New and Selected Poems (18 page)

VIII

 

Black water. White waves. Furrows snowcapped.

A magpie flew from the basilica

and staggered in the granite airy space

I was staring into, on my knees

at the hard mouth of St Brigid’s Bed.

I came to and there at the bed’s stone hub

was my archaeologist, very like himself,

with his scribe’s face smiling its straight-lipped smile,

starting at the sight of me with the same old

pretence of amazement, so that the wing

of woodkerne’s hair fanned down over his brow.

And then as if a shower were blackening

already blackened stubble, the dark weather

of his unspoken pain came over him.

A pilgrim bent and whispering on his rounds

inside the bed passed between us slowly.

   

 

‘Those dreamy stars that pulsed across the screen

beside you in the ward – your heartbeats, Tom, I mean –

scared me the way they stripped things naked.

My banter failed too early in that visit.

I could not take my eyes off the machine.

I had to head back straight away to Dublin,

guilty and empty, feeling I had said nothing

and that, as usual, I had somehow broken

covenants, and failed an obligation.

I half knew we would never meet again …

Did our long gaze and last handshake contain

nothing to appease that recognition?’

   

 

‘Nothing at all. But familiar stone

had me half numbed to face the thing alone.

I loved my still-faced archaeology.

The small crab-apple physiognomies

on high crosses, carved heads in abbeys …

Why else dig in for years in that hard place

in a muck of bigotry under the walls

picking through shards and Williamite cannon balls?

But all that we just turned to banter too.

I felt that I should have seen far more of you

and maybe would have – but dead at thirty-two!

Ah poet, lucky poet, tell me why

what seemed deserved and promised passed me by?’

   

 

I could not speak. I saw a hoard of black

basalt axe heads, smooth as a beetle’s back,

a cairn of stone force that might detonate,

the eggs of danger. And then I saw a face

he had once given me, a plaster cast

of an abbess, done by the Gowran master,

mild-mouthed and cowled, a character of grace.

‘Your gift will be a candle in our house.’

But he had gone when I looked to meet his eyes

and hunkering instead there in his place

was a bleeding, pale-faced boy, plastered in mud.

‘The red-hot pokers blazed a lovely red

in Jerpoint the Sunday I was murdered,’

he said quietly. ‘Now do you remember?

You were there with poets when you got the word

and stayed there with them, while your own flesh and blood

was carted to Bellaghy from the Fews.

They showed more agitation at the news

than you did.’

   

 

                                        ‘But they were getting crisis

first-hand, Colum, they had happened in on

live sectarian assassination.

I was dumb, encountering what was destined.’

And so I pleaded with my second cousin.

‘I kept seeing a grey stretch of Lough Beg

and the strand empty at daybreak.

I felt like the bottom of a dried-up lake.’

   

 

‘You saw that, and you wrote that – not the fact.

You confused evasion and artistic tact.

The Protestant who shot me through the head

I accuse directly, but indirectly, you

who now atone perhaps upon this bed

for the way you whitewashed ugliness and drew

the lovely blinds of the
Purgatorio

and saccharined my death with morning dew.’

   

 

Then I seemed to waken out of sleep

among more pilgrims whom I did not know

drifting to the hostel for the night.

IX

 

‘My brain dried like spread turf, my stomach

Shrank to a cinder and tightened and cracked.

Often I was dogs on my own track

Of blood on wet grass that I could have licked.

Under the prison blanket, an ambush

Stillness I felt safe in settled round me.

Street lights came on in small towns, the bomb flash

Came before the sound, I saw country

I knew from Glenshane down to Toome

And heard a car I could make out years away

With me in the back of it like a white-faced groom,

A hit-man on the brink, emptied and deadly.

When the police yielded my coffin, I was light

As my head when I took aim.’

                                                   This voice from blight

And hunger died through the black dorm:

There he was, laid out with a drift of mass cards

At his shrouded feet. Then the firing party’s

Volley in the yard. I saw woodworm

In gate posts and door jambs, smelt mildew

From the byre loft where he watched and hid

From fields his draped coffin would raft through.

Unquiet soul, they should have buried you

In the bog where you threw your first grenade,

Where only helicopters and curlews

Make their maimed music, and sphagnum moss

Could teach you its medicinal repose

Until, when the weasel whistles on its tail,

No other weasel will obey its call.

   

 

I dreamt and drifted. All seemed to run to waste

As down a swirl of mucky, glittering flood

Strange polyp floated like a huge corrupt

Magnolia bloom, surreal as a shed breast,

My softly awash and blanching self-disgust.

And I cried among night waters, ‘I repent

My unweaned life that kept me competent

To sleepwalk with connivance and mistrust.’

Then, like a pistil growing from the polyp,

A lighted candle rose and steadied up

Until the whole bright-masted thing retrieved

A course and the currents it had gone with

Were what it rode and showed. No more adrift,

My feet touched bottom and my heart revived.

   

 

Then something round and clear

And mildly turbulent, like a bubbleskin

Or a moon in smoothly rippled lough water

Rose in a cobwebbed space: the molten

Inside-sheen of an instrument

Revolved its polished convexes full

Upon me, so close and brilliant

I seemed to pitch back in a headlong fall.

And then it was the clarity of waking

To sunlight and a bell and gushing taps

In the next cubicle. Still there for the taking!

The old brass trumpet with its valves and stops

I found once in loft thatch, a mystery

I shied from then for I thought such trove beyond me.

   

 

‘I hate how quick I was to know my place.

I hate where I was born, hate everything

That made me biddable and unforthcoming,’

I mouthed at my half-composed face

In the shaving mirror, like somebody

Drunk in the bathroom during a party,

Lulled and repelled by his own reflection.

As if the cairnstone could defy the cairn.

As if the eddy could reform the pool.

As if a stone swirled under a cascade,

Eroded and eroding in its bed,

Could grind itself down to a different core.

Then I thought of the tribe whose dances never fail

For they keep dancing till they sight the deer.

X

 

Morning stir in the hostel. A pot

hooked on forged links. Soot flakes. Plumping water.

The open door brilliant with sunlight.

Hearthsmoke rambling and a thud of earthenware

   

 

drumming me back until I saw the mug

beyond my reach on its high shelf, the one

patterned with blue cornflowers, sprig after sprig

repeating round it, as quiet as a milestone …

   

 

When had it not been there? There was one night

when fit-up actors used it for a prop

and I sat in the dark hall estranged from it

as a couple vowed and called it their loving cup

   

 

and held it in our gaze until the curtain

jerked shut with an ordinary noise.

Dipped and glamoured then by this translation,

it was restored to its old haircracked doze

   

 

on the mantelpiece, its parchment glazes fast –

as the otter surfaced once with Ronan’s psalter

miraculously unharmed, that had been lost

a day and a night under lough water.

   

 

And so the saint praised God on the lough shore

for that dazzle of impossibility

I credited again in the sun-filled door,

so absolutely light it could put out fire.

XI

 

As if the prisms of the kaleidoscope

I plunged once in a butt of muddied water

surfaced like a marvellous lightship

   

 

and out of its silted crystals a monk’s face

that had spoken years ago from behind a grille

spoke again about the need and chance

   

 

to salvage everything, to re-envisage

the zenith and glimpsed jewels of any gift

mistakenly abased …

   

 

What came to nothing could always be replenished.

‘Read poems as prayers,’ he said, ‘and for your penance

translate me something by Juan de la Cruz.’

   

 

Returned from Spain to our chapped wilderness,

his consonants aspirate, his forehead shining,

he had made me feel there was nothing to confess.

   

 

Now his sandalled passage stirred me on to this:

How well I know that fountain, filling, running,

            although it is the night.

   

 

That eternal fountain, hidden away,

I know its haven and its secrecy

            although it is the night.

   

 

But not its source because it does not have one,

which is all sources’ source and origin

              although it is the night.

   

 

No other thing can be so beautiful.

Here the earth and heaven drink their fill

            although it is the night.

   

 

So pellucid it never can be muddied,

and I know that all light radiates from it

            although it is the night.

   

 

I know no sounding-line can find its bottom,

nobody ford or plumb its deepest fathom

                although it is the night.

   

 

And its current so in flood it overspills

to water hell and heaven and all peoples

                although it is the night.

   

 

And the current that is generated there,

as far as it wills to, it can flow that far

                although it is the night.

   

 

And from these two a third current proceeds

which neither of these two, I know, precedes

                although it is the night.

   

 

This eternal fountain hides and splashes

within this living bread that is life to us

                although it is the night.

   

 

Hear it calling out to every creature.

And they drink these waters, although it is dark here

                because it is the night.

   

 

I am repining for this living fountain.

Within this bread of life I see it plain

                although it is the night.