i
Shifting brilliancies. Then winter light
In a doorway, and on the stone doorstep
A beggar shivering in silhouette.
So the particular judgement might be set:
Bare wallstead and a cold hearth rained into --
Bright puddle where the soul-free cloud-life roams.
And after the commanded journey, what?
Nothing magnificent, nothing unknown.
A gazing out from far away, alone.
And it is not particular at all,
Just old truth dawning: there is no next-time-round.
Unroofed scope. Knowledge-freshening wind.
ii
Roof it again. Batten down. Dig in.
Drink out of tin. Know the scullery cold,
A latch, a door-bar, forged tongs and a grate.
Touch the crossbeam, drive iron in a wall,
Hang a line to verify the plumb
From lintel, coping-stone and chimney-breast.
Relocate the bedrock in the threshold.
Take squarings from the recessed gable pane.
Make your study the unregarded floor.
Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure
The bastion of sensation. Do not waver
Into language. Do not waver in it.
iii
Squarings? In the game of marbles, squarings
Were all those anglings, aimings, feints and squints
You were allowed before you'd shoot, all those
Hunkerings, tensings, pressures of the thumb,
Test-outs and pull-backs, re-envisagings,
All the ways your arms kept hoping towards
Blind certainties that were going to prevail
Beyond the one-off moment of the pitch.
A million million accuracies passed
Between your muscles' outreach and that space
Marked with three round holes and a drawn line.
You squinted out from a skylight of the world.
iv
Beneath the ocean of itself, the crowd
In Roman theatres could hear another
Stronger groundswell coming through.
It was like the steady message in a shell
Held to the ear in earshot of the sea:
Words being spoken on the scene arrived
Resonating up through the walls of urns.
the cordoned air rolled back, wave upon wave
Of classic mouthfuls amplified and faded.
How airy and how earthed it felt up there.
Bare to the world, light-headed, volatile
And carried like the rests in tides or music.
v
Three marble holes thumbed in the concrete road
Before the concrete hardened still remained
Three decades after the marble-player vanished
Into Australia. Three stops to play
The music of the arbitrary on.
Blow on them now and hear an undersong
Your levelled breath made once going over
The empty bottle. Improvise. Make free
Like old hay in its flimsy afterlife
High on a windblown hedge. Ocearina earth.
Three listening posts up on some hard-baked tier
Above the resonating amphorae.
vi
Once, as a child, out in a field of sheep,
Thomas Hardy pretended to be dead
And lay down flat among their dainty shins.
In that sniffed-at, bleated-into, grassy space
He experimented with infinity.
His small cool brow was like an anvil waiting
For sky to make it sing the perfect pitch
Of his dumb being, and that stir he caused
In the fleece-hustle was the original
Of a ripple that would travel eighty years
Outward from there, to be the same ripple
Inside him at its last circumference.
vii
(I misremembered. He went down on all fours,
Florence Emily says, crossing a ewe-leaze.
Hardy sought the creatures face to face,
Their witless eyes and liability
To panic made him feel less alone,
Made proleptic sorrow stand a moment
Over him, perfectly known and sure.
And then the flock's dismay went swimming on
Into the blinks and murmurs and deflections
He'd know at parties in renowned old age
When sometimes he imagined himself a ghost
And circulated with that new perspective.)
viii
The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise
Were all at prayers inside the oratory
A ship appeared above them in the air.
The anchor dragged along behind so deep
It hooked itself into the altar rails
And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill.
A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope
And struggled to release it. But in vain.
'This man can't bear our life here and will drown,'
The abbot said, 'unless we help him.' So
They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back
Out of the marvellous as he had known it.
ix
A boat that did not rock or wobble once
Sat in long grass one Sunday afternoon
In nineteen forty-one or two. The heat
Out on Lough Neagh and in where cattle stood
Jostling and skittering near the hedge
Grew redolent of the tweed skirt and tweed sleeve
I nursed on. I remember little treble
timber-notes their smart heels struck from planks,
Me creadled in an elbow like a secret
Open now as the eye of heaven was then
Above three sisters talking, talking steady
In a boat the ground still falls and falls from under.
x
Overhang of grass and seedling birch
On the quarry face. Rock-hob where you watched
All that cargoed brightness travelling
Above and beyond and sumptuously across
The water in its clear deep dangerous holes
On the quarry floor. Ultimate
Fathomableness, ultimate
Stony up-againstness: could you reconcile
What was diaphanous there with what was massive?
Were you equal to or were you opposite
To build-ups so promiscuous and weightless?
Shield your eyes, look up and face the music.
xi
To put a glass roof on the handball alley
Where a hopped ball cut merciless angles
In and out of play, or levelled true
For the unanswerable dead-root . . .
He alone, our walking weathercock,
Our peeled eye at the easel, had the right
To make a studio of that free maze,
To turn light outside in and curb the space
Where accident got tricked to accuracy
And rain was rainier for being blown
Across the grid and texture of the concrete.
He scales the world at arm's length, gives thumbs up.
xii
And lightening? One meaning of that
Beyond the usual sense of alleviation,
Illumination, and so on, is this:
A phenomenal instant when the spirit flares
With pure exhilaration before death --
The good thief in us harking to the promise!
So paint him on Christ's right hand, on a promonotory
Scanning empty space, so body-racked he seems
Untranslatable into the bliss
Ached for the moon-rim of his forehead,
By nail-craters on the dark side of his brain:
This day thou shalt be with Me in Paradise.
Settings
xiii
Hazel stealth. A trickle in the culvert.
Athletic sealight on the doorstep slab,
On the sea itself, on silent roofs and gables.
Whitewashed suntraps. Hedges hot as chimneys.
Chairs on all fours. A plate-rack braced and laden.
The fossil poetry of hob and slate.
Desire within its moat, dozing at ease --
Like a gorged cormorant on the rock at noon,
Exiled and in tune with the big glitter.
Re-enter this as the adult of solitude,
the silence-forder and the defintie
Presence you sensed withdrawing first time round.
xiv
One afternoon I was seraph on gold leaf.
I stood on the railway sleepers hearing larks,
Grasshoppers, cuckoos, dog-barks, trainer planes
Cutting and modulating and drawing off.
Heat wavered on the immaculate line
And shine of the cogged rails. On either side,
Dog daisies stood like vestals, the hot stones
Were clover-meshed and streaked with engine oil.
Air spanned, passage waited, the balance rode,
Nothing prevailed, whatever was in store
Witnessed itself already taking place
In a time marked by assent and by hiatus.
xv
And strike this scene in gold too, in relief,
So that a greedy eye cannot exhaust it:
Stable straw, Rembrandt-gleam and burnish
Where my father bends to a tea-chest packed with salt,
The hurricane lamp held up at eye-level
In his bunched left fist, his right hand foraging
For the unbleeding, vivid-flesh bacon,
Home-cured hocks pulled up into the light
For pondering a while and putting back.
That night I owned the piled grain of Egypt.
I watched the sentry's torchlight on the hoard.
I stood in the door, unseen and blazed upon.
xvi
Rat-poison the colour of blood pudding
Went phosphorescent when it was being spread:
Its sparky rancid shine under the blade
Brought everything to life -- like news of murder
Or the sight of a parked car occupied by lovers
On a side road, or stories of bull victims.
If a muse had sung the anger of Achilles
It owuld not have heightened the world-danger more
It was all there in the fresh rat-poison
Corposant on mouldy, dried-up crusts.
On winter evenings I loved its reek and risk.
And windfall freezing on the outhouse roof.
xvii
What were the virtues of an eel skin? What
Was the eel itself? A rib of water drawn
Out of the water, an ell yielded up
From glooms and whorls and slatings,
Rediscovered once it had been skinned.
When a wrist was bound with eelskin, energy
Redounded in that arm, a waterwheel
Turned in the shoulder, mill-races poured
And made your elbow giddy.
Your hand felt unconstrained and spirited
As heads and tails that wriggled in the mud
Aristotle supposed all eels were sprung from.
xviii
Like a foul-mouthed god of hemp come down to rut,
The rope-man stumped about and praised new rope
With talk of how thick it was, or how long and strong,
And how you could take it into your own hand
And feel it. His perfect, tight-bound wares
Made a circle round him: the making of reins
And belly-bands and halters. And of slippage --
For even then, knee-high among the farmers,
I knew the rope-man menaced them with freedoms
They were going to turn their backs on; and knew too
His powerlessness once the fair-hill emptied
And he had to break the circle and start loading.
xix
Memory as a building or a city,
Well lighted, well laid out, appointed with
Tableaux vivants and constumed effigies --
Statues in purple cloaks, or painted red,
Ones wearing crowns, ones smeared with mud or blood:
So that the mind's eye could haunt itself
With fixed associations and learn to read
Its own contents in meaningful order,
Ancient textbooks recommended that
Familiar places be linked deliberately
With a code of images. You knew the portent
In each setting, you blinked and concentrated.
xx
On Red Square, the brick wall of kremlin
Looked unthreatening in scale, just right for people
To behave well under, inside or outside.
The big cleared space in front was dizzying.
I looked across a heave and sweep of cobbles
Like the ones that beamed up in my dream of flying
Above the old cart road, with all the air
Fanning off beneath my neck and breastbone.
(The cloud-roamer, was it, Stalin called Pasternak?)
Terrible history and protected joys!
Plosive horse-dung on nineteen forties' roads.
The newsreel bomb-hits, as harmless as dust-puffs.
xxi
Once and only once I fired a gun -
A point two two. At a sqaure of handkerchief
Pinned on a tree about sixty yards away.
It exhilarated me -- the bullet's song
So effortlessly at my fingertip,
The target's single shocking little jerk,
A whole new quickened sense of what rifle meant.
And then again as it was in the beginning
I saw the soul like a white cloth snatched away
Across dark galaxies and felt that shot
For the sin it was against eternal life --
Another phrase dilating in new light.
xxii
Where does spirit live? Inside or outside
Things remembered, made things, things unmade?
What came first, the seabird's cry or the soul
Imagined in the dawn cold when it cried?
Where does it roost at last? On dungy sticks
In a jackdaw's nest up in the old stone tower
Or a marble bust commanding the parterre?
How habitable is perfected form?
And how inhabited the windy light?
What's the use of a held note or a held line
That cannot be assailed for reassurance?
(Set questions for the ghost of W.B.)
xxiii
On the bus-trip into saga country
Ivan Malinowski wrote a poem
About the nucelar submarines offshore
From an abandones whaling station.
I remember it as a frisson, but cannot
Remember any words. What I wanted then
Was a poem of utter evening:
The thirteenth century, weird midnight sun
Setting at eye-level with Snorri Sturluson
Who has come out to bathe in a hot spring
And sit through the stillness after milking time,
Laved and ensconced in the throne-room of his mind.
xxiv
Deserted harbour stillness. Every stone
Clarified and dormant under water,
The harbour wall a masonry of silence.
Fullness. Shimmer. Laden high Atlantic
The moorings barely stirred in, very slight
Clucking of the swell against boat boards.
Perfected vision: cockle minarets
Consigned down there with green-clicked bottle glass,
Shell-debris and a reddened bud of sandstone.
Air and ocean known as antecedents
Of each other. In apposition with
omnipresence, equilibrium, brim.
Crossings
xxv
Travelling south at dawn, going full out
Through high-up stone-wall country, the rocks still cold,
Rainwater gleaming here and there ahead,
I took a turn and met the fox stock-still.
Face-to-face in the middle of the road.
Wildness tore through me as he dipped and wheeled
In a level-running tawny breakaway.
O neat head, fabled brush and astonished eye
My blue Volkswagen flared into with morning!
Let rebirth come through water, through desire,
Through crawling backwards across clinic floors:
I have to cross back through that startled iris.
xxvi
Only to come up, year after year, behind
Those open-ended, canvas-covered trucks
Full of soldiers sitting cramped and staunch,
Their hands round gun-barrels, their gaze abroad
In dreams out of the body-heated metal
Silent, time-proofed, keeping an even distance
Beyond the windscreen glass, carried ahead
On the phantasmal flow-back of the road,
They still mean business in the here and now.
So draw no attention, steer and concentrate
On the space that flees between like a speeded-up
Meltdown of souls from the straw-flecked ice of hell.
xxvii
Everything flows. Even a solid man,
A pillar to himself and to his trade,
All yellow boots and stick and soft felt hat,
Can sprout wings at the ankle and grow fleet
As the god of fair days, stone posts, roads and crossroads,
Guardian of travellers and pyschopomp.
'Look for a man with an ashplant on the boat,'
My father told his sister setting out
For London, 'and stay near him all night
And you'll be safe.' Flow on, flow on
The journey of the soul with its soul guide
And the mysteries of the dealing-men with sticks!
xxviii
The ice was like a bottle. We lined up
Eager to re-enter the long slide
We were bringing to perfection, time after time
Running and readying and letting go
Into a sheerness that was its own reward:
A farewell to surefootedness, a pitch
Beyond our usual hold upon ourselves.
And what went on kept going, from grip to give,
The narrow milky way in the black ice,
The race-up, the free passage and return --
It followed on itself like a ring of light
We knew we'd come through and kept sailing towards.
xxix
Scissor-and-slap abruptness of a latch.
Its coldness to the thumb. Its see-saw lift
And drop and innocent harshness.
Which is a music of binding and of loosing
Unheard in this generation, but there to be
Called up or called down at a touch renewed.
Once the latch pronounces, roof
Is original again, threshold fatal,
The sanction powerful as the foreboding.
Your footstep is already known, so bow
Just a little, raise your right hand,
Make impulse one with wilfulness, and enter.
xxx
On St Brigid's Day the new life could be enetred
By going through her girdle of straw rope:
The proper way for men was right leg first,
Then right arm and right shoulder, head, then left
Shoulder, arm and leg. Women drew it down
Over the body and stepped out of it.
The open they came into by these moves
Stood opener, hoops came off the world,
They could feel the February air
Still soft above their heads and imagine
The limp rope fray and flare like wind-borne gleanings
Or an unhindered goldfinch over ploughland.
xxxi
Not an avenue and not a bower.
For a quarter-mile or so, where the country road
Is running straight across North Antrim bog,
Tall old fir trees line it on both sides.
Scotch firs, that is. Calligraphic shocks
Bushed and tufted in prevailing winds.
You drive into a meaning made of trees.
Or not exactly trees. It is a sense
Of running through and under without let,
Of glimpse and dapple. A life all trace and skim
The car has vanished out of. A fanned nape
Sensitive to the millionth of a flicker.
xxxii
Running water never disappointed.
Crossing water always furthered something.
Stepping stones were stations of the soul.
A kesh could mean the track of some called a causey
Raised above the wetness of the bog,
Or the causey where it bridged old drains and streams.
It steadies me to tell these things. Also
I cannot mention keshes or the ford
Without my father's shade appearing to me
On a path towards sunset, eyeing spades and clothes
That turf-cutters stowed perhaps or souls cast off
Before they crossed the log that spans the burn.
xxxiii
Be literal a moment. Recollect
Walking out on what had been emptied out
After he died, turning your back and leaving.
That morning tiles were harder, windows colder,
The raindrops on the pane more scourged, the grass
Barer to the sky, more wind-harrowed,
Or so it seemed. The house that he had planned
'Plain, big, straight, ordinary, you know',
A paradigm of rigour and correction,
Rebuke to fanciness and shrine to limit,
Stood firmer than ever for its own idea
Like a printed X-ray for the X-rayed body.
xxxiv
Yeats said, To those who see spirits, human skin
For a long time afterwards appears most coarse.
The face I see that all falls short of since
Passes down an aisle: I share the bus
From San Francisco Airport into Berkeley
With one other passenger, who's dropped
At the Treasure Island military base
Half-way across Bay Bridge. Vietnam-bound,
He could have been one of the newly dead come back,
Unsurprisable but still disappointed,
Having to bear his farm-boy self again,
His shaving cuts, his otherworldly brow.
xxxv
Shaving cuts. The pallor of bad habits.
Sunday afternoons, when summer idled
And couples walked the road along the Foyle,
We brought a shaving mirror to ourwindow
In the top storey of the boarders' dorms:
Lovers in the happy valley, cars
Eager-backed and silent, the absolute river
Between us and it all. We tilted the glass up
Into the sun and found the range and shone
A flitting light on what we could not have.
Brightness played over them in chancy sweeps
Like flashes from a god's shield or a dance-floor.
xxxvi
And yes, my friend, we too walked through a valley
Once. In darkness. With all the streetlamps off.
As danger gathered and the march dispersed.
Scene from Dante, made more memorable
By one of his head-clearing similes --
Fireflies, say, since the policemen's torches
Clustered and flicked and tempted us to trust
Their unpredictable, attractive light.
We were like herded shades who had to cross
And did cross, in a panic, to the car
Parked as we'd left it, that gave when we got in
Like Charon's boat under the faring poets.
Squarings
xxxvii
In famous poems by the sage Han Shan,
Cold Mountain is a place that can also mean
A state of mind. Or different states of mind
At different times, for the poems seem
One-off, impulsive, the kind of thing that starts
I have sat here facing the Cold Mountain
For twenty-nine years, or There is no path
That goes all the way -- enviable stuff,
Unfussy and believable.
Talking about it isn't good enough
But quoting from it at least demonstrates
The virtue of an art that knows its mind.
xxxviii
We climbed the Capitol by moonlight, felt
The transports of temptation on the heights:
We were privileged and belated and we knew it.
Then something in me moved to prophesy
Aganist the beloved stand-offishness of marble
And all emulation of stone-cut verses.
'Down with form triumphant, long live' (said I)
'From mendicant to convalescent. We attend
The come-back of pure water and the prayer-wheel.'
To which a voice replied, 'Of course we do.
But the others are in the Forun Cafe waiting,
Wondering where we are. What'll you have?'
xxxix
When you sat, far-eyed and cold, in the basalt throne
Of 'the wishing chair' at Giant's Causeway,
The small of your back made very solid sense.
Like a papoose at sap-time strapped to a maple tree,
You gathered force out of the world-tree's hardness.
If you stretched your hand forth, things might turn to stone.
But you were only goose-fleshed skin and bone,
The rocks and wonder of the world were only
Lava crystallized, salts of the earth
The wishing chair gave a savour to, its kelp
And ozone freshening your outlook
Beyond the range you thought you'd settled for.
xl
I was four but I turned four hundred maybe
Encountering the ancients dampish feel
Of a clay floor. Maybe four thousand even.
Anyhow, there it was. Milk poured for cats
In a rank puddle-place, splash -darkened mould
Around the terracottta water-crock.
Ground of being. Body's deep obedience
To all its shifting tenses. A half-door
Opening dircetly into starlight.
Out of that earth house I inherited
A stack of singular, cold memory-weights
To load me, hand and foot, in the scale of things.
xli
Sand-bed, they said. And gravel-bed. Before
I knew river shallows or river pleasures
I knew the ore of longing in those words.
The places I go back to have not failed
But will not last. Waist-deep in cow-parsley,
I re-enter the swim, riding or quelling
The very currents memory is composed of,
Everything accumulated ever
As I took squarings from the tops of bridges
Or the banks of self at evening.
Lick of fear. Sweet transience. Flirt and splash.
Crumpled flow the sky-dipped willows trailed in.
xlii
Heather and kesh and turf stacks reappear
Summer by summer still, grasshoppers and all,
The same yet rarer: fields of the nearly blessed
Where gaunt ones in their shirtsleeves stooped and dug
Or stood alone at dusk surveying bog-banks --
Apparitions now, yet active still
And territorial, still sure of their ground,
Still interested, not knowing how far
The country of the shades has been pushed back,
How long the lark has stopped outside these fields
And only seems unstoppable to them
Caught like a far hill in a freak of sunshine.
xliii
Choose one set of tracks and track a hare
Until the prints stop, just like that, in snow.
End of the line. Smooth drifts. Where did she go?
Back on her tracks, of course, then took a spring
Yards off to the side; clean break; no scent or sign.
She landed in her form and ate the snow.
Consider too the ancient hieroglyph
Of 'hare and zig-zag', which meant 'to exist',
To be on the qui vive, weaving and dodging
Like our friend who sprang (goodbye) beyond our ken
And missed a round at last (but of course he'd stood it):
The shake-the-heart the dew-hammer, the far-eyed.
xliv
All gone into the world of light? Perhaps
As we read the line sheer forms do crowd
The starry vestibule. Otherwise
They do not. What luceny survives
Is blanched as worms on nightlines I would lift,
Ungratified if always well prepared
For the nothing there -- which was only what had been there.
Although in fact it is more like a caught line snapping,
That moment of admission of All gone,
When the rod butt loses touch and the tip drools
And eddies swirl a dead leaf past in silence
Swifter (it seems) than the water's passage.
xlv
For certain ones what was written may come true:
They shall live on in the distance
At the mouths of rivers.
For our ones, no. They will re-enter
Dryness that was heaven on earth to them,
Happy to eat the scones baked out of clay.
For some, perhaps, the delta's reed-beds
And cold bright-footed seabirds always wheeling.
For our ones, snuff
And hob-soot and the heat off ashes.
And a judge who comes between them and the sun
In a pillar of radiant house-dust.
xlvi
Mountain air from the mountain up behind;
Out front, the end-of-summer, stone-walled fields;
And in a slated house the fiddle going
Like a flat stone skimmed at sunset
Or the irrevocable slipstream of flat earth
Still fleeing behind space.
Was music once a proof of God's existence?
As long as it admits things beyond measure,
That supposition stands.
So let the ear attend like a farmhouse window
In placid light, where the extravagant
Passed once under full sail into the longed-for.
xlvii
The visible sea at a distance from the shore
Or beyond the anchoring grounds
Was called the offing.
The emptier it stood, the more compelled
The eye that scanned it.
But once you turned your back on it, your back
Was suddenly all eyes like Argus's.
Then, when you'd look again, the offing felt
Untresspassed still, and yet somehow vacated
As if a lambent troop that exercised
On the borders of your vision had withdrawn
Behind the skyline to manoeuvre and regroup.
xlviii
Strange how things in the offing, once they're sensed,
Convert to things foreknown;
And how what's come upon is manifest
Only in light of what has been gone through.
Seventh heaven may be
The whole truth of a sixth sense come to pass.
At any rate, when light breaks over me
The way it did on the road beyond Coleraine
Where wind got saltier, the sky more hurried
And silve lame shivered on the Bann
Out in mid-channel between the painted poles,
That day I'll be in step with what escaped me.
-- Seamus Heaney