SEAMUS HEANEY
Human Chain
for
Des and Mary
Peter and Jean
Acknowledgements
Some of these poems appeared for the first time in slightly different form in the following magazines: Agenda, Archipelago, Irish Pages, Irish Times, Little Star, Magenta, New Yorker, Parnassus, Poetry Review, The SHOp, Times Literary Supplement.
‘The Conway Stewart’ and ‘Lick the Pencil’ were first published in Many Mansions, Stoney Road Press, 2009; ‘Human Chain’ in That Island Never Found: Essays and Poems for Terence Brown, Four Courts Press, 2007; ‘Slack’ appeared as a poem card and poster poem from Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts, 2009; ‘A Herbal’ is a version of ‘Herbier de Bretagne’ from Guillevic’s Étier, Gallimard, 1979, and appeared in Franco–Irish Connections: Essays, Memoirs and Poems in Honour of Pierre Joannon, Four Courts Press, 2009; ‘The Riverbank Field’ and ‘Route 110’ in The Riverbank Field, Gallery Press, 2007; ‘Wraiths’ in From the Small Back Room: A Festschrift for Ciaran Carson, Netherlea, 2008; ‘Parking Lot’ appeared under the title ‘Wraiths’ in Captivating Brightness: Ballynahinch, Ballynahinch Castle Hotel/Occasional Press, 2008; ‘Hermit Songs’ in Something Understood: Essays and Poetry for Helen Vendler, University of Virginia Press, 2009; ‘A Kite for Aibhín’ is adapted from ‘The Kites’, first published in Auguri: To Mary Kelleher, Royal Dublin Society, 2009.
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
‘Had I not been awake’
Album
The Conway Stewart
Uncoupled
The Butts
Chanson d’Aventure
Miracle
Human Chain
A Mite-Box
An Old Refrain
The Wood Road
The Baler
Derry Derry Down
Eelworks
Slack
A Herbal
Canopy
The Riverbank Field
Route 110
Death of a Painter
Loughanure
Wraiths
I Sidhe
II Parking Lot
III White Nights
Sweeney Out-Takes
I Otterboy
II He Remembers Lynchechaun
III The Pattern
Colum Cille Cecinit
I Is scíth mo chrob ón scríbainn
II Is aire charaim Doire
III Fil súil nglais
Hermit Songs
‘Lick the Pencil’
‘The door was open and the house was dark’
In the Attic
A Kite for Aibhín
About the Author
By the Same Author
Copyright
HUMAN CHAIN
‘Had I not been awake’
Had I not been awake I would have missed it,
A wind that rose and whirled until the roof
Pattered with quick leaves off the sycamore
And got me up, the whole of me a-patter,
Alive and ticking like an electric fence:
Had I not been awake I would have missed it,
It came and went so unexpectedly
And almost it seemed dangerously,
Returning like an animal to the house,
A courier blast that there and then
Lapsed ordinary. But not ever
After. And not now.
Album
I
Now the oil-fired heating boiler comes to life
Abruptly, drowsily, like the timed collapse
Of a sawn down tree, I imagine them
In summer season, as it must have been,
And the place, it dawns on me,
Could have been Grove Hill before the oaks were cut,
Where I’d often stand with them on airy Sundays
Shin-deep in hilltop bluebells, looking out
At Magherafelt’s four spires in the distance.
Too late, alas, now for the apt quotation
About a love that’s proved by steady gazing
Not at each other but in the same direction.
II
Quercus, the oak. And Quaerite, Seek ye.
Among green leaves and acorns in mosaic
(Our college arms surmounted by columba,
Dove of the church, of Derry’s sainted grove)
The footworn motto stayed indelible:
Seek ye first the Kingdom … Fair and square
I stood on in the Junior House hallway
Seeing them as a couple, I now see,
For the first time, all the more together
For having had to turn and walk away, as close
In the leaving (or closer) as in the getting.
III
It’s winter at the seaside where they’ve gone
For the wedding meal. And I am at the table,
Uninvited, ineluctable.
A skirl of gulls. A smell of cooking fish.
Plump dormant silver. Stranded silence. Tears.
Their bibbed waitress unlids a clinking dish
And leaves them to it, under chandeliers.
And to all the anniversaries of this
They are not ever going to observe
Or mention even in the years to come.
And now the man who drove them here will drive
Them back, and by evening we’ll be home.
IV
Were I to have embraced him anywhere
It would have been on the riverbank
That summer before college, him in his prime,
Me at the time not thinking how he must
Keep coming with me because I’d soon be leaving.
That should have been the first, but it didn’t happen.
The second did, at New Ferry one night
When he was very drunk and needed help
To do up trouser buttons. And the third
Was on the landing during his last week,
Helping him to the bathroom, my right arm
Taking the webby weight of his underarm.
V
It took a grandson to do it properly,
To rush him in the armchair
With a snatch raid on his neck,
Proving him thus vulnerable to delight,
Coming as great proofs often come
Of a sudden, one-off, then the steady dawning
Of whatever erat demonstrandum.
Just as a moment back a son’s three tries
At an embrace in Elysium
Swam up into my very arms, and in and out
Of the Latin stem itself, the phantom
Verus that has slipped from ‘very’.
The Conway Stewart
‘Medium’, 14-carat nib,
Three gold bands in the clip-on screw-top,
In the mottled barrel a spatulate, thin
Pump-action lever
The shopkeeper
Demonstrated,
The nib uncapped,
Treating it to its first deep snorkel
In a newly opened ink-bottle,
Guttery, snottery,
Letting it rest then at an angle
To ingest,
Giving us time
To look together and away
From our parting, due that evening,
To my longhand
‘Dear’
To them, next day.
Uncoupled
I
Who is this coming to the ash-pit
Walking tall, as if in a procession,
Bearing in front of her a slender pan
Withdrawn just now from underneath
T
he firebox, weighty, full to the brim
With whitish dust and flakes still sparking hot
That the wind is blowing into her apron bib,
Into her mouth and eyes while she proceeds
Unwavering, keeping her burden horizontal still,
Hands in a tight, sore grip round the metal knob,
Proceeds until we have lost sight of her
Where the worn path turns behind the henhouse.
II
Who is this, not much higher than the cattle,
Working his way towards me through the pen,
His ashplant in one hand
Lifted and pointing, a stick of keel
In the other, calling to where I’m perched
On top of a shaky gate,
Waving and calling something I cannot hear
With all the lowing and roaring, lorries revving
At the far end of the yard, the dealers
Shouting among themselves, and now to him
So that his eyes leave mine and I know
The Butts
His suits hung in the wardrobe, broad
And short
And slightly bandy-sleeved,
Flattened back
Against themselves,
A bit stand-offish.
Stale smoke and oxter-sweat
Came at you in a stirred-up brew
When you reached in,
A whole rake of thornproof and blue serge
Swung heavily
Like waterweed disturbed. I sniffed
Tonic unfreshness,
Then delved past flap and lining
For the forbidden handfuls.
But a kind of empty-handedness
Transpired … Out of suit-cloth
Pressed against my face,
Out of those layered stuffs
That surged and gave,
Out of the cold smooth pocket-lining
Nothing but chaff cocoons,
A paperiness not known again
Until the last days came
And we must learn to reach well in beneath
Each meagre armpit
To lift and sponge him,
One on either side,
Feeling his lightness,
Having to dab and work
Closer than anybody liked
But having, for all that,
To keep working.
Chanson d’Aventure
Love’s mysteries in souls do grow,
But yet the body is his book.
I
Strapped on, wheeled out, forklifted, locked
In position for the drive,
Bone-shaken, bumped at speed,
The nurse a passenger in front, you ensconced
In her vacated corner seat, me flat on my back –
Our postures all the journey still the same,
Everything and nothing spoken,
Our eyebeams threaded laser-fast, no transport
Ever like it until then, in the sunlit cold
Of a Sunday morning ambulance
When we might, O my love, have quoted Donne
On love on hold, body and soul apart.
II
Apart: the very word is like a bell
That the sexton Malachy Boyle outrolled
In illo tempore in Bellaghy
Or the one I tolled in Derry in my turn
As college bellman, the haul of it there still
In the heel of my once capable
Warm hand, hand that I could not feel you lift
And lag in yours throughout that journey
When it lay flop-heavy as a bellpull
And we careered at speed through Dungloe,
Glendoan, our gaze ecstatic and bisected
By a hooked-up drip-feed to the cannula.
III
The charioteer at Delphi holds his own,
His six horses and chariot gone,
His left hand lopped
From a wrist protruding like an open spout,
Bronze reins astream in his right, his gaze ahead
Empty as the space where the team should be,
His eyes-front, straight-backed posture like my own
Doing physio in the corridor, holding up
As if once more I’d found myself in step
Between two shafts, another’s hand on mine,
Each slither of the share, each stone it hit
Registered like a pulse in the timbered grips.
Miracle
Not the one who takes up his bed and walks
But the ones who have known him all along
And carry him in –
Their shoulders numb, the ache and stoop deeplocked
In their backs, the stretcher handles
Slippery with sweat. And no let-up
Until he’s strapped on tight, made tiltable
And raised to the tiled roof, then lowered for healing.
Be mindful of them as they stand and wait
For the burn of the paid-out ropes to cool,
Their slight lightheadedness and incredulity
To pass, those ones who had known him all along.
Human Chain
for Terence Brown
Seeing the bags of meal passed hand to hand
In close-up by the aid workers, and soldiers
Firing over the mob, I was braced again
With a grip on two sack corners,
Two packed wads of grain I’d worked to lugs
To give me purchase, ready for the heave –
The eye-to-eye, one-two, one-two upswing
On to the trailer, then the stoop and drag and drain
Of the next lift. Nothing surpassed
That quick unburdening, backbreak’s truest payback,
A letting go which will not come again.
Or it will, once. And for all.
A Mite-Box
But still in your cupped palm to feel
The chunk and clink of an alms-collecting mite-box,
Full to its slotted lid with copper coins,
Pennies and halfpennies donated for
‘The foreign missions’ … Made from a cardboard kit,
Wedge-roofed like a little oratory
And yours to tote as you made the rounds,
Indulged on every doorstep, each donation
Accounted for by a pinprick in a card –
A way for all to see a way to heaven,
The same as when a pinholed Camera
Obscura unblinds the sun eclipsed.
An Old Refrain
I
Robin-run-the-hedge
We called the vetch –
A fading straggle
Of Lincoln green
English stitchwork
Unravelling
With a hey-nonny-no
Along the Wood Road.
Sticky entangling
Berry and thread
Summering in
On the tousled verge.
II
In seggins
Hear the wind
Among the sedge,
In boortree
The elderberry’s
Dank indulgence,
In benweed
Ragwort’s
Singular unbending,
In easing
Drips of night rain
From the eaves.
The Wood Road
Resurfaced, never widened,
The verges grassy as when
Bill Pickering lay with his gun
Under the summer hedge
Nightwatching, in uniform –
Special militiaman.
Moonlight on rifle barrels,
On the windscreen of a van
Roadblocking the road,
The rest of his staunch patrol
In profile, sentry-loyal,
Harassing Mulhollandstown.
Or me in broad daylight
On top of
a cartload
Of turf built trig and tight,
Looked up to, looking down,
Allowed the reins like an adult
As the old cart rocked and rollicked.
Then that August day I walked it
To the hunger striker’s wake,
Across a silent yard,
In past a watching crowd
To where the guarded corpse
And a guard of honour stared.
Or the stain at the end of the lane
Where the child on her bike was hit
By a speed-merchant from nowhere
Hard-rounding the corner,
A back wheel spinning in sunshine,
A headlamp in smithereens.
Film it in sepia,