District and Circle

by Seamus Heaney

  blettings, beestings,

  creamery spillage

  on her cleanly, comely

  sally trees and alders.

  Step into her for me

  some fresh-faced afternoon,

  but not before

  you step into thigh waders

  to walk up to the bib

  upstream, in the give and take

  of her deepest, draggiest purchase,

  countering, parting,

  getting back at her, sourcing

  her and your plashy self,

  neither of you

  ready to let up.

  PLANTING THE ALDER

  For the bark, dulled argent, roundly wrapped

  And pigeon-collared.

  For the splitter-splatter, guttering

  Rain-flirt leaves.

  For the snub and clot of the first green cones,

  Smelted emerald, chlorophyll.

  For the scut and scat of cones in winter,

  So rattle-skinned, so fossil-brittle.

  For the alder-wood, flame-red when torn

  Branch from branch.

  But mostly for the swinging locks

  Of yellow catkins,

  Plant it, plant it,

  Streel-head in the rain.

  TATE’S AVENUE

  Not the brown and fawn car rug, that first one

  Spread on sand by the sea but breathing land-breaths,

  Its vestal folds unfolded, its comfort zone

  Edged with a fringe of sepia-coloured wool tails.

  Not the one scraggy with crusts and eggshells

  And olive stones and cheese and salami rinds

  Laid out by the torrents of the Guadalquivir

  Where we got drunk before the corrida.

  Instead, again, it’s locked-park Sunday Belfast,

  A walled back yard, the dust-bins high and silent

  As a page is turned, a finger twirls warm hair,

  And nothing gives on the rug or the ground beneath it.

  I lay at my length and felt the lumpy earth,

  Keen-sensed more than ever through discomfort,

  But never shifted off the plaid square once.

  When we moved I had your measure and you had mine.

  A HAGGING MATCH

  Axe-thumps outside

  like wave-hits through

  a night ferry:

  you

  whom I cleave to, hew to,

  splitting firewood.

  FIDDLEHEADS

  Fiddlehead ferns are a delicacy where? Japan? Estonia? Ireland long ago?

  I say Japan because when I think of those delicious things I think of my friend Toraiwa, and the surprise I felt when he asked me about the erotic. He said it belonged in poetry and he wanted more of it.

  So here they are, Toraiwa, frilled, infolded, tenderized, in a little steaming basket, just for you.

  TO PABLO NERUDA IN TAMLAGHTDUFF

  Niall FitzDuff brought a jar

  of crab apple jelly

  made from crabs off the tree

  that grew at Duff’s Corner—

  still grows at Duff’s Corner—

  a tree I never once saw

  with crab apples on it.

  Contrary, unflowery

  sky-whisk and bristle, more

  twig-fret than fruit-fort,

  crabbed

  as crabbed could be—

  that was the tree

  I remembered.

  But then—

  O my Pablo of earthlife—

  when I tasted the stuff

  it was freshets and orbs.

  My eyes were on stalks,

  I was back in an old

  rutted cart road, making

  the rounds of the district, breasting

  its foxgloves, smelling

  cow-parsley and nettles, all

  of high summer’s smoulder

  under our own tree ascendant

  in Tamlaghtduff,

  its crab-hoard and—yes,

  in pure hindsight—corona

  of gold.

  For now,

  O my home truth Neruda,

  round-faced as the crowd

  at the crossroads, with your eyes

  I see it, now taste-bud

  and tear-duct melt down

  and I spread the jelly on thick

  as if there were no tomorrow.

  HOME HELP

  1. Helping Sarah

  And so with tuck and tightening of blouse

  And vigorous advance of knee, she was young

  Again as the year, out weeding rigs

  In the same old skirt and brogues, on top of things

  Every time she straightened. And a credit.

  Her oatmeal tweed

  With pinpoints of red haw and yellow whin,

  Its threadbare workadayness hard and common;

  Her quick step; her dry hand; all things well-sped;

  Her open and closed relations with earth’s work;

  And everything passed on without a word.

  2. Chairing Mary

  Heavy, helpless, carefully manhandled

  Upstairs every night in a wooden chair

  She sat in all day as the sun sundialled

  Window-splays across the quiet floor …

  Her body heat had entered the braced timber

  Two would take hold of, by weighted leg and back,

  Tilting and hoisting, the one on the lower step

  Bearing the brunt, the one reversing up

  Not averting eyes from her hurting bulk,

  And not embarrassed, but never used to it.

  I think of her warm brow we might have once

  Bent to and kissed before we kissed it cold.

  RILKE: THE APPLE ORCHARD

  Come just after the sun has gone down, watch

  This deepening of green in the evening sward:

  Is it not as if we’d long since garnered

  And stored within ourselves a something which

  From feeling and from feeling recollected,

  From new hope and half forgotten joys,

  And from an inner dark infused with these,

  Issues in thoughts as ripe as windfalls scattered

  Here under trees like trees in a Dürer woodcut—

  Pendent, pruned, the husbandry of years

  Gravid in them until the fruit appears—

  Ready to serve, replete with patience, rooted

  In the knowledge that no matter how above

  Measure or expectation, all must be

  Harvested and yielded, when a long life willingly

  Cleaves to what’s willed and grows in mute resolve.

  QUITTING TIME

  The hosed-down chamfered concrete pleases him.

  He’ll wait a while before he kills the light

  On the cleaned up yard, its pails and farrowing crate,

  And the cast-iron pump immobile as a herm

  Upstanding elsewhere, in another time.

  More and more this last look at the wet

  Shine of the place is what means most to him—

  And to repeat the phrase “My head is light,”

  Because it often is as he reaches back

  And switches off, a home-based man at home

  In the end with little. Except this same

  Night after nightness, redding up the work,

  The song of a tubular steel gate in the dark

  As he pulls it to and starts his uphill trek.

  HOME FIRES

  1. A Scuttle for Dorothy Wordsworth

  Dorothy young, jig-jigging her iron shovel,

  Barracking a pile of lumpy coals

  Carted up by one Thomas Ashburner,

  Her toothache so ablaze the carter’s name

  Goes unremarked as every jolt and jag

  Backstabs her through her wrist-bone, neck-bone, jaw-bone.

  Dorothy old, doting at the flicker

  In a brass companion set, all t
he companions

  Gone or let go, their footfalls on the road

  Unlistened for, that sounded once as plump

  As the dropping shut of the flap-board scuttle-lid

  The minute she’d stacked the grate for their arrival.

  2. A Stove Lid for W. H. Auden

  The mass and majesty of this world, all

  That carries weight and always weighs the same …

  “THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES”

  The mass and majesty of this world I bring you

  In the small compass of a cast-iron stove lid.

  I was the youngster in a Fair Isle jersey

  Who loved a lifter made of stainless steel,

  The way its stub claw found its clink-fast hold,

  The fit and weight and danger as it bore

  The red hot solidus to one side of the stove

  For the fire-fanged maw of the fire-box to be stoked,

  Then the gnashing bucket stowed.

  So one more time

  I tote it, hell-mouth stopper, flat-earth disc,

  And replace it safely. Wherefore rake and rattle,

  Watch sparks die in the ashpan, poke again,

  Think of dark matter in the starlit coalhouse.

  THE BIRCH GROVE

  At the back of a garden, in earshot of river water,

  In a corner walled off like the baths or bake-house

  Of an unroofed abbey or broken-floored Roman villa,

  They have planted their birch grove. Planted it recently only,

  But already each morning it puts forth in the sun

  Like their own long grown-up selves, the white of the bark

  As suffused and cool as the white of the satin nightdress

  She bends and straightens up in, pouring tea,

  Sitting across from where he dandles a sandal

  On his big time-keeping foot, as bare as an abbot’s.

  Red brick and slate, plum tree and apple retain

  Their credibility, a CD of Bach is making the rounds

  Of the common or garden air. Above them a jet trail

  Tapers and waves like a willow wand or a taper.

  “If art teaches us anything,” he says, trumping life

  With a quote, “it’s that the human condition is private.”

  CAVAFY: “The rest I’ll speak of to the ones below in Hades”

  “Yes,” said the proconsul, replacing the scroll,

  “indeed the line is true. And beautiful.

  Sophocles at his most philosophical.

  We’ll talk about a whole lot more down there

  and be happy to be seen for what we are.

  Here we’re like sentries, watching anxiously,

  guarding every locked-up hurt and secret,

  but all we cover up here, day and night,

  down there we’ll let out, frankly and completely.’

  “That is,” said the sophist, with a slow half-smile,

  “if down there they ever talk about such things,

  if they can be bothered with the like at all.”

  IN A LOANING

  Spoken for in autumn, recovered speech

  Having its way again, I gave a cry:

  “Not beechen green, but these shin-deep coffers

  Of copper-fired leaves, these beech boles grey.”

  THE BLACKBIRD OF GLANMORE

  On the grass when I arrive,

  Filling the stillness with life,

  But ready to scare off

  At the very first wrong move.

  In the ivy when I leave.

  It’s you, blackbird, I love.

  I park, pause, take heed.

  Breathe. Just breathe and sit

  And lines I once translated

  Come back: “I want away

  To the house of death, to my father

  Under the low clay roof.”

  And I think of one gone to him,

  A little stillness dancer—

  Haunter-son, lost brother—

  Cavorting through the yard,

  So glad to see me home,

  My homesick first term over.

  And think of a neighbour’s words

  Long after the accident:

  “Yon bird on the shed roof,

  Up on the ridge for weeks—

  I said nothing at the time

  But I never liked yon bird.”

  The automatic lock

  Clunks shut, the blackbird’s panic

  Is shortlived, for a second

  I’ve a bird’s eye view of myself,

  A shadow on raked gravel

  In front of my house of life.

  Hedge-hop, I am absolute

  For you, your ready talkback,

  Your each stand-offish comeback,

  Your picky, nervy goldbeak—

  On the grass when I arrive,

  In the ivy when I leave.

  Seamus Heaney’s first collection, Death of a Naturalist, appeared forty years ago. Since then he has published poetry, criticism, and translations that have established him as the leading poet of his generation. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  www.fsgbooks.com