—Guide to Irish Birds
A sobering thought, the idea of you stretched there,
bittern, under a dark sky, your exposed bones
yellow too in a ditch among cold stones,
ice glittering everywhere on bog and river,
the whole unfortunate country frozen over
and your voice stilled by enforced sobriety –
a thought more wrenching than the fall of Troy
because more intimate; for we’d hear your shout
of delight from a pale patch of watery sunlight
out on the mud there as you took your first
drink of the day and now, destroyed by thirst,
you lie in brambles while the rats rotate.
I’d’ve broken the ice for you, given an inkling;
now, had I known it, we might both be drinking
and singing too; for ours is the same story.
Others have perished – heron, blackbird, thrushes –
and lie shivering like you under whin-bushes;
but I mourn only the bittern, withdrawn and solitary,
who used to carouse alone among the rushes
and sleep rough in the star-glimmering bog-drain.
It used to be, with characters like us,
they’d let us wander the roads in wind and rain
or lock us up and throw away the key –
but now they have a cure for these psychoses
as indeed they do for most social diseases
and, rich at last, we can forget our pain.
She says I’m done for if I drink again;
so now, relieved of dangerous stimuli,
at peace with my plastic bottle of H2O
and the slack strings of insouciance, I sit
with bronze Kavanagh on his canal-bank seat,
not in ‘the tremendous silence of mid-July’
but the fast bright zing of a winter afternoon
dizzy with head-set, flash-bulb and digifone,
to learn the tao he once claimed as his own
and share with him the moor-hen and the swan,
the thoughtless lyric of a cloud in the sky
and the play of light and shadow on the slow
commemorative waters; relax, go with the flow.
‘Things’
for Jane
It rained for years when I was young.
I sat there as in the old pop song
and stared at a lonely avenue
like everybody else I knew
until, one day, the sun came out.
I too came out, to shout and sing
and see what it was all about.
Oh yes, I remember everything.
Biographia Literaria
(Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1772–1834)
A spoilt child shivers at the river’s edge –
night-hiding yes but anxious to be found,
a troubled soul torn between fear and rage.
Sun, moon and star on the sky-blue clock face
in the south transept of St. Mary’s mind
the autumn dark, and shadows have changed place
obscurely, each tick an ‘articulate sound’,
as he dozes off under a rustic bridge.
When he wakes at dawn to a slow-waning moon,
frozen and scared, curled up like the unborn,
the sun blinking behind an owl-eyed barn,
frost in the fields and winter coming on,
a frigate flutters on a glittering sea.
A great cold has gripped the heart already
with signs of witchery in an ivy tree:
now nothing will ever be the same again.
Genie, taper and paper, long solitary cliff walks,
cloud thoughts unfolding over the Quantocks
sheer to shore beneath high, feathery springs.
The cottage shines its light above the rocks,
the world’s oceans tear in from the west
and an Aeolian harp the size of a snuff-box
sings in a casement where its tingling strings
record the faintest whisper, the loudest blast.
Receptive, tense, adrift in a breezy trance,
the frame is seized as if in a nightmare
by some quotation, fugue, some fugitive air,
some distant echo of the primal scream.
Silence, dead calm, no worldly circumstance;
the words form figures and begin to dance –
and then the miracle, the pleasure dome,
the caves of ice, the vibrant dulcimer.
Stowey to Göttingen, philosophy in a mist,
wide-eyed sublimities of ghost and Geist,
wild wind-and-rain effects of Greta Hall,
the rattling windows and the icy lake,
babbling excursions and the perpetual
white roaring rose of a close waterfall;
finally Highgate Grove and table talk,
a ‘destined harbour’ for the afflicted soul.
Asra and Christabel in confused opium dreams,
heartbroken whimpers and nocturnal screams
grow ever fainter as he becomes ‘a sage
escaped from the inanity’, aghast
at furious London and its rising smoke,
the sinister finance of a dark new age.
Dunn’s pharmacy is only a short walk;
his grown-up daughter visits him there at last.
EILÉAN NÍ CHUILLEANÍIN
(b.1942)
Deaths and Engines
We came down above the houses
In a stiff curve, and
At the edge of Paris airport
Saw an empty tunnel
– The back half of a plane, black
On the snow, nobody near it,
Tubular, burnt-out and frozen.
When we faced again
The snow-white runways in the dark
No sound came over
The loudspeakers, except the sighs
Of the lonely pilot.
The cold of metal wings is contagious:
Soon you will need wings of your own,
Cornered in the angle where
Time and life like a knife and fork
Cross, and the lifeline in your palm
Breaks, and the curve of an aeroplane’s track
Meets the straight skyline.
The images of relief:
Hospital pyjamas, screens round a bed
A man with a bloody face
Sitting up in bed, conversing cheerfully
Through cut lips:
These will fail you some time.
You will find yourself alone
Accelerating down a blind
Alley, too late to stop
And know how light your death is;
You will be scattered like wreckage,
The pieces every one a different shape
Will spin and lodge in the hearts
Of all who love you.
MacMoransbridge
Although the whole house creaks from their footsteps
The sisters, when he died,
Never hung up his dropped dressing-gown,
Took the ash from the grate, or opened his desk. His will,
Clearly marked, and left in the top drawer,
Is a litany of objects lost like itself.
The tarnished silver teapot, to be sold
And the money given to a niece for her music-lessons,
Is polished and used on Sundays. The rings and pendants
Devised by name to each dear sister are still
Tucked between silk scarves in his wardrobe, where he found
And hid them again, the day they buried his grandmother.
And his posthumous plan of slights and surprises
Has failed – though his bank account’s frozen – to dam up time.
He had wanted it all to stop,
As he stopped moving between that room
With it
s diaries and letters posted abroad
And the cold office over the chemist’s
Where he went to register deaths and births,
While the sisters went on as they do now, never
All resting at once – one of them would be
Boiling up mutton-shanks for broth, or washing out blankets,
Dipping her black clothes in boiled vitriol and oak-gall
(He used to see from his leafy window
Shoulders bobbing at the pump like pistons).
And still the youngest goes down at night to the stream,
Tending the salmon-nets at the weir,
And comes home to bed as the oldest of all
Can already be heard adding up small change with the servant.
Fireman’s Lift
I was standing beside you looking up
Through the big tree of the cupola
Where the church splits wide open to admit
Celestial choirs, the fall-out of brightness.
The Virgin was spiralling to heaven,
Hauled up in stages. Past mist and shining,
Teams of angelic arms were heaving,
Supporting, crowding her, and we stepped
Back, as the painter longed to
While his arm swept in the large strokes.
We saw the work entire, and how the light
Melted and faded bodies so that
Loose feet and elbows and staring eyes
Floated in the wide stone petticoat
Clear and free as weeds.
This is what love sees, that angle:
The crick in the branch loaded with fruit,
A jaw defining itself, a shoulder yoked,
The back making itself a roof
The legs a bridge, the hands
A crane and a cradle.
Their heads bowed over to reflect on her
Fair face and hair so like their own
As she passed through their hands. We saw them
Lifting her, the pillars of their arms
(Her face a capital leaning into an arch)
As the muscles clung and shifted
For a final purchase together
Under her weight as she came to the edge of the cloud.
Parma 1963–Dublin 1994
The Real Thing
The Book of Exits, miraculously copied
Here in this convent by an angel’s hand,
Stands open on a lectern, grooved
Like the breast of a martyred deacon.
The bishop has ordered the windows bricked up on this side
Facing the fields beyond the city.
Lit by the glow from the cloister yard at noon
On Palm Sunday, Sister Custos
Exposes her major relic, the longest
Known fragment of the Brazen Serpent.
True stories wind and hang like this
Shuddering loop wreathed on a lapis lazuli
Frame. She says, this is the real thing.
She veils it again and locks up.
On the shelves behind her the treasures are lined.
The episcopal seal repeats every coil,
Stamped on all closures of each reliquary
Where the labels read: Bones
Of Different Saints. Unknown.
Her history is a blank sheet,
Her vows a folded paper locked like a well.
The torn end of the serpent
Tilts the lace edge of the veil.
The real thing, the one free foot kicking
Under the white sheet of history.
A Capitulary
Now in my sleep I can hear them beyond the wall,
A chapterhouse growl, gently continuous:
The sound the child heard, waking and dozing again
All the long night she was tucked up in the library
While her father told his story to the chaplain
And then repeated it before the bishop.
She heard his flat accent, always askew
Responding to the Maynooth semitones,
A pause, and then the whisper of the scribe
Sweeping up the Latin like dust before a brush,
Lining up the ablatives, a refined
Countrywoman’s hiss, and the neuter scrape of the pen.
I feel the ticking of their voices and remember how
My sister before she was born listened for hours
To my mother practising scales on the cello;
A grumble of thick string, and then climbing
To a high note that lifted
that lifted its head
like a seal –
To a high note that lifted its head like a seal in the water.
Gloss/Clós/Glas
Look at the scholar, he has still not gone to bed,
Raking the dictionaries, darting at locked presses,
Hunting for keys. He stacks the books to his oxter,
Walks across the room as stiff as a shelf.
His nightwork, to make the price of his release:
Two words, as opposite as his and hers
Which yet must be as close
As the word clós to its meaning in a Scots courtyard
Close to the spailpín ships, or as close as the note
On the uilleann pipe to the same note on the fiddle –
As close as the grain in the polished wood, as the finger
Bitten by the string, as the hairs of the bow
Bent by the repeated note –
Two words
Closer to the bone than the words I was so proud of,
Embrace and strict to describe the twining of bone and flesh.
The rags of language are streaming like weathervanes,
Like weeds in water they turn with the tide, as he turns
Back and forth the looking-glass pages, the words
Pouring and slippery like the silk thighs of the tomcat
Pouring through the slit in the fence, lightly,
Until he reaches the language that has no word for his,
No word for hers, and is brought up sudden
Like a boy in a story faced with a small locked door.
Who is that he can hear panting on the other side?
The steam of her breath is turning the locked lock green.
DOROTHY MOLLOY
(1942–2004)
Ghost Train
I pay sixpence to go round the loop. Slide the coin
with the greyhound and harp from my red pillar-box.
Slip it into the hand of the garlicky carnival-man.
He whispers, as always: ‘That’s grand.’ But this time
his face is too close to my cheek. There’s a shag
of thick hair on his chest. He half-jests in my ear: ‘Not a word
to your folks and the next ride’s on me.’ He follows
my spark as I clickety-clack round the track.
Skeletons hang in the dark, lighting up, as we pass.
I pretend he’s a friendly old dog when he jumps in
beside me and rests his white head on my knee.
But I find I can’t slap him away when he opens his flippety
-flap, takes the blanket-pin out of my pleats, leaves a
slobber all over my lap.
Gethsemane Day
They’ve taken my liver down to the lab,
left the rest of me here on the bed;
the blood I am sweating rubs off on the sheet,
but I’m still holding on to my head.
What cocktail is Daddy preparing for me?
What ferments in pathology’s sink?
Tonight they will tell me, will proffer the cup,
and, like it or not, I must drink.
JOHN F. DEANE
(b.1943)
The Instruments of Art
Edvard Munch
We move in draughty, barn-like spaces, swallows
busy round the beams, like images. There is room
for l
arger canvases to be displayed, there are storing-places
for our weaker efforts; hold
to warm clothing, to surreptitious nips of spirits
hidden behind the instruments of art. It is all, ultimately,
a series of bleak self-portraits, of measured-out
reasons for living. Sketches
of heaven and hell. Self-portrait with computer;
self-portrait, nude, with blanching flesh; self
as Lazarus, mid-summons, as Job, mid-scream.
There is outward
dignity, white shirt, black tie, a black hat
held before the crotch; within, the turmoil, and advanced
decay. Each work achieved and signed announcing itself
the last. The barn door slammed shut.
*
There was a pungency of remedies on the air, the house
hushed for weeks, attending. A constant focus
on the sick-room. When I went in, fingers reached for me,
like crayfish bones; saliva
hung in the cave of the mouth like a web. Later,
with sheets and eiderdown spirited away, flowers stood
fragrant in a vase in the purged room. Still life. Leaving
a recurring sensation of dread, a greyness
like a dye, darkening the page; that Dies Irae, a slow
fretsaw wailing of black-vested priests. It was Ireland
subservient, relishing its purgatory. Books, indexed,
locked in glass cases. Night
I could hear the muted rhythms in the dance-hall; bicycles
slack against a gable-wall; bicycle-clips, minerals, the raffle;
words hesitant, ill-used, like groping. In me the dark bloom
of fascination, an instilled withdrawal.
*
He had a long earth-rake and he drew lines
like copy-book pages on which he could write
seeds, meaning – love; and can you love, be loved, and never
say ‘love’, never hear ‘love’?
The uncollected apples underneath the trees
moved with legged things and a chocolate-coloured rust;
if you speak out flesh and heart’s desire will the naming of it
canker it? She cut hydrangeas,
placed them in a pewter bowl (allowing herself at times
to cry) close by the tabernacle door; patience in pain
mirroring creation’s order. The boy, suffering puberty, sensed
The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry Page 66