New and Selected Poems (22 page)

1

 

A cobble thrown a hundred years ago

Keeps coming at me, the first stone

Aimed at a great-grandmother’s turncoat brow.

The pony jerks and the riot’s on.

She’s crouched low in the trap

Running the gauntlet that first Sunday

Down the brae to Mass at a panicked gallop.

He whips on through the town to cries of ‘Lundy!’

   

 

Call her ‘The Convert’. ‘The Exogamous Bride’.

Anyhow, it is a genre piece

Inherited on my mother’s side

And mine to dispose with now she’s gone.

Instead of silver and Victorian lace,

The exonerating, exonerated stone.

2

 

Polished linoleum shone there. Brass taps shone.

The china cups were very white and big –

An unchipped set with sugar bowl and jug.

The kettle whistled. Sandwich and teascone

Were present and correct. In case it run,

The butter must be kept out of the sun.

And don’t be dropping crumbs. Don’t tilt your chair.

Don’t reach. Don’t point. Don’t make noise when you stir.

   

 

It is Number 5, New Row, Land of the Dead,

Where grandfather is rising from his place

With spectacles pushed back on a clean bald head

To welcome a bewildered homing daughter

Before she even knocks. ‘What’s this? What’s this?’

And they sit down in the shining room together.

3

 

When all the others were away at Mass

I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.

They broke the silence, let fall one by one

Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:

Cold comforts set between us, things to share

Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.

And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes

From each other’s work would bring us to our senses.

   

 

So while the parish priest at her bedside

Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying

And some were responding and some crying

I remembered her head bent towards my head,

Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives –

Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

4

 

Fear of affectation made her affect

Inadequacy whenever it came to

Pronouncing words ‘beyond her’.
Bertold Brek
.

She’d manage something hampered and askew

Every time, as if she might betray

The hampered and inadequate by too

Well-adjusted a vocabulary.

With more challenge than pride, she’d tell me, ‘You

Know all them things.’ So I governed my tongue

In front of her, a genuinely well-

adjusted adequate betrayal

Of what I knew better. I’d
naw
and
aye

And decently relapse into the wrong

Grammar which kept us allied and at bay.

5

 

The cool that came off sheets just off the line

Made me think the damp must still be in them

But when I took my corners of the linen

And pulled against her, first straight down the hem

And then diagonally, then flapped and shook

The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind,

They made a dried-out undulating thwack.

So we’d stretch and fold and end up hand to hand

For a split second as if nothing had happened

For nothing had that had not always happened

Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go,

Coming close again by holding back

In moves where I was x and she was ο

Inscribed in sheets she’d sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.

6

 

In the first flush of the Easter holidays

The ceremonies during Holy Week

Were highpoints of our
Sons and Lovers
phase.

The midnight fire. The paschal candlestick.

Elbow to elbow, glad to be kneeling next

To each other up there near the front

Of the packed church, we would follow the text

And rubrics for the blessing of the font.

As the hind longs for the streams, so my soul
…

Dippings. Towellings. The water breathed on.

The water mixed with chrism and with oil.

Cruet tinkle. Formal incensation

And the psalmist’s outcry taken up with pride:

Day and night my tears have been my bread
.

7

 

In the last minutes he said more to her

Almost than in all their life together.

‘You’ll be in New Row on Monday night

And I’ll come up for you and you’ll be glad

When I walk in the door … Isn’t that right?’

His head was bent down to her propped-up head.

She could not hear but we were overjoyed.

He called her good and girl. Then she was dead,

The searching for a pulsebeat was abandoned

And we all knew one thing by being there.

The space we stood around had been emptied

Into us to keep, it penetrated

Clearances that suddenly stood open.

High cries were felled and a pure change happened.

8

 

I thought of walking round and round a space

Utterly empty, utterly a source

Where the decked chestnut tree had lost its place

In our front hedge above the wallflowers.

The white chips jumped and jumped and skited high.

I heard the hatchet’s differentiated

Accurate cut, the crack, the sigh

And collapse of what luxuriated

Through the shocked tips and wreckage of it all.

Deep planted and long gone, my coeval

Chestnut from a jam jar in a hole,

Its heft and hush become a bright nowhere,

A soul ramifying and forever

Silent, beyond silence listened for.

Scuts of froth swirled from the discharge pipe.

We halted on the other bank and watched

A milky water run from the pierced side

Of milk itself, the crock of its substance spilt

Across white limbo floors where shift-workers

Waded round the clock, and the factory

Kept its distance like a bright-decked star-ship.

   

 

There we go, soft-eyed calves of the dew,

Astonished and assumed into fluorescence.

I thought of her as the wishing tree that died

And saw it lifted, root and branch, to heaven,

Trailing a shower of all that had been driven

   

 

Need by need by need into its hale

Sap-wood and bark: coin and pin and nail

Came streaming from it like a comet-tail

   

 

New-minted and dissolved. I had a vision

Of an airy branch-head rising through damp cloud,

Of turned-up faces where the tree had stood.

Light as a skiff, manoeuvrable

yet outmanoeuvred,

   

 

I affected epaulettes and a cockade,

wrote a style well-bred and impervious

   

 

to the solidarity I angled for,

and played the ancient Roman with a razor.

   

 

I was the shouldered oar that ended up

far from the brine and whiff of venture,

   

 

like a scratching-post or a crossroads flagpole,

out of my element among small farmers –

   

 

I who once wakened to the shouts of men

rising from the bottom of the sea,

   

 

men in their shirts mounting through deep water

when the Atlantic stove our cabin’s dead lights in

   

 

and the big fleet split and Ireland dwindled

as we ran before the gale under bare poles.

I

 

We lived deep in a land of optative moods,

under high, banked clouds of resignation.

A rustle of loss in the phrase
Not in our lifetime
,

the broken nerve when we prayed
Vouchsafe
or
Deign
,

were creditable, sufficient to the day.

   

 

Once a year we gathered in a field

of dance platforms and tents where children sang

songs they had learned by rote in the old language.

An auctioneer who had fought in the brotherhood

enumerated the humiliations

we always took for granted, but not even he

considered this, I think, a call to action.

Iron-mouthed loudspeakers shook the air

yet nobody felt blamed. He had confirmed us.

When our rebel anthem played the meeting shut

we turned for home and the usual harassment

by militiamen on overtime at roadblocks.

II

 

And next thing, suddenly, this change of mood.

Books open in the newly wired kitchens.

Young heads that might have dozed a life away

against the flanks of milking cows were busy

paving and pencilling their first causeways

across the prescribed texts. The paving stones

of quadrangles came next and a grammar

of imperatives, the new age of demands.

They would banish the conditional for ever,

this generation born impervious to

the triumph in our cries of
de profundis
.

Our faith in winning by enduring most

they made anathema, intelligences

brightened and unmannerly as crowbars.