VI.
Freckle-face, fox-head, pod of the broom, Catkin-pixie, little fern-swish: Where did she arrive from?
Like a wish wished And gone, her I chose at "secrets"
And whispered to. When we were playing houses.
I was sunstruck at the basilica door A stillness far away, a s.p.a.ce, a dish, A blackened tin and knocked-over stool Like a tramped neolithic floor Uncovered among dunes where the bent gra.s.s Whispers on like reeds about Midas"s Secrets, secrets. I shut my ears to the bell.
Head hugged. Eyes shut. Leaf ears. Don"t tell. Don"t tell.
A stream of pilgrims answering the bell Trailed up the steps as I went down them Towards the bottle-green, still Shade of an oak. Shades of the Sabine farm On the beds of St Patrick"s Purgatory.
Late summer, country distance, not an air: Loosen the toga for wine and poetry Till Phoebus returning routs the morning star.
As a somnolent hymn to Mary rose I felt an old pang that packed bags of grain And the sloped shafts of forks and hoes Once mocked me with, at my own long virgin Fasts and thirsts, my nightly shadow feasts, Haunting the granaries of words like b.r.e.a.s.t.s.
As if I knelt for years at a keyhole Mad for it, and all that ever opened Was the breathed-on grille of a confessional Until that night I saw her honey-skinned Shoulderblades and the wheatlands of her back Through the wide keyhole of her keyhole dress And a window facing the deep south of luck Opened and I inhaled the land of kindness.
As little flowers that were all bowed and shut By the night chills rise on their stems and open As soon as they have felt the touch of sunlight, So I revived in my own wilting powers And my heart flushed, like somebody set free.
Translated, given, under the oak tree.
VII.
I had come to the edge of the water, soothed by just looking, idling over it as if it were a clear barometer or a mirror, when his reflection did not appear but I sensed a presence entering into my concentration on not being concentrated as he spoke my name. And though I was reluctant I turned to meet his face and the shock is still in me at what I saw. His brow was blown open above the eye and blood had dried on his neck and cheek. "Easy now,"
he said, "it"s only me. You"ve seen men as raw after a football match ... What time it was when I was wakened up I still don"t know but I heard this knocking, knocking, and it scared me, like the phone in the small hours, so I had the sense not to put on the light but looked out from behind the curtain.
I saw two customers on the doorstep and an old Land Rover with the doors open parked on the street, so I let the curtain drop; but they must have been waiting for it to move for they shouted to come down into the shop.
She started to cry then and roll round the bed, lamenting and lamenting to herself, not even asking who it was. "Is your head astray, or what"s come over you?" I roared, more to bring myself to my senses than out of any real anger at her for the knocking shook me, the way they kept it up, and her whingeing and half-screeching made it worse.
All the time they were shouting, "Shop!
Shop!" so I pulled on my shoes and a sportscoat and went back to the window and called out, "What do you want? Could you quieten the racket or I"ll not come down at all." "There"s a child not well.
Open up and see what you have got pills or a powder or something in a bottle,"
one of them said. He stepped back off the footpath so I could see his face in the streetlamp and when the other moved I knew them both.
But bad and all as the knocking was, the quiet hit me worse. She was quiet herself now, lying dead still, whispering to watch out.
At the bedroom door I switched on the light.
"It"s odd they didn"t look for a chemist.
Who are they anyway at this hour of the night?"
she asked me, with the eyes standing in her head.
"I know them to see," I said, but something made me reach and squeeze her hand across the bed before I went downstairs into the aisle of the shop. I stood there, going weak in the legs. I remember the stale smell of cooked meat or something coming through as I went to open up. From then on you know as much about it as I do."
"Did they say nothing?" "Nothing. What would they say?"
"Were they in uniform? Not masked in any way?"
"They were barefaced as they would be in the day, s.h.i.tes thinking they were the be-all and the end-all."
"Not that it is any consolation but they were caught," I told him, "and got jail."
Big-limbed, decent, open-faced, he stood forgetful of everything now except whatever was welling up in his spoiled head, beginning to smile. "You"ve put on a bit of weight since you did your courting in that big Austin you got the loan of on a Sunday night."
Through life and death he had hardly aged.
There always was an athlete"s cleanliness shining off him, and except for the ravaged forehead and the blood, he was still that same rangy midfielder in a blue jersey and starched pants, the one stylist on the team, the perfect, clean, unthinkable victim.
"Forgive the way I have lived indifferent forgive my timid circ.u.mspect involvement,"
I surprised myself by saying. "Forgive my eye," he said, "all that"s above my head."
And then a stun of pain seemed to go through him and he trembled like a heatwave and faded.
VIII.
Black water. White waves. Furrows snowcapped.
A magpie flew from the basilica and staggered in the granite airy s.p.a.ce 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 wood-kerne"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 pa.s.sed 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 straightaway 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 b.a.l.l.s?
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 pa.s.sed me by?"
I could not speak. I saw a h.o.a.rd of black basalt axeheads, 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 a.s.sa.s.sination.
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 gra.s.s 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 Ma.s.s 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 had watched and hid From fields that 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 s.p.a.ce: 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 bra.s.s 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 the lough water.
And so the saint praised G.o.d on the lough sh.o.r.e for that dazzle of impossibility I credited again in the sun-filled door, so absolutely light it could put out fire.