You encountered them in broad daylight, going about their usual business, yet there was always a feeling that they were coming towards you out of storytime. One of the menfolk, as often as not, with a bit of a halter, you on your way to school, he with a smell of woodsmoke off him, asking if you’d seen an old horse anywhere behind the hedges. The stillness of the low tarpaulin tent as you approached and passed, the green wood in the fire spitting under a pot slung from a tripod. Every time they landed in the district, there was an extra-ness in the air, as if a gate had been left open in the usual life, as if something might get in or get out.
3. Boarders
There’s no heat in the bus, but the engine’s running and up where a destination should be showing it just says PRIVATE, so it must be ours. We’re back in the days of peaked caps and braid piping, drivers mounting steps as ominously as hangmen, conductors with plump bags of coin, the ticket punch a-dangle on its chain. But this is a special bus, so there’ll be no tickets, no conductor, and no fare collection until the load is full.
The stops are the same as every other time, clusters of us with suitcases assembled in shop doorways or at the appointed crossroads, the old bus getting up speed wherever the going’s good, but now she’s changing down on Glenshane Pass. The higher she goes, the heavier she pulls, and yet there’s no real hurry. Let the driver keep doing battle with the gear-stick, let his revs and double-clutchings drag the heart, anything to put off that last stop when he slows down at the summit and turns and seems about to take us back. Instead of which he halts, pulls on the handbrake, gives us time to settle, then switches off.
When we start again, the full lock of the steering will be held, the labour of cut and spin leave tyre-marks in the gravel, the known country fall away behind us. But for the moment it’s altogether quiet, the whole bus shakes as he bangs the cabin door shut, comes round the side and in to lift the money. Unfamiliar, uninvolved, almost, it seems, angered, he deals with us one by one, as one by one we go farther into ourselves, wishing we were him on the journey back, flailing downhill with the windows all lit up, empty and faster and angrier bend after bend.
THE LIFT
A first green braird: the hawthorn half in leaf.
Her funeral filled the road
And could have stepped from some old photograph
Of a Breton pardon, remote
Familiar women and men in caps
Walking four abreast, soon falling quiet.
Then came the throttle and articulated whops
Of a helicopter crossing, and afterwards
Awareness of the sound of our own footsteps,
Of open air, and the life behind those words
“Open” and “air.” I remembered her aghast,
Foetal, shaking, sweating, shrunk, wet-haired,
A beaten breath, a misting mask, the flash
Of one wild glance, like ghost surveillance
From behind a gleam of helicopter glass.
A lifetime, then the deathtime: reticence
Keeping us together when together,
All declaration deemed outspokenness.
Favourite aunt, good sister, faithful daughter,
Delicate since childhood, tough alloy
Of disapproval, kindness, and hauteur,
She took the risk, at last, of certain joys—
Her birdtable and jubilating birds,
The “fashion” in her wardrobe and her tallboy.
Weather, in the end, would say our say.
Reprise of griefs in summer’s clearest mornings,
Children’s deaths in snowdrops and the may,
Whole requiems at the sight of plants and gardens …
They bore her lightly on the bier. Four women,
Four friends—she would have called them girls—stepped in
And claimed the final lift beneath the hawthorn.
NONCE WORDS
The road taken
to bypass Cavan
took me west,
(a sign mistaken)
so at Derrylin
I turned east.
Sun on ice,
white floss
on reed and bush,
the bridge-iron cast
in an Advent silence
I drove across,
then pulled in,
parked, and sat
breathing mist
on the windscreen.
Requiescat …
I got out
well happed up,
stood at the frozen
shore gazing
at rimed horizon,
my first stop
like this in years.
And blessed myself
in the name of the nonce
and happenstance,
the Who knows
and What nexts
and So be its.
STERN
in memory of Ted Hughes
“And what was it like,” I asked him,
“Meeting Eliot?”
“When he looked at you,”
He said, “it was like standing on a quay
Watching the prow of the Queen Mary
Come towards you, very slowly.”
Now it seems
I’m standing on a pierhead watching him
All the while watching me as he rows out
And a wooden end-stopped stern
Labours and shimmers and dips,
Making no real headway.
OUT OF THIS WORLD
in memory of Czeslaw Milosz
l. “Like everybody else …”
“Like everybody else, I bowed my head
during the consecration of the bread and wine,
lifted my eyes to the raised host and raised chalice,
believed (whatever it means) that a change occurred.
I went to the altar rails and received the mystery
on my tongue, returned to my place, shut my eyes fast, made
an act of thanksgiving, opened my eyes, and felt
time starting up again.
There was never a scene
when I had it out with myself or with another.
The loss occurred off stage. And yet I cannot
disavow words like ‘thanksgiving’ or ‘host’
or ‘communion bread.’ They have an undying
tremor and draw, like well water far down.”
2. Brancardier
You’re off, a pilgrim, in the age of steam:
Derry, Dun Laoghaire, Dover, Rue du Bac
(Prayers for the Blessed M. M. Alacoque,
That she be canonized). Then leisure time
That evening in Paris, whence to Lourdes,
Learning to trust your learning on the way:
“Non, pas de vin, merci. Mais oui, du thé,”
And the waiter’s gone to take you at your word.
Hotel de quoi in Rue de quoi? All gone.
But not your designation, brancardier,
And your coloured bandolier, as you lift and lay
The sick on stretchers in precincts of the shrine
Or on bleak concrete to await their bath.
And always the word “cure” hangs in the air
Like crutches hung up near the grotto altar.
And always prayers out loud or under breath.
Belgian miners in blue dungarees
March in procession, carrying brass lamps.
Sodalities with sashes, poles, and pennants
Move up the line. Mantillas, rosaries,
And the unam sanctam catholicam acoustic
Of that underground basilica—maybe
Not gone but not what was meant to be,
The concrete reinforcement of the Mystical
Body, the Eleusis of its age.
I brought back one plastic canteen litre
On a shoulder strap (très chic) of the Lourdes water.
One small glass dome that englobed an image
Of the Virgin above barefoot Bern
adette—
Shake it and the clear liquid would snow
Flakes like white angel feathers on the grotto.
And (for stretcher-bearing work) a certificate.
3. Saw Music
Q. Do you renounce the world?
A. I do renounce it.
Barrie Cooke has begun to paint “godbeams,”
Vents of brightness that make the light of heaven
Look like stretched sheets of fluted silk or rayon
In an old-style draper’s window. Airslides, scrims,
And scumble. Columnar sift. But his actual palette
Is ever sludge and smudge, as if a shower
Made puddles on the spirit’s winnowing floor.
What it reminds me of is a wet night
In Belfast, around Christmas, when the man
Who played the saw inside the puddled doorway
Of a downtown shop, in light from a display
Of tinselled stuffs and sleigh bells blinking neon,
Started to draw his bow across the blade.
The stainless steel was oiled or Vaselined,
The saw stood upside down, and his left hand
Pressed light or heavy as the tune required
Flop-wobble grace note or high banshee whine.
Rain spat upon his threadbare gaberdine,
Into his cap where the occasional tossed coin
Basked on damp lining, the raindrops glittering
Like the saw’s greased teeth his bow caressed and crossed
Back across unharmed. “The art of oil painting—
Daubs fixed on canvas—is a paltry thing
Compared with what cries out to be expressed,”
The poet said, who lies this god-beamed day
Coffined in Kraków, as out of this world now
As the untranscendent music of the saw
He might have heard in Vilnius or Warsaw
And would not have renounced, however paltry.
IN IOWA
In Iowa once, among the Mennonites
In a slathering blizzard, conveyed all afternoon
Through sleet-glit pelting hard against the windscreen
And a wiper’s strong absolving slumps and flits,
I saw, abandoned in the open gap
Of a field where wilted corn stalks flagged the snow,
A mowing machine. Snow brimmed its iron seat,
Heaped each spoked wheel with a thick white brow,
And took the shine off oil in the black-toothed gears.
Verily I came forth from that wilderness
As one unbaptized who had known darkness
At the third hour and the veil in tattters.
In Iowa once. In the slush and rush and hiss
Not of parted but as of rising waters.
HÖFN
The three-tongued glacier has begun to melt.
What will we do, they ask, when boulder-milt
Comes wallowing across the delta flats
And the miles-deep shag ice makes its move?
I saw it, ridged and rock-set, from above,
Undead grey-gristed earth-pelt, aeon-scruff,
And feared its coldness that still seemed enough
To iceblock the plane window dimmed with breath,
Deepfreeze the seep of adamantine tilth
And every warm, mouthwatering word of mouth.
ON THE SPOT
A cold clutch, a whole nestful, all but hidden
In last year’s autumn leaf-mould, and I knew
By the mattness and the stillness of them, rotten,
Making death sweat of a morning dew
That didn’t so much shine the shells as damp them.
I was down on my hands and knees there in the wet
Grass under the hedge, adoring it,
Early riser busy reaching in
And used to finding warm eggs. But instead
This sudden polar stud
And stigma and dawn stone-circle chill
In my mortified right hand, proof positive
Of what conspired on the spot to addle
Matter in its planetary stand-off.
THE TOLLUND MAN IN SPRINGTIME
Into your virtual city I’ll have passed
Unregistered by scans, screens, hidden eyes,
Lapping myself in time, an absorbed face
Coming and going, neither god nor ghost,
Not at odds or at one, but simply lost
To you and yours, out under seeding grass
And trickles of kesh water, sphagnum moss,
Dead bracken on the spreadfield, red as rust.
I reawoke to revel in the spirit
They strengthened when they chose to put me down
For their own good. And to a sixth-sensed threat:
Panicked snipe offshooting into twilight,
Then going awry, larks quietened in the sun,
Clear alteration in the bog-pooled rain.
Scone of peat, composite bog-dough
They trampled like a muddy vintage, then
Slabbed and spread and turned to dry in sun—
Though never kindling-dry the whole way through—
A dead-weight, slow-burn lukewarmth in the flue,
Ashless, flameless, its very smoke a sullen
Waft of swamp-breath … And me, so long unrisen,
I knew that same dead weight in joint and sinew
Until a spade-plate slid and soughed and plied
At my buried ear, and the levered sod
Got lifted up; then once I felt the air
I was like turned turf in the breath of God,
Bog-bodied on the sixth day, brown and bare,
And on the last, all told, unatrophied.
My heavy head. Bronze-buffed. Ear to the ground.
My eye at turf level. Its snailskin lid.
My cushioned cheek and brow. My phantom hand
And arm and leg and shoulder that felt pillowed
As fleshily as when the bog pith weighed
To mould me to itself and it to me
Between when I was buried and unburied.
Between what happened and was meant to be.
On show for years while all that lay in wait
Still waited. Disembodied. Far renowned.
The harrow turned up when the crop was sown.
Out in the Danish night I’d hear soft wind
And remember moony water in a rut.
“The soul exceeds its circumstances.” Yes.
History not to be granted the last word
Or the first claim … In the end I gathered
From the display-case peat my staying powers,
Told my webbed wrists to be like silver birches,
My old uncallused hands to be young sward,
The spade-cut skin to heal, and got restored
By telling myself this. Late as it was,
The early bird still sang, the meadow hay
Still buttercupped and daisied, sky was new.
I smelled the air, exhaust fumes, silage reek,
Heard from my heather bed the thickened traffic
Swarm at a roundabout five fields away
And transatlantic flights stacked in the blue.
Cattle out in rain, their knowledgeable
Solid standing and readiness to wait,
These I learned from. My study was the wet,
My head as washy as a head of kale,
Shedding water like the flanks and tail
Of every dumb beast sunk above the cloot
In trampled gaps, bringing their heavyweight
Silence to bear on nosed-at sludge and puddle.
Of another world, unlearnable, and so
To be lived by, whatever it was I knew
Came back to me. Newfound contrariness.
In check-out lines, at cash-points, in those queues
Of wired, far-faced smilers
, I stood off,
Bulrush, head in air, far from its lough.
Through every check and scan I carried with me
A bunch of Tollund rushes—roots and all—
Bagged in their own bog-damp. In an old stairwell
Broom cupboard where I had hoped they’d stay
Damp until transplanted, they went musty.
Every green-skinned stalk turned friable,
The drowned-mouse fibres withered and the whole
Limp, soggy cluster lost its frank bouquet
Of weed leaf and turf mould. Dust in my palm
And in my nostrils dust, should I shake it off
Or mix it in with spit in pollen’s name
And my own? As a man would, cutting turf,
I straightened, spat on my hands, felt benefit,
And spirited myself into the street.
MOYULLA
In those days she flowed
black-lick and quick
under the sallies,
the coldness off her
like the coldness off you—
your cheek and your clothes
and your moves—when you come in
from gardening.
She was in the swim
of herself, her gravel shallows
swarmed, pollen sowings
tarnished her pools.
And so what, did I hear
somebody cry? Let them
cry if it suits them,
but let it be for her,
her stones, her purls, her pebbles
slicked and blurred
with algae, as if her name
and addressing water
suffered muddying,
her clear vowels
a great vowel shift,
Moyola to Moyulla.
Milk-fevered river.
Froth at the mouth
of the discharge pipe,
gidsome flotsam …
Barefooted on the bank,
glad-eyed, ankle-grassed,
I saw it all
and loved it at the time—