has boxed me in
it’s like I’m trapped inside her
and can only control – well the thing –
if I’m locked in it
and feel the car’s part of me
I guess they’re happy in that stretched
caravan but if they saw me driving past
they’d say there goes a happy fella
he doesn’t give a damn what his car looks like
no one’s ever asked him to write a poem
in praise of its make and makers
– they’d say that of course
if they could see the state this
what they call a cyar is in
but none of them would know
that on the road to Inver
in moonlight in my own so
deepdown sadness driving this borrowed
Toyota disconsolately
I’m losing myself in the road in front of me
I’m adding myself to the distance
and then suddenly
out of some terrible desire
I put my foot down and wham forward
but my heart stays with that pile of stones
I swerved past without seeing
– it stood at the wattle gate
a pile of road metal
– yes my heart is empty
my unsatisfied heart
my heart more human than I am and so
much more exact than life is
on the road to Inver near midnight
at the wheel under the moon’s light
on the road to Inver – oh
how tiring one’s imagination is
on the road to Inver always closer
to Inver – I want to reach out and touch it
like the rocks round Bantry Bay
on the road to Inver
craving peace its slow so slow
drop into our laps but as far
from it and myself as ever
MEDBH MCGUCKIAN
(b.1950)
The Seed-Picture
This is my portrait of Joanna – since the split
The children come to me like a dumb-waiter,
And I wonder where to put them, beautiful seeds
With no immediate application … the clairvoyance
Of seed-work has opened up
New spectrums of activity, beyond a second home.
The seeds dictate their own vocabulary,
Their dusty colours capture
More than we can plan,
The mould on walls, or jumbled garages,
Dead flower heads where insects shack …
I only guide them not by guesswork
In their necessary numbers,
And attach them by the spine to a perfect bedding,
Woody orange pips, and tear-drop apple,
The banana of the caraway, wrinkled peppercorns,
The pocked peach, or waterlily honesty,
The seamed cherry stone so hard to break.
Was it such self-indulgence to enclose her
In the border of a grandmother’s sampler,
Bonding all the seeds in one continuous skin,
The sky resolved to a cloud the length of a man?
To use tan linseed for the trees, spiky
Sunflower for leaves, bright lentils
For the window, patna stars
For the floral blouse? Her hair
Is made of hook-shaped marigold, gold
Of pleasure for her lips, like raspberry grain.
The eyelids oatmeal, the irises
Of Dutch blue maw, black rape
For the pupils, millet
For the vicious beige circles underneath.
The single pearl barley
That sleeps around her dullness
Till it catches light, makes women
Feel their age, and sigh for liberation.
The Sitting
My half-sister comes to me to be painted:
She is posing furtively, like a letter being
Pushed under a door, making a tunnel with her
Hands over her dull-rose dress. Yet her coppery
Head is as bright as a net of lemons. I am
Painting it hair by hair as if she had not
Disowned it, or forsaken those unsparkling
Eyes as blue may be sifted from the surface
Of a cloud; and she questions my brisk
Brushwork, the note of positive red
In the kissed mouth I have given her,
As a woman’s touch makes curtains blossom
Permanently in a house: she calls it
Wishfulness, the failure of the tampering rain
To go right into the mountain, she prefers
My sea-studies, and will not sit for me
Again, something half-opened, rarer
Than railroads, a soiled red-letter day.
Monody for Aghas
You won’t be a voice to me any more,
the weather of my own creation
repeating the highest possible shared
symptoms of the day. You were born
in a leap year, just as one day
was ending and the next beginning,
in a new time zone where landscape
has become language … blue bloom
of the faultless month of May,
with its heart set on conquering
every green glen … springtime
in action, springtime unfolding
into words, a literature of spring,
spring in place, time and eternity,
she-bird in its velvet dress
of soft blackbird colour,
maroon seed dashed from the hand.
Let me taste the whole of it,
my favourite tomb, the barbarity
and vividness of the route,
my due feet standing all night
in the sea of your pale goldfish
skin without body, its glimmering
sponged out by a tall white storm:
the red flag could not have made you
less Irish, your once-red lips before
and after folded together and left down
quietly, never to be parted,
that were forced open, strapped open,
by a sort of meal of a fixed gag,
a three-foot tube previously
used on ten others,
dipped in hot water, and withdrawn
and inserted, clogged and withdrawn,
and cleansed … your broad heart
became broader as you opened
to the Bridewell and the Curragh,
Mountjoy and Ship Street.
It was fifty hours without
plank bed or covering
while Max Green, Sir Arthur Chance,
Dr Lowe and the JP
almost wept, then attended
a banquet, before you smashed
the cell window for want of air,
and the Sisters of Charity
at the Mater Hospital
painted your mouth with brandy:
like a high-mettled horse,
soothing and coaxing him
with a sieve of provender in one hand
and a bridle in the other,
ready to slip it over his head
while he is snuffling at the food.
Today the fairest wreath is an inscape
mixed of strength and grace –
the ash tree trim above your grave.
She is in the Past, She has this Grace
My mother looks at her watch,
as if to look back over the curve
of her life, her slackening rhythms:
nobody can know her, how she lost herself
evening after evening in that after,
her hourly feelings, the repetition,
delay and failure of her labour
of mourning. The steps space themselves
out, the steps pass, in the mists<
br />
and hesitations of the summer,
and within a space which is doubled
one of us has passed through the other,
though one must count oneself three,
to figure out which of us
has let herself be traversed.
Nothing advances, we don’t move,
we don’t address one another.
I haven’t opened my mouth
except for one remark,
and what remark was that?
A word which appeases the menace
of time in us, reading as if
I were stripping the words
of their ever-mortal high meaning.
She is in dark light, or an openness
that leads to a darkness,
embedded in the wall
her mono-landscape
stays facing the sea
and the harbour activity,
her sea-conscience being ground up
with the smooth time of the deep,
her mourning silhouetted against
the splendour of the sea
which is now to your left,
as violent as it is distant
from all aggressive powers
or any embassies.
And she actively dreams
in the very long ending of this moment,
she is back in her lapping marshes,
still walking with the infinite
step of a prisoner, that former dimension
in which her gaze spreads itself
as a stroke without regarding you,
making you lower your own gaze.
Who will be there,
at that moment, beside her,
when time becomes sacred,
and her voice becomes an opera,
and the solitude is removed
from her body, as if my hand
had been held in some invisible place?
PETER FALLON
(b.1951)
The Company of Horses
They are flesh on the bones
of the wind, going full gallop,
the loan of freedom.
But the company of broken
horses is a quiet blessing.
Just to walk in the paddock;
to stand by their stall.
Left to their own devices
they graze or doze, hock to fetlock
crooked at ease, or – head to tail –
nibble withers, hips and flanks.
They fit themselves flat
to the ground. They roll.
But the mere sound or smell
of us – and they’re all neighs
and nickerings, their snorts
the splinters of the waves.
And growing out of morning
mists the ghosts of night
form silhouettes along the ridge,
a dun, two chestnuts,
and a bay. A shy colt stares
and shivers – a trembling like
fine feathers in a sudden breeze
around the hooves of heavy
horses. And the dam,
with foal to foot, steadies herself
to find her bearings,
her ears antennae of attention.
Put your hand towards her head-
collar, whispering your Ohs and Whoa,
Oh the boy and Oh the girl,
close your eyes and lean
your head towards
her quiet head, the way
the old grey mare,
hearing that her hero
joined the sleep
of death, spread her mane
across his breast and began to wail and weep.
PAUL MULDOON
(b.1951)
The Electric Orchard
The early electric people had domesticated the wild ass.
They knew all about falling off.
Occasionally, they would have fallen out of the trees.
Climbing again, they had something to prove
To their neighbours. And they did have neighbours.
The electric people lived in villages
Out of their need of security and their constant hunger.
Together they would divert their energies
To neutral places. Anger to the banging door,
Passion to the kiss.
And electricity to earth. Having stolen his thunder
From an angry god, through the trees
They had learned to string his lightning.
The women gathered random sparks into their aprons,
A child discovered the swing
Among the electric poles. Taking everything as given,
The electric people were confident, hardly proud.
They kept fire in a bucket,
Boiled water and dry leaves in a kettle, watched the lid
By the blue steam lifted and lifted.
So that, where one of the electric people happened to fall,
It was accepted as an occupational hazard.
There was something necessary about the thing. The North Wall
Of the Eiger was notorious for blizzards,
If one fell there his neighbour might remark, Bloody fool.
All that would have been inappropriate,
Applied to the experienced climber of electric poles.
I have achieved this great height?
No electric person could have been that proud,
Thirty or forty feet. Perhaps not that,
If the fall happened to be broken by the roof of a shed.
The belt would burst, the call be made,
The ambulance arrive and carry the faller away
To hospital with a scream.
There and then the electric people might invent the railway,
Just watching the lid lifted by the steam.
Or decide that all laws should be based on that of gravity, Just thinking of the faller fallen.
Even then they were running out of things to do and see.
Gradually, they introduced legislation
Whereby they nailed a plaque to every last electric pole.
They would prosecute any trespassers.
The high up, singing and live fruit liable to shock or kill
Were forbidden. Deciding that their neighbours
And their neighbours’ innocent children ought to be stopped
For their own good, they threw a fence
Of barbed wire round the electric poles. None could describe
Electrocution, falling, the age of innocence.
Cuba
My eldest sister arrived home that morning
In her white muslin evening dress.
‘Who the hell do you think you are,
Running out to dances in next to nothing?
As though we hadn’t enough bother
With the world at war, if not at an end.’
My father was pounding the breakfast-table.
‘Those Yankees were touch and go as it was –
If you’d heard Patton in Armagh –
But this Kennedy’s nearly an Irishman
So he’s not much better than ourselves.
And him with only to say the word.
If you’ve got anything on your mind
Maybe you should make your peace with God.’
I could hear May from beyond the curtain.
‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.
I told a lie once, I was disobedient once.
And, Father, a boy touched me once.’
‘Tell me, child. Was this touch immodest?
Did he touch your breast, for example?’
‘He brushed against me, Father. Very gently.’
Anseo
When the Master was calling the roll
At the primary school in Collegelands,
You were meant to call back Anseo
And raise your hand
As your name occurred.
Anseo, meaning here, here and
now,
All present and correct,
Was the first word of Irish I spoke.
The last name on the ledger
Belonged to Joseph Mary Plunkett Ward
And was followed, as often as not,
By silence, knowing looks,
A nod and a wink, the Master’s droll
‘And where’s our little Ward-of-court?’
I remember the first time he came back
The Master had sent him out
Along the hedges
To weigh up for himself and cut
A stick with which he would be beaten.
After a while, nothing was spoken;
He would arrive as a matter of course
With an ash-plant, a salley-rod.
Or, finally, the hazel-wand
He had whittled down to a whip-lash,
Its twist of red and yellow lacquers
Sanded and polished,
And altogether so delicately wrought
That he had engraved his initials on it.
I last met Joseph Mary Plunkett Ward
In a pub just over the Irish border.
He was living in the open,
In a secret camp
On the other side of the mountain.
He was fighting for Ireland,
Making things happen.
And he told me, Joe Ward,
Of how he had risen through the ranks
To Quartermaster, Commandant:
How every morning at parade
His volunteers would call back Anseo
And raise their hands
As their names occurred.
from Immram
I was just about getting things into perspective
When a mile-long white Cadillac
Came sweeping out of the distant past
Like a wayward Bay mist,
A transport of joy. There was that chauffeur
From the 1931 Sears Roebuck catalogue,
Susannah, as you guessed,
And this refugee from F. Scott Fitzgerald
Who looked as if he might indeed own the world.
His name was James Earl Caulfield III.
This was how it was. My father had been a mule.
He had flown down to Rio
Time and time again. But he courted disaster.
He tried to smuggle a wooden statue
Through the airport at Lima.
The Christ of the Andes. The statue was hollow.
He stumbled. It went and shattered.
And he had to stand idly by
As a cool fifty or sixty thousand dollars worth
Was trampled back into the good earth.
He would flee, to La Paz, then to Buenos Aires,
From alias to alias.
The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry Page 70