hold.
V
When I answered that I came from ‘far away’,
The policeman at the roadblock snapped, ‘Where’s that?’
He’d only half-heard what I said and thought
It was the name of some place up the country.
And now it is – both where I have been living
And where I left – a distance still to go
Like starlight that is light years on the go
From far away and takes light years arriving.
Mycenae Lookout
for Cynthia and Dimitri Hadzi
The ox is on my tongue
Aeschylus, Agamemnon
1 The Watchman’s War
Some people wept, and not for sorrow – joy
That the king had armed and upped and sailed for Troy,
But inside me like struck sound in a gong
That killing-fest, the life-warp and world-wrong
It brought to pass, still augured and endured.
I’d dream of blood in bright webs in a ford,
Of bodies raining down like tattered meat
On top of me asleep – and me the lookout
The queen’s command had posted and forgotten,
The blind spot her farsightedness relied on.
And then the ox would lurch against the gong
And deaden it and I would feel my tongue
Like the dropped gangplank of a cattle truck,
Trampled and rattled, running piss and muck,
All swimmy-trembly as the lick of fire,
A victory beacon in an abattoir …
Next thing then I would waken at a loss,
For all the world a sheepdog stretched in grass,
Exposed to what I knew, still honour-bound
To concentrate attention out beyond
The city and the border, on that line
Where the blaze would leap the hills when Troy had fallen.
My sentry work was fate, a home to go to,
An in-between-times that I had to row through
Year after year: when the mist would start
To lift off fields and inlets, when morning light
Would open like the grain of light being split,
Day in, day out, I’d come alive again,
Silent and sunned as an esker on a plain,
Up on my elbows, gazing, biding time
In my outpost on the roof … What was to come
Out of that ten years’ wait that was the war
Flawed the black mirror of my frozen stare.
If a god of justice had reached down from heaven
For a strong beam to hang his scale-pans on
He would have found me tensed and ready-made.
I balanced between destiny and dread
And saw it coming, clouds bloodshot with the red
Of victory fires, the raw wound of that dawn
Igniting and erupting, bearing down
Like lava on a fleeing population …
Up on my elbows, head back, shutting out
The agony of Clytemnestra’s love-shout
That rose through the palace like the yell of troops
Hurled by King Agamemnon from the ships.
2 Cassandra
No such thing
as innocent
bystanding.
Her soiled vest,
her little breasts,
her clipped, devast-
ated, scabbed
punk head,
the char-eyed
famine gawk –
she looked
camp-fucked
and simple.
People
could feel
a missed
trueness in them
focus,
a homecoming
in her dropped-wing,
half-calculating
bewilderment.
No such thing
as innocent.
Old King Cock-
of-the-Walk
was back,
King Kill-
the-Child-
and-Take-
What-Comes,
King Agamem-
non’s drum-
balled, old buck’s
stride was back.
And then her Greek
words came,
a lamb
at lambing time,
bleat of clair-
voyant dread,
the gene-hammer
and tread
of the roused god.
And the result-
ant shock desire
in bystanders
to do it to her
there and then.
Little rent
cunt of their guilt:
in she went
to the knife,
to the killer wife,
to the net over
her and her slaver,
the Troy reaver,
saying, ‘A wipe
of the sponge,
that’s it.
The shadow-hinge
swings unpredict-
ably and the light’s
blanked out.’
3 His Dawn Vision
Cities of grass. Fort walls. The dumbstruck palace.
I’d come to with the night wind on my face,
Agog, alert again, but far, far less
Focused on victory than I should have been –
Still isolated in my old disdain
Of claques who always needed to be seen
And heard as the true Argives. Mouth athletes,
Quoting the oracle and quoting dates,
Petitioning, accusing, taking votes.
No element that should have carried weight
Out of the grievous distance would translate.
Our war stalled in the pre-articulate.
The little violets’ heads bowed on their sterns,
The pre-dawn gossamers, all dew and scrim
And star-lace, it was more through them
I felt the beating of the huge time-wound
We lived inside. My soul wept in my hand
When I would touch them, my whole being rained
Down on myself, I saw cities of grass,
Valleys of longing, tombs, a windswept brightness,
And far off, in a hilly, ominous place,
Small crowds of people watching as a man
Jumped a fresh earth-wall and another ran
Amorously, it seemed, to strike him down.
4 The Nights
They both needed to talk,
pretending what they needed
was my advice. Behind backs
each one of them confided
it was sexual overload
every time they did it –
and indeed from the beginning
(a child could have hardly missed it)
their real life was the bed.
The king should have been told,
but who was there to tell him
if not myself? I willed them
to cease and break the hold
of my cross-purposed silence
but still kept on, all smiles
to Aegisthus every morning,
much favoured and self-loathing.
The roof
was like an eardrum.
The ox’s tons of dumb
inertia stood, head-down
and motionless as a herm.
Atlas, watchmen’s patron,
would come into my mind,
the only other one
up at all hours, ox-bowed
under his yoke of cloud
out there at the world’s end.
The loft-floor where the gods
and goddesses took lovers
and made out endlessly
successfully, those thuds
and moans through the cloud cover
were wholly on his shoulders.
Sometimes I thought of us
apotheosized to boulders
called Aphrodite’s Pillars.
High and low in those days
hit their stride together.
When the captains in the horse
felt Helen’s hand caress
its wooden boards and belly
they nearly rode each other.
But in the end Troy’s mothers
bore their brunt in alley,
bloodied cot and bed.
The war put all men mad,
horned, horsed or roof-posted,
the boasting and the bested.
My own mind was a bull-pen
where horned King Agamemnon
had stamped his weight in gold.
But when hills broke into flame
and the queen wailed on and came,
it was the king I sold.
I moved beyond bad faith:
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