The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry
Page 71
I imagined him sitting outside a hacienda
Somewhere in the Argentine.
He would peer for hours
Into the vastness of the pampas.
Or he might be pointing out the constellations
Of the Southern hemisphere
To the open-mouthed child at his elbow.
He sleeps with a loaded pistol under his pillow.
The mile-long white Cadillac had now wrapped
Itself round the Park Hotel.
We were spirited to the nineteenth floor
Where Caulfield located a secret door.
We climbed two perilous flights of steps
To the exclusive penthouse suite.
A moment later I was ushered
Into a chamber sealed with black drapes.
As I grew accustomed to the gloom
I realized there was someone else in the room.
He was huddled on an old orthopaedic mattress,
The makings of a skeleton,
Naked but for a pair of draw-string shorts.
His hair was waistlength, as was his beard.
He was covered in bedsores.
He raised one talon.
‘I forgive you,’ he croaked. ‘And I forget.
On your way out, you tell that bastard
To bring me a dish of ice-cream.
I want Baskin-Robbins banana-nut ice-cream.’
I shimmied about the cavernous lobby.
Mr and Mrs Alfred Tennyson
Were ahead of me through the revolving door.
She tipped the bell-hop five dollars.
There was a steady stream of people
That flowed in one direction,
Faster and deeper,
That I would go along with, happily,
As I made my way back, like any other pilgrim,
To Main Street, to Foster’s pool-room.
Aisling
I was making my way home late one night
this summer, when I staggered
into a snow drift.
Her eyes spoke of a sloe-year,
her mouth a year of haws.
Was she Aurora, or the goddess Flora,
Artemidora, or Venus bright,
or Anorexia, who left
a lemon stain on my flannel sheet?
It’s all much of a muchness.
In Belfast’s Royal Victoria Hospital
a kidney machine
supports the latest hunger-striker
to have called off his fast, a saline
drip into his bag of brine.
A lick and a promise. Cuckoo spittle.
I hand my sample to Doctor Maw.
She gives me back a confident All Clear.
They that Wash on Thursday
She was such a dab hand, my mother. Such a dab hand
at raising her hand
to a child. At bringing a cane down across my hand
in such a seemingly offhand
manner I almost have to hand
it to her. ‘Many hands,’
she would say, ‘spoil the broth.’ My father took no hand
in this. He washed his hands
of the matter. He sat on his hands.
So I learned firsthand
to deal in the off-, the under-, the sleight-of-hand,
writing now in that great, open hand
yet never quite showing my hand.
I poured myself a drink with a heavy hand.
As for the women with whom I sat hand-in-hand
in the Four-in-Hand,
as soon as they were eating out of my hand
I dismissed them out of hand.
Then one would play into my hands –
or did she force my hand? –
whose lily-white hand
I took in marriage. I should have known beforehand
it wouldn’t work. ‘When will you ever take yourself in hand?’
‘And give you the upper hand?’
For things were by now completely out of hand.
The show of hands
on a moonlit hill under the Red Hand.
The Armalite in one hand
and the ballot box in the other. Men dying at hand.
Throughout all of which I would hand
back to continuity as the second hand
came up to noon. ‘On the one hand …
On the other …’ The much-vaunted even hand
of the BBC. Though they’d pretty much given me a free hand
I decided at length to throw in my hand
and tendered my resignation ‘by hand’.
I was now quite reconciled to living from hand
to mouth. (Give that man a big, big hand.)
My father was gone. My mother long gone. Into Thy hands,
O Lord … Gone, too, the ink-stained hands
of Mary Powers. Now I’d taken another lily-white hand
put in by the hole of the door. A hand
no bigger than a cloud. Now she and I and the child of my right hand
stand hand in hand,
brave Americans all, and I know (‘The bird in the hand
is the early bird …’) that the time is at hand
for me to set my hand
to my daughter’s still-wet, freehand
version of the Muldoon ‘coat of arms’ that came to hand
in a heraldry shop on Nassau Street – on a green field a white hand.
Third Epistle to Timothy
You made some mistake when you intended to favor me with some of the new valuable grass seed … for what you gave me … proves mere timothy.
—A letter from Benjamin Franklin to Jared Eliot, July 16, 1747
I
Midnight. June 1923. Not a stir except for the brough and brouhaha
surrounding the taper or link
in which a louse
flares up and a shadow, my da’s,
clatters against a wall of the six-by-eight-by-six-foot room
he sleeps in, eleven years old, a servant boy at Hardys of Carnteel.
There’s a boot-polish lid filled with turps
or paraffin oil
under each cast-iron bed leg, a little barrier
against bedbugs under each bed foot.
II
That knocking’s the knocking against their stalls of a team
of six black Clydesdales mined in Coalisland
he’s only just helped to unhitch from the cumbersome
star of a hay rake. Decently and in order
he brought each whitewashed nose
to its nosebag of corn, to its galvanized bucket.
One of the six black Clydesdale mares
he helped all day to hitch and unhitch
was showing, on the near hock, what might be a bud of farcy
picked up, no doubt, while on loan to Wesley Cummins.
III
‘Decently and in order,’ Cummins would proclaim, ‘let all Inniskillings
be done.’ A week ago my da helped him limber up
the team to a mowing machine as if to a gun carriage. ‘For no Dragoon
can function without his measure of char.’
He patted his bellyband. ‘A measure, that is, against dysentery.’
This was my da’s signal to rush
into the deep shade of the hedge to fetch such little tea as might remain
in the tea urn. ‘Man does not live,’ Cummins would snort, ‘only by scraps
of wheaten farls and tea dregs.
You watch your step or I’ll see you’re shipped back to Killeter.’
IV
‘ Killeeshill,’ my da says, ‘I’m from Killeeshill.’ Along the cast-iron
rainbow of his bed end
comes a line
of chafers or cheeselips that have scaled the bed legs
despite the boot-polish lids. Eleven years of age. A servant boy
on the point of falling asleep. The reek of paraffin
or the pinewoods reek
of turpentine
good against roundworm in horses. That knocking against their stalls
of six Clydesdales, each standing at sixteen hands.
V
Building hay even now, even now drawing level with the team’s headbrass,
buoyed up by nothing more than the ballast
of hay – meadow cat’s-tail, lucerne, the leaf upon trodden leaf
of white clover and red –
drawing level now with the taper blooms of a horse chestnut.
Already light in the head.
‘Though you speak, young Muldoon …’ Cummins calls up from trimming the skirt
of the haycock, ‘though you speak with the tongue
of an angel, I see you for what you are … Malevolent.
Not only a member of the church malignant but a malevolent spirit.’
VI
Even now borne aloft by bearing down on lap cocks and shake cocks
from under one of which a ruddy face
suddenly twists and turns upward as if itself carried
on a pitchfork and, meeting its gaze
he sees himself, a servant boy still, still ten or eleven,
breathing upon a Clydesdale’s near hock and finding a farcy bud
like a tiny glow in a strut of charcoal.
‘I see you,’ Cummins points at him with the pitchfork, ‘you little byblow,
I see you casting your spells, your sorceries,
I see you coming as a thief in the night to stab us in the back.’
VII
A year since they kidnapped Anketell Moutray from his home at Favour Royal,
dragging him, blindfolded, the length of his own gravel path,
eighty years old, the Orange County grand master. Four A Specials shot on a train
in Clones. The Clogher valley
a blaze of flax mills and haysheds. Memories of the Land League. Davitt and Biggar.
Breaking the boycott at Lough Mask.
The Land Leaguers beaten
at the second battle of Saintfield. It shall be revealed …
A year since they cut out the clapper of a collabor … a collabor …
a collaborator from Maguiresbridge.
VIII
That knocking’s the team’s near-distant knocking on wood
while my da breathes upon
the blue-yellow flame on a fetlock, on a deep-feathered pastern
of one of six black Shires … ‘Because it shall be revealed by fire,’
Cummins’s last pitchfork is laden
with thistles, ‘as the sparks fly upward
man is born into trouble. For the tongue may yet be cut
from an angel.’ The line of cheeselips and chafers
along the bed end. ‘Just wait till you come back down and I get a hold
of you, young Muldoon … We’ll see what spells you’ll cast.’
IX
For an instant it seems no one else might scale
such a parapet of meadow cat’s-tail, lucerne, red and white clovers,
not even the line of chafers and cheeselips
that overthrow as they undermine
when, light in the head, unsteady on his pegs as Anketell Moutray,
he squints through a blindfold of clegs
from his grass-capped, thistle-strewn vantage point,
the point where two hay ropes cross,
where Cummins and his crew have left him, in a straw hat with a fraying brim,
while they’ve moved on to mark out the next haycock.
X
That next haycock already summoning itself from windrow after wind-weary windrow
while yet another brings itself to mind in the acrid stink
of turpentine. There the image of Lizzie,
Hardy’s last servant girl, reaches out from her dais
of salt hay, stretches out an unsunburned arm
half in bestowal, half beseechingly, then turns away to appeal
to all that spirit troop
of hay treaders as far as the eye can see, the coil on coil
of hay from which, in the taper’s mild uproar,
they float out across the dark face of the earth, an earth without form, and void.
The Breather
Think of this gravestone
as a long, low chair
strategically placed
at a turn in the stair.
Turkey Buzzards
They’ve been so long above it all,
those two petals
so steeped in style they seem to stall
in the kettle
simmering over the town dump
or, better still,
the neon-flashed, X-rated rump
of fresh roadkill
courtesy of the interstate
that Eisenhower
would overtake in the home straight
by one horsepower,
the kettle where it all boils down
to the thick scent
of death, a scent of such renown
it’s given vent
to the idea buzzards can spot
a deer carcass
a mile away, smelling the rot
as, once, Marcus
Aurelius wrinkled his nose
at a gas leak
from the Great Sewer that ran through Rome
to the Tiber
then went searching out, through the gloam,
one subscriber
to the other view that the rose,
full-blown, antique,
its no-frills ruff, the six-foot shrug
of its swing-wings,
the theologian’s and the thug’s
twin triumphings
in a buzzard’s shaved head and snood,
buzz-buzz-buzzy,
its logic in all likelihood
somewhat fuzzy,
would ever come into focus,
it ever deign
to dispense its hocus-pocus
in that same vein
as runs along an inner thigh
to where, too right,
the buzzard vouchsafes not to shy
away from shite,
its mission not to give a miss
to a bête noire,
all roly-poly, full of piss
and vinegar,
trying rather to get to grips
with the grommet
of the gut, setting its tinsnips
to that grommet
in the spray-painted hind’s hindgut
and making a
sweeping, too right, a sweeping cut
that’s so blasé
it’s hard to imagine, dear Sis,
why others shrink
from this sight of a soul in bliss,
so in the pink
from another month in the red
of the shambles,
like a rose in over its head
among brambles,
unflappable in its belief
it’s Ararat
on which the Ark would come to grief,
abjuring that
Marcus Aurelius humbug
about what springs
from earth succumbing to the tug
at its heartstrings,
reported to live past fifty,
as you yet may,
dear Sis, perhaps growing your hair
in requital,
though briefly, of whatever tears
at your vitals,
learning, perhaps, from the nifty,
nay thrifty, way
these buzzards are given to stoop
and take their ease
by letting their time-chastened poop
fall to their knees
till they’re almost as bright with lime
as their night roost,
their poop containing an enzyme
that’s known to boost
their immune systems, should they
prong
themselves on small
bones in a cerebral cortex,
at no small cost
to their well-being, sinking fast
in a deer crypt,
buzzards getting the hang at last
of being stripped
of their command of the vortex
while having lost
their common touch, they’ve been so long
above it all.
KERRY HARDIE
(b.1951)
Ship of Death
for my mother
Watching you, for the first time,
turn to prepare your boat, my mother;
making it clear you have other business now –
the business of your future –
I was washed-through with anger.
It was a first survey,
an eye thrown
over sails, oars, timbers,
as many a time I’d seen that practised eye
scan a laden table.
How can you plan going off like this
when we stand at last, close enough, if the wind is right,
to hear what the other is saying?
I never thought you’d do this, turning away,
mid-sentence, your hand testing a rope,
your ear tuned
to the small thunder of the curling wave
on the edge of the great-night sea,
neither regretful nor afraid –
anxious only for the tide.
Seal Morning
The small seal, laid on the greyish sand
like a bolster – the same off-white colour –
its smooth, tight, belly-ticking holed by a crow,
one thick thread of blackened entrail
pulled out and looped loosely over its body.
And the crow – standing off – waiting.
Like those old stories of the Vikings,
how they’d prick a man’s belly and hook out
a coil of his gut. Then they’d nail it to a tree
and make him crawl round and around,
unwinding himself, the tree taking his entrails,
as a bobbin draws thread from a spool.
The sea mist was a blowing whiteness,
the small seal lay on its back in a curve,
one flipper folded across its body,
the other outstretched. Like a sunbather
lying in easy abandon, asleep. Too private really;