IV.
Fear of affectation made her affect Inadequacy whenever it came to p.r.o.nouncing 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.
V.
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 O Inscribed in sheets she"d sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.
VI.
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.
VII.
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 s.p.a.ce 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.
VIII.
I thought of walking round and round a s.p.a.ce 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.
The Milk Factory
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 a.s.sumed into fluorescence.
The Wishing Tree
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.
Grotus and Coventina
Far from home Grotus dedicated an altar to Coventina
Who holds in her right hand a waterweed And in her left a pitcher spilling out a river.
Anywhere Grotus looked at running water he felt at home And when he remembered the stone where he cut his name Some dried-up course beneath his breastbone started Pouring and darkening more or less the way The thought of his stunted altar works on me.
Remember when our electric pump gave out, Priming it with bucketfuls, our idiotic rage And hangdog phone-calls to the farm next door For somebody please to come and fix it?
And when it began to hammer on again, Jubilation at the tap"s full force, the sheer Given fact of water, how you felt you"d never Waste one drop but know its worth better always.
Do you think we could run through all that one more time?
I"ll be Grotus, you be Coventina.
Wolfe Tone
Light as a skiff, manoeuvrable
yet outmanoeuvred, I affected epaulettes and a c.o.c.kade, 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.
From the Canton of Expectation
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 n.o.body felt blamed. He had confirmed us.
When our rebel anthem played the meeting shut we turned for home and the usual hara.s.sment 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.
III.
What looks the strongest has outlived its term.
The future lies with what"s affirmed from under.
These things that corroborated us when we dwelt under the aegis of our stealthy patron, the guardian angel of pa.s.sivity, now sink a fang of menace in my shoulder.
I repeat the word "stricken" to myself and stand bareheaded under the banked clouds edged more and more with bra.s.sy thunderlight.
I yearn for hammerblows on clinkered planks, the uncompromised report of driven thole-pins, to know there is one among us who never swerved from all his instincts told him was right action, who stood his ground in the indicative, whose boat will lift when the cloudburst happens.
The Mud Vision
Statues with exposed hearts and barbed-wire crowns
Still stood in alcoves, hares flitted beneath The dozing bellies of jets, our menu-writers And punks with aerosol sprays held their own With the best of them. Satellite link-ups Wafted over us the blessings of popes, heliports Maintained a charmed circle for idols on tour And casualties on their stretchers. We sleepwalked The line between panic and formulae, screentested Our first native models and the last of the mummers, Watching ourselves at a distance, advantaged And airy as a man on a springboard Who keeps limbering up because the man cannot dive.
And then in the foggy midlands it appeared, Our mud vision, as if a rose window of mud Had invented itself out of the glittery damp, A gossamer wheel, concentric with its own hub Of nebulous dirt, sullied yet lucent.
We had heard of the sun standing still and the sun That changed colour, but we were vouchsafed Original clay, transfigured and spinning.
And then the sunsets ran murky, the wiper Could never entirely clean off the windscreen, Reservoirs tasted of silt, a light fuzz Accrued in the hair and the eyebrows, and some Took to wearing a smudge on their foreheads To be prepared for whatever. Vigils Began to be kept around puddled gaps, On altars bulrushes ousted the lilies And a rota of invalids came and went On beds they could lease placed in range of the shower.
A generation who had seen a sign!
Those nights when we stood in an umber dew and smelled Mould in the verbena, or woke to a light Furrow-breath on the pillow, when the talk Was all about who had seen it and our fear Was touched with a secret pride, only ourselves Could be adequate then to our lives. When the rainbow Curved flood-brown and ran like a water-rat"s back So that drivers on the hard shoulder switched off to watch, We wished it away, and yet we presumed it a test That would prove us beyond expectation.
We lived, of course, to learn the folly of that.