North

  North

  Acknowledgements

  The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the American Irish Foundation during 1973/4 when he was recipient of their annual Literary Award.

  Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following where some of these poems appeared for the first time: Antaeus, The Arts in Ireland, Causeway (BBC Radio 3), Encounter, Exile, Hibernia, The Irish Press, The Irish Times, Irish University Review, James Joyce Quarterly, The Listener, The New Review, Phoenix, The Times Literary Supplement; and to the editors of the following anthologies: The Faber Book of Irish Verse, New Poems 1972–1973 and New Poems 1973–1974 (Hutchinson), and Soundings ’72 (Blackstaff, Belfast).

  Eight of the poems appeared in a limited edition entitled Bog Poems (Rainbow Press).

  Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication

  for Mary Heaney

  I. SUNLIGHT

  There was a sunlit absence.

  The helmeted pump in the yard

  heated its iron,

  water honeyed

  in the slung bucket

  and the sun stood

  like a griddle cooling

  against the wall

  of each long afternoon.

  So, her hands scuffled

  over the bakeboard,

  the reddening stove

  sent its plaque of heat

  against her where she stood

  in a floury apron

  by the window.

  Now she dusts the board

  with a goose’s wing,

  now sits, broad-lapped,

  with whitened nails

  and measling shins:

  here is a space

  again, the scone rising

  to the tick of two clocks.

  And here is love

  like a tinsmith’s scoop

  sunk past its gleam

  in the meal-bin.

  2. THE SEED CUTTERS

  They seem hundreds of years away. Breughel,

  You’ll know them if I can get them true.

  They kneel under the hedge in a half-circle

  Behind a windbreak wind is breaking through.

  They are the seed cutters. The tuck and frill

  Of leaf-sprout is on the seed .potatoes

  Buried under that straw. With time to kill,

  They are taking their time. Each sharp knife goes

  Lazily halving each root that falls apart

  In the palm of the hand: a milky gleam,

  And, at the centre, a dark watermark.

  Oh, calendar customs! Under the broom

  Yellowing over them, compose the frieze

  With all of us there, our anonymities.

  PART I

  Antaeus

  When I lie on the ground

  I rise flushed as a rose in the morning.

  In fights I arrange a fall on the ring

  To rub myself with sand

  That is operative

  As an elixir. I cannot be weaned

  Off the earth's long contour, her river-veins.

  Down here in my cave,

  Girded with root and rock,

  I am cradled in the dark that wombed me

  And nurtured in every artery

  Like a small hillock.

  Let each new hero come

  Seeking the golden apples and Atlas.

  He must wrestle with me before he pass

  Into that realm of fame

  Among sky-born and royal:

  He may well throw me and renew my birth

  But let him not plan, lifting me off the earth,

  My elevation, my fall.

  1966

  Belderg

  'They just kept turning up

  And were thought of as foreign'---

  One-eyed and benign

  They lie about his house,

  Quernstones out of a bog.

  To lift the lid of the peat

  And find this pupil dreaming

  Of neolithic wheat!

  When he stripped off blanket bog

  The soft-piled centuries

  Fell open like a glib:

  There were the first plough-marks,

  The stone-age fields, the tomb

  Corbelled, turfed and chambered,

  Floored with dry turf-coomb.

  A landscape fossilized,

  Its stone-wall patternings

  Repeated before our eyes

  In the stone walls of Mayo.

  Before I turned to go

  He talked about persistence,

  A congruence of lives,

  How, stubbed and cleared of stones,

  His home accrued growth rings

  Of iron, flint and bronze.

  So I talked of Mossbawn,

  A bogland name. 'But moss?'

  He crossed my old home's music

  With older strains of Norse.

  I'd told how its foundation

  Was mutable as sound

  And how I could derive

  A forked root from that ground

  And make bawn an English fort,

  A planter's walled-in mound,

  Or else find sanctuary

  And think of it as Irish,

  Persistent if outworn.

  'But the Norse ring on your tree?'

  I passed through the eye of the quern,

  Grist to an ancient mill,

  And in my mind's eye saw

  A world-tree of balanced stones,

  Querns piled like vertebrae,

  The marrow crushed to grounds.

  Funeral Rites

  I

  I shouldered a kind of manhood,

  stepping in to lift the coffins

  of dead relations.

  They had been laid out

  in tainted rooms,

  their eyelids glistening,

  their dough-white hands

  shackled in rosary beads.

  Their puffed knuckles

  had unwrinkled, the nails

  were darkened, the wrists

  obediently sloped.

  The dulse-brown shroud,

  the quilted satin cribs:

  I knelt courteously,

  admiring it all,

  as wax melted down

  and veined the candles,

  the flames hovering

  to the women hovering

  behind me.

  And always, in a corner,

  the coffin lid,

  its nail-heads dressed

  with little gleaming crosses.

  Dear soapstone masks,

  kissing their igloo brows

  had to suffice

  before the nails were sunk

  and the black glacier

  of each funeral

  pushed away.

  II

  Now as news comes in

  of each neighbourly murder

  we pine for ceremony,

  customary rhythms:

  the temperate footsteps

  of a cortège, winding past

  each blinded home.

  I would restore

  the great chambers of Boyne,

  prepare a sepulchre

  under the cupmarked stones.

  Out of side-streets and bye-roads

  purring family cars

  nose into line,

  the whole country tunes

  to the muffled drumming

  of ten thousand engines.

  Somnambulant women,

  left behind, move

  through emptied kitchens

  imagining our slow triumph

  towards the mounds.

  Quiet as a serpent

  in its grassy boulevard,

  the procession drags its tail

  out of the Gap of the North

  as it
s head already enters

  the megalithic doorway.

  III

  When they have put the stone

  back in its mouth

  we will drive north again

  past Strang and Carling fjords,

  the cud of memory

  allayed for once, arbitration

  of the feud placated,

  imagining those under the hill

  disposed like Gunnar

  who lay beautiful

  inside his burial mound,

  though dead by violence

  and unavenged.

  Men said that he was chanting

  verses about honour

  and that four lights burned

  in corners of the chamber:

  which opened then, as he turned

  with a joyful face

  to look at the moon.

  North

  I returned to a long strand,

  the hammered shod of a bay,

  and found only the secular

  powers of the Atlantic thundering.

  I faced the unmagical

  invitations of Iceland,

  the pathetic colonies

  of Greenland, and suddenly

  those fabulous raiders,

  those lying in Orkney and Dublin

  measured against

  their long swords rusting,

  those in the solid

  belly of stone ships,

  those hacked and glinting

  in the gravel of thawed streams

  were ocean-deafened voices

  warning me, lifted again

  in violence and epiphany.

  The longship's swimming tongue

  was buoyant with hindsight---

  it said Thor's hammer swung

  to geography and trade,

  thick-witted couplings and revenges,

  the hatreds and behindbacks

  of the althing, lies and women,

  exhaustions nominated peace,

  memory incubating the spilled blood.

  It said, 'Lie down

  in the word-hoard, burrow

  the coil and gleam

  of your furrowed brain.

  Compose in darkness.

  Expect aurora borealis

  in the long foray

  but no cascade of light.

  Keep your eye clear

  as the bleb of the icicle,

  trust the feel of what nubbed treasure

  your hands have known.'

  Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces

  I

  It could be a jaw-bone

  or a rib or a portion cut

  from something sturdier:

  anyhow, a small outline

  was incised, a cage

  or trellis to conjure in.

  Like a child's tongue

  following the toils

  of his calligraphy,

  like an eel swallowed

  in a basket of eels,

  the line amazes itself,

  eluding the hand

  that fed it,

  a bill in flight,

  a swimming nostril.

  II

  These are trial pieces,

  the craft's mystery

  improvised on bone:

  foliage, bestiaries,

  interlacings elaborate

  as the netted routes

  of ancestry and trade.

  That have to be

  magnified on display

  so that the nostril

  is a migrant prow

  sniffing the Liffey,

  swanning it up to the ford,

  dissembling itself

  in antler combs, bone pins,

  coins, weights, scale-pans.

  III

  Like a long sword

  sheathed in its moisting

  burial clays,

  the keel stuck fast

  in the slip of the bank,

  its clinker-built hull

  spined and plosive

  as Dublin.

  And now we reach in

  for shards of the vertebrae,

  the ribs of hurdle,

  the mother-wet caches---

  and for this trial piece

  incised by a child,

  a longship, a buoyant

  migrant line.

  IV

  That enters my longhand,

  turns cursive, unscarfing

  a zoomorphic wake,

  a worm of thought

  I follow into the mud.

  I am Hamlet the Dane,

  skull-handler, parablist,

  smeller of rot

  in the state, infused

  with its poisons,

  pinioned by ghosts

  and affections,

  murders and pieties,

  coming to consciousness

  by jumping in graves,

  dithering, blathering.

  V

  Come fly with me,

  come sniff the wind

  with the expertise

  of the Vikings---

  neighbourly, scoretaking

  killers, haggers

  and hagglers, gombeen-men,

  hoarders of grudges and gain.

  With a butcher's aplomb

  they spread out your lungs

  and made you warm wings

  for your shoulders.

  Old fathers, be with us.

  Old cunning assessors

  of feuds and of sites

  for ambush or town.

  VI

  'Did you ever hear tell,'

  said Jimmy Farrell,

  'of the skulls they have

  in the city of Dublin?

  White skulls and black skulls

  and yellow skulls, and some

  with full teeth, and some

  haven't only but one,'

  and compounded history

  in the pan of 'an old Dane,

  maybe, was drowned

  in the Flood.'

  My words lick around

  cobbled quays, go hunting

  lightly as pampooties

  over the skull-capped ground.

  The Digging Skeleton

  After Baudelaire

  I

  You find anatomical plates

  Buried along these dusty quays

  Among books yellowed like mummies

  Slumbering in forgotten crates,

  Drawings touched with an odd beauty

  As if the illustrator had

  Responded gravely to the sad

  Mementoes of anatomy---

  Mysterious candid studies

  Of red slobland around the bones.

  Like this one: flayed men and skeletons

  Digging the earth like navvies.

  II

  Sad gang of apparitions,

  Your skinned muscles like plaited sedge

  And your spines hooped towards the sunk edge

  Of the spade, my patient ones,

  Tell me, as you labour hard

  To break this unrelenting soil,

  What barns are there for you to fill?

  What farmer dragged you from the boneyard?

  Or are you emblems of the truth,

  Death's lifers, hauled from the narrow cell

  And stripped of night-shirt shrouds, to tell:

  'This is the reward of faith

  In rest eternal. Even death

  Lies. The void deceives.

  We do not fall like autumn leaves

  To sleep in peace. Some traitor breath

  Revives our clay, sends us abroad

  And by the sweat of our stripped brows

  We earn our deaths; our one repose

  When the bleeding instep finds its spade.'

  Bone Dreams

  I

  White bone found

  on the grazing:

  the rough, porous

  language of touch

  and its yellowing, ribbed

  impression in the grass---


  a small ship-burial.

  As dead as stone,

  flint-find, nugget

  of chalk,

  I touch it again,

  I wind it in

  the sling of mind

  to pitch it at England

  and follow its drop

  to strange fields.

  II

  Bone-house:

  a skeleton

  in the tongue's

  old dungeons.

  I push back

  through dictions,

  Elizabethan canopies.

  Norman devices,

  the erotic mayflowers

  of Provence

  and the ivied latins

  of churchmen

  to the scop's

  twang, the iron

  flash of consonants

  cleaving the line.

  III