LANDMARKS (2015)
I The Lost Child
C'EST LA VIE
LOOM
A CHILD WHITTLED BY TIME
BARE HOUSES
DEBT
BOOM
LAWN
A BOX OF AIR
OUT OF TIME
THE SMILE AND THE TUNNEL
AND WHAT IF DEATH
THE SHORTEST DAY BUT ONE
HAY
BLOOD
SATORI
VESPERS
BONE FLUTE
CHERRIES
A MAP OF THE PARISH OF KILLANNY IN THE 17TH CENTURY
EVENING
THE LOST CHILD
II Landmarks
THE PATH
WALNUT
THE PRUDENCE OF BIRDS
ROSENGARTEN, BERN
TWANN
SOLOTHURN
THOSE FAR-OFF PEAKS
LANDMARKS
I The Lost Child
C'EST LA VIE
A walk
with a water drop
on the point of a pin.
LOOM
Like a spider shuttling
the afternoon has shifted
between major and minor,
a timid warmth,
cold kept at bay,
the friction of something frayed.
A pattern forms
on the loom of emptiness.
A CHILD WHITTLED BY TIME
You move, unmoving,
from one mystery to another
a child whittled by time
thin, straight, sharp-shouldered,
your eyes narrowed
as if they looked out on a siege.
What does the castle of your mind
tell of thirty years,
what fosterage within walls,
the passing seasons weighed in a changing sky?
How light a world
you hold in a closed hand,
a smile that is everything and nothing,
you who were once a cloth, a screen.
BARE HOUSES
My boyhood town gave me its bare houses
to dream against; their walls were screens
where played films never to be seen.
Its dry winds came from the street where Dylan
walked arm in arm with Suze Rotolo,
and when we hunched against the cold
we turned our coats like spies.
And now I think of those old women then,
their covered heads, lips moving soundlessly:
into what bright expanse were they cast
as stain-glass darkened round its leaden veins,
their black beads stirred as if by a breeze?
DEBT
(i.m. J.S.)
You left just in time – am I allowed to say that
in this age that resents the implication of will?
But you went anyhow, before summer had ended,
and your exit was suitably quiet,
just as your last years were hushed;
and the evening coloured with old stories.
I recall the grimness of their first telling,
the happening of some of them, how pain
was tempered and flashed off as wit;
and the buoyancy of those expressions,
how I later heard them in my head
as a bubble expanding, rising –
a stent for the spirit, a child’s joy
in suddenly finding himself wise.
You showed us there were different kinds
of debt, unlisted, uncontracted.
Their being discovered is their being paid off.
And whether on time or late, who knows?
Which brings us back to now, truth and sentiment.
And this: you always knew better than to call it
falling asleep. And now that you’re gone,
irrevocably, what words I have from you
are gripped in the memory: an old tree
still clutching a knuckle of leaves.
BOOM
Under a wall of trees, the far end
of the lake is gleaming. This is how
I remember it, a foil no silver
ever outshone.
But the near bank
is gouged; bitten away, that slope
to where water gently foamed,
its bob of broken reeds,
fat and brown as cigars.
Where are they now, those older boys,
those girls, the air live
with their sophisticated laughter,
their limbs red and glistening?
Vanished like the smell
of suncream, or the shiver on hearing
a song on a new transistor.
A car on the road boom booms,
faint but insistent.
LAWN
With that fear I sometimes have
on taking up a pen, I drove in search
of unmarked bridges, glints
of moving grey that might have been
a backwater; a gap still used, grass flattened,
bushes fused together in an arch.
And there were roads I couldn’t go,
tracks that opened once
into a promise of wholeness
where a sun almost set
before it was time to turn away
and into years of wandering half-sightless
while paths greened over and signposts rusted.
Tractors rolled in fields which stretched
long and bright like strips
of bandages. For the first time overwhelming,
this sense of high summer, of travelling
through your own mistake.
I kept the windows up. I didn’t stop.
I pulled in at an old hotel.
I’d never felt at home here. Now,
my coffee scalding, black, I listened
to a wedding party on the steps
and looked out at the lawn,
a lone man on a wrought-iron chair,
not quite my age, further from home,
struggling as the world he saw supplanted
the one he’d vowed to keep intact.
A BOX OF AIR
Monday, and the sound of the postman,
letterboxes clacking along the opposite row,
he working his way down, then up.
Footsteps, greetings, footsteps; a hurry
as the sky presumably grows dark.
The blinds are drawn. You wait
for the letterbox to open like that wrong
train door a man once disappeared through.
Are you still counting? It was numbers
first overwhelmed you – termites, stars, Hiroshima.
Dizzy alike under the sky at night
or pointed at a screen you took refuge
in a box of air, calmed
by the purity of blank walls,
windows breathing through a hairline crack.
And are your dreams more beautiful
for being the hive your active mind denies?
for to be sure there is a seaside path
that will never leave you, walls overhung
with flowers; you in your twenties seeing for the first time
the far end of the bay; a promise
made to yourself.
A nightly dream, one of you a ghost.
OUT OF TIME
We are nearer the end of the universe
than we are to yesterday.
Today was a day out of time
a light that should not have shone
and she, washing her hands
of her thirty-five years
looked into the sun and was not blinded.
And when she closed her eyes
she saw on her lids the universe
someone not yet born will paint.
Will she be glad to have seen
or will this image be
an apple never shaken from the tree,
shrivelled in the end to a stone?
Look. The leaves that should be dead
are reaching out, following
the sun, like a child’s eye
tracing the bright swing of a toy
and over the valley where the town should be
a mist has settled, veiling the quiet streets
and the tree on a corner where the crows alight.
The air closes round harsh words
like water round a pebble-drop.
The silence is entrancing,
and she, remembering, walks to the gate,
a step, a year, the music
of gravel under her feet
and the drip of suds from her undried hands.
THE SMILE AND THE TUNNEL
As if two wires
had suddenly touched
he is of us, of the world,
its clods and abrasions,
earthed like a small creature
half-in, half-out,
feeling the air,
finding it strange and wonderful
yet not his:
the next movement
will be a backing away
into the smile and the tunnel.
AND WHAT IF DEATH
And what if death
were a figure – any one of many
appearing in the recess of night,
whose familiar face or voice crosses
with you when you wake –
enticing you, finally, forever
into your own dream.
THE SHORTEST DAY BUT ONE
Sun blazed in the rear-view mirror
the shortest day but one
and Wicklow darkened behind me
as I returned to a sense of order,
the order of absence:
a door that only opened for funerals
finally closed,
grasses flattened, the rockery
under its mat of years.
And a hallway as Moses’ rock must have been,
emptied of water, abandoned,
a shell but not a shell.
Two days on. Noon so still
the sun seems trapped,
I turn onto the lane and dwell
on the last of my mother’s generation
adrift on a sea no one can fathom,
a presence seeing but unseen,
no more than the sum
of what she taught, the sound
of her piano in another’s house.
I cross the threshold, and in curtained
dark, something swims across
the trick of sight:
is it really me – or a scene
transplanted years later from some film,
steam on a platform, dark carriages;
I feel in my toes that cold still –
waiting for my uncle, the first
Christmas to stay in my mind,
and that song
forgotten but for its pulsing
through me then, the way it slipped
out of reach like a bird between branches,
and my first knowledge of music
as a place, beyond the next hill.
As so much now, in front, behind;
the baby grand in the parlour,
its keys like stones, wires locked
in the silence of what they once told,
holding nothing, yet waiting to unfold
all music – only to be freed!
I lift the lid and trace
like a silhouette, a scale.
Room by room I let what little
light the year admits,
narrow, cold, entire.
HAY
Unsteady, those glimpses of gold – the sun
on the glass of the great house as we move
towards it through the woods. And then
in full view, it seems a thousand molten
wires have meshed to frame the windows.
Past orchard, sheepfold and the great rolled
meadow, and beyond, the fresh certainty of hay.
But the sun has gone down on more than one
way of life, and the damp that fogs pictures
of shooting parties, will gather in a ball and crush
the promise of restoring fields to what they were.
A dream born of reading Tolstoy too late
at night and too long into life: the only
whispers in hedgerows will be of blood and money.
Our winds are no longer sweet. They carry
blight and the mocking truth that they’ve never changed;
the mind, like the body, faltering to remember a scent
apart from the fact of its once having been,
like childhood or one of those songs we can sing
more perfectly for its essence having vanished.
But you have looked over the steppes, have breathed
air that pains the throat. What was it like
to stand there, at that corner of the year
when the mind can see no green, no gold,
to hope in spite of all: to see beyond
snow’s bullets to the crisp white of a blanket,
the slow, uncertain warmth of a crowded ward,
and the spider lines of her newborn breath on glass?
BLOOD
And as we danced, all the stars fell in the sea.
– Horslips, ‘Stars’
Stars pepper the sky
making the house more isolated still,
describing year by year their endless bleak perfections,
mocking the men who gave them shape.
Diamonds on cloth, they draw darkness,
the eye can’t leave off looking,
the head reels with the infirmity
of a sudden standing up
for which the only cure is myth,
spread across millennia, like stars, like genes:
the first of us upright mimicking with their footprints
that great wheel, bending the bow of a story;
and our own child-sight,
wondering how they came to be,
walking and never losing it,
that gauze above the world’s bed.
Indifferent fire rained about Abraham,
the violence of a billion clashing stones
soft under his feet. He walked and saw
the stars as a mesh of armies,
night’s inky blood, the future:
his, out of his grasp.
No longer the gods’ children,
those never before uncovered, who leaned out
to peer at Galileo and Copernicus,
more and yet more,
endless as a mass of startled birds
then pinned, ringed, numbered.
Who believes they dance
or fall like jewels in the sea?
Some great song, like a bird, was extinguished
when ocean and sky were mapped,
stories became the act of being told,
blood no longer golden, its cells stacked like plates.
And yet we dance, hunger for untruth,
and nightly are amazed
a man has so much blood in him.
SATORI
(i.m. John Tackney)
And what remains
after the light is gone?
- the light it leaves behind
and at the last
a wise head, a whitewashed wall.
VESPERS
“When the light began to turn green
I knew that night was coming.” - Camus, L’Etranger
The room gives, as they say,
onto a square of sky. And in such stillness
as is needed to entice
a bird into the hand,
the edge of that unmoving blue
gives onto all movement,
the vastness of what is never caught,
the painting that exists beyond the frame.
Noises are gone now. Whatever life
the street had, is dispersed, taken indoors
and is suddenly felt more keenly
here where everything is seeping
in and out of walls
like food or tiredness ghosting
through muscle and brain, or colours
washing through the fading mind.
The green of evening is the eye tricking
into truth; dizzy from too long looking
at a fixed point, it cleanses the twilight
of its beauty and thousand tales
and the night is merely itself,
like the tides, nothing more than a motion,
a tiny stirring in the universe
as a bee shakes before settling to sleep.
Each sound has a purity,
muffled, unattached. That dog in the distance
is whole as the stars once were
under which he barks; the sea
underpinning. Room and sky
are one finally, the hour turning
with the unseen certain motion
of a drifting boat.
BONE FLUTE
The door opens like a confessional,
the light is that
of a London Irish pub
when the name on the glass warms briefly;
here the floors, stripped back
to wood, give each step
its due measure of sound.
The blinds are shut, each case
spotlit discreetly. And here again
the bone flute, perfect, in place.
How white and frail, like a flake.
Once I tried to hear its song,
then to picture it animate, complete,
now I know it longing
for its brother bones
for the kiss of clay or teeth
or pining for its spirit scattered
on the lost wind of a sacred rite;
a fair day; that first hush
when glasses are set down.
CHERRIES
The air has the smell of mountain rain
it tells of creatures stirring in the undergrowth
and for the first time this year it’s mild enough
to leave the doors ajar and walk unhindered
through the house. If only thought
would give access as freely; room after room
opens onto the shell of itself, its cold
moving past as if shaken by an animal
as it stretches in the light.
Still a long time until the sun stretches round
to redden that odd painting of Venice,
its walls already pink and orange,
their hanging flowers like medals for withstanding winter.
A touch of spring and everything quickens
- too quick – potted clay still tight,
its seal turning over days to crumb.
But nothing starts, no tip emerges; all stubborn
to their time, as if a knot refused to bud.
We wait still, always; for the moment
or the moment to pass, for memory
to be dragged back from extinction, or burst
out of nothing like a blossom
or blood in water. How long
until we can rejoice again
in the unexpected – like that sudden surge
of water that shocked and delighted me
that very first days at the rocks,
my thin legs almost buckling
under the urge to run, the rest of me
held fast, mesmerised, aware only of wet stone.
And afterwards, how many times I dreamed
I saw the undertow as a dark sleek animal,
frightening but turning away at the last moment,
alarmed in turn by the world
into which I woke, startled
every time by the ceiling’s sheer white.
Is it that memory glows more brightly
the further it has to travel, like a star,
or that colour deadens now, the eye
and what it feeds grown tired
from a lifetime of reacting? Too many books,
perhaps, too little wind. I think of that wiry man
I saw once cutting cherries from a height,
in his eighties then, mind like a thin tree,
heart-tight, layered, moving ever outwards.
A MAP OF THE PARISH OF KILLANNY
IN THE 17TH CENTURY
I
Consider the light we’ve lost
in an age of bulbs;
windows ceiling-high, giving
onto long tables, inks and dyes
running in thick glasses,
and the meticulous hand, the avid eye.
II
We come into our own
and as soon leave it.
Consider too, those trees, how
the paper took to colour,
becoming what it held,
brown and green,
the page that was tree once,
its sap that was rain and earth
parched and brittle now,
an opaque mirror. History.
The living reading the dead.
And carrying on a ritual
enacted before birth. For what are we
without this consciousness
of our not existing: as this paper
is a present dead three hundred years;
as we impose order on a life -
or part thereof – no longer there:
an animal turning three times
round last night’s bedding;
or rubbing an old wound
to assure its having healed.
III
On quiet days the map
as I remember it is a conceit.
Nothing drawn is ever true, paper admits
brush-tip or nib as clay the zig-zag
of running rain. And so the fluidity
of ideas ploughs a path and sticks
to it. That house, strong-walled,
floating in a corner, has no peculiarity,
it rises like a drawing in a child’s book
from a vast imagined grassland.
An age passes with every re-drafting
Recollections become languages,
inimical, taking chunks from each other
or at their purest, passing through,
colliding and splitting off,
altered, true to themselves
like the birth of planets.
This picturing – a vivid flash –
of children in a roll call:
is it the illumination before a long lapse
or the last white heat of a filament burning out?
It may be time to look in boxes under boxes,
to kneel and search until the lower limbs
are dizzy with pins and needles.
EVENING
A restless sky, a hurrying on the pier
before the squall. Sundays to come take shape:
a grey that drops like mercury, and then
the niggling hope that dawn might make a difference.
Evening and its clear sky brings a sense
of being between two endings, and the fear
of going from I to we and back again.
THE LOST CHILD
And after thirty-seven years, I pause
on this first work-free morning
and remember those
who have gone too soon; by their own hand
or driven down in a locking of wheels
and the dull smack of earth on steel;
for whom the present is a mask
fashioned by those they left,
a favourite song become a bitter thing;
who grow old in the children
they never had, in the fading
of those who remain. Yet
for me, in the end
they are forever at a desk,
their faces childlike, questioning.
II Landmarks
THE PATH
Where does it begin, this threading
into a place of strangers,
a wood about to close?
Dark hours in a cell of little learning,
crows on the wind scattering like leaves
as they did twenty years ago:
their sameness, their unrelenting drudgery,
makes them eternal,
like grey clouds, like snow.
Days in the sun are lost,
unique as loved ones
or those few dreams that persist.
No path is marked
by map-makers’ footprints. Only fiction –
line, colour, symbol – endure,
and memories of places
seen once, twice, or not at all.
Viaticum, journey-food.
So too, this peculiar, sudden haunting.
WALNUT
Walking a dirt path, dry and rollered –
even the countryside was level, streams
a grid of tributaries – we came across
a walnut tree. I think back
to its spread, its shade, and how
two thousand years before, an army
of trees swept down from the Juras,
their tops, plumes in a wind
but all I truly remember
is a green shell, soft as a fontanelle,
its undulations like a brain
under my wondering finger.
THE PRUDENCE OF BIRDS
See from a safe distance meltwater
churning grey, chilling summer air,
hear the sudden dearth of birdsong.
Call it, as you would, the neutral simplicity
of ice, heat, bitten earth, acting on each other.
Our truths are grit
swept in a great turbulence,
light and shade, beautiful, brief;
and I incline to the old belief
in the prudence of birds, their patience outlasting
the giant’s cold breath, his angry silver.
The glacier bleeds, settles; then comes
song, timid at first, late-leafing trees
overhanging like horses’ heads.
In all my dreams I never
fell here, where most of all I should,
have woken instead with a sense of cleanness
and having seen the birthplace of the psyche,
the war between movement and stillness.
ROSENGARTEN, BERN
Roses, bones. And below,
the old city glistening
like paint on a mummified finger.
And the bears becoming drab
as the earth they pad
and the sum of their days.
Time on this height
slows to the rhythm
of soil, parting, closing;
the married couple posing
with their backs to the middle ages
will become in time
their own story. Or stories.
The dead, if we think of them,
must be content that the living
have this view at their expense
since beauty, peace
can only be maintained
by a constant hollowing out.
TWANN
The sun will be coming up now on the rows of vines
and later cars will roll up and the immemorial custom
of the lake will be re-enacted. How long
since the first sacrifice, the boat breaking the water’s calm,
the creaking of its oars the only sound?
No silence on the shore now. The only troubles are private,
put aside; children, sandaled even in October, play
a careful distance from spread cloths and charcoal.
But the warmth is making ready to leave, as the swallows
have lately done; if a window catches gold
it will be for the shortest time. Yet Twann stands pure
in a memory of twenty years or more,
held in some dim recess: now for an hour
it gleams like a cross in a procession.
SOLOTHURN
The bells from the Cathedral
travel on a clear day
as far as the Biel Gate
which opens onto houses
that could have come from Dillon Street.
The old city curls
round itself like a nest,
round the number eleven.
The green clock shows no twelve.
And the walls of the Jesuitenkirche
like icing – that first cake,
its ribbon a red sash.
Outside the sun dazzles,
the Aare rubs old against new;
bridges, too many crossings,
a restlessness no history calms,
nor beauty, solid yet
not belonging, like eleven.
THOSE FAR-OFF PEAKS
Like the unattainable white of clouds,
those far-off peaks
Jungfrau, Eiger, Monch,
a purity only distance can confer,
a newly-baptised soul, or music
flawless on first hearing.
No melt-water disgorges its grit
the way time vomits its truth;
snow, sun and sky in the fleeting
balance of a child’s first step.
And as the blood runs ever, infinitesimally,
colder; as the eye withdraws from light
like the erosion of a hill,
there is still the sudden surprise of harmony
and one more time, the mirage of perfection.
LANDMARKS
I
There is first a calm, yet a sense too
of the glacier only lately having moved,
of being somehow at lake’s edge
instead of the edge of wood and mountain.
Lovely, yes; green, pastoral, the very frailty
of wooden churches stronger
than an act of faith. A calm of having
stepped forever out of the primeval,
looking across and down
into the richness of tilth and history.
How this land yields up its stories!
One by one, like the dreams of a child
leaving him until there remains
no more than a handful, worn, distorted,
one grown like the fact of a shadow –
a two-roomed school, grim as the wire
that sets it apart; it admits no light,
neither through glass nor in the mind
of one who would lead, ambition
shrivelled to a paper grid –
words, more words! A figure sick,
frightened, calling for a taper, believing only
in her image on a wall,
grasping the substance of delusion,
young minds scattering like mice
from corner to corner of a box
And the church it faces: barn-shaped,
it gathers in what little harvest
encroaching age provides.
Nowhere here is far from Jung’s country
and the breadth of green is the measure
of snow-skies past and to come.
II
Skirting the woods, the paths move in and out of shadow
and no view is true to memory,
even the signposts are a suggestion – something
may have happened here, an intake of breath,
a line of pollen along the body
and a longing then – for, sure, now –
for the unconsciousness of trees, stock-still,
their leaf and spread outliving names,
the change of language swirling about them like the wind
or the noise of far-off battle:
to be a cell in that great animal, the forest,
and not an ant crawling through the maze of our absences.
An hour’s trek to a well that isn’t here,
on no map now. You feel again
under your outstretched hand, cool air
rising from its depths – but where?
and you fight with the certainty that it wasn’t
a dream last time, and envy the wide-winged bird
circling its distant field. The Roman Well:
always some word will trigger a search,
pick at a scab of loss deep in the psyche
where no art can truly heal; years alone
may soothe it to a pilgrim’s itch, storied, timeless,
and never wholly futile.
The rows of corn, so improbably green
in the baked clay, seem to converge on a point
hidden in a dip. What chance has the mind,
torn between wilderness and order –
and the sky’s relentless, level blue?
III
The air is full of its own strangeness, loaded
with the power to startle – like that ringing
of a bell across a meadow where there is no bell,
where the small yellow flowers have no secret
stretching as they do as far as the neatness of a long road.
Midday, so bright the eyelids fill with a red-gold darkness
and it seems that this breadth, green, yellow, blue, is its own closed room,
and that sound in the air is a knocking on the wall
to be let in or out: or a summoning,
for the snake to slough back into its cast-off skin
and trees to spear their way through the miles of fields
like soldiers, like fathers. Three thousand years
of clearances are a holding at bay; those scattered
houses are small boats ready at any moment to sink.
The grasses, fattened on water, rustle nonetheless
like paper. The sun passing from shadow to shadow
is taking all to itself. Only the forest is spared,
deep-rooted, grown beyond the gift of light.
IV
The stream is a trickle in summer,
last year’s flotsam beginning to bleach,
branches becoming bones.
Flowers like pale blue stars
are forming among the shingle
and a lizard warms its belly on another stone.
A step across and into the flat hectares
where drainage keeps the ground
as it should be, and cars, hidden,
are a steady hum.
Over the meadow missionaries rest.
What would they make of this
enormous neatness: no bears, no wolves,
an element of held breath in our coming and going?
Dizzy on stomach-churning waters,
navigating by breaks in the cloud
and then by mosses and the call of birds
their clearances were an act of acceptance,
that they worked, ate and healed
at the sufferance of the wilderness:
that there was no holding together,
only a holding back, a planting
between one harvest and another,
a prayer between peace and tumult.
Against great pagan fires they pitted their damp bones,
against dawn they tested the entranced mind,
the body in the cell of its own cold.
Some slept in stone; others the bears had
or roots claimed, their tendrils like a child’s fingers
and round their traces boxes grew,
walls, fences, advance and retreat.
But how triangulate the mind?
Only in the clearing haze of chaos
when truth settles like a chill, and fields
yield sustenance and unexpected bones.
V
Bones in the dry bed of dreams,
pinned to a page, sucked dry of life
as air sucks the curve of ink
and no letter illuminated, the room
silent but for the clock chanting
the running down of its own wheels
And the pennants outside, still, breathless,
the train a gliding, yellow dot, Its carriages
a pencil-line drawn along foothills.
White is the only colour; the knight,
the scholar, fade into it as memory
bleeds into the necessities of day.
Down the corridor, mobile phones
are held like scapulars before an altar,
they range along windows like birds
greedy for flies; the snapped to be buried
in piles, world wide: rubble without matter,
the triumph of the immaterial world.
But is it any different from the firing
of a monk’s imagination, his desire
for an unearthly city on a hill?
VI
Evening and an empty platform. The sun
is a haze on the tips of the hills,
the hills themselves like a blanket
ready to be unrolled. And distant, a lake, bottlenecked,
feeding a river, funnelling last winter’s snow
toward the ocean. The last pleasure-steamer
has put in, and that urban sound, quieter than silence,
a settling, a hundred thousand sighs,
falls like a landing of dust.
And more than silence, the emptiness
of waiting for a train, the knowledge of being a dot
on that unending rectangle, the railway cutting,
that time itself is invalid, will only resume
with the first sound, faint, almost beyond hearing,
of an approaching engine. Others come out,
shrouded now; their speech, low, unintelligible,
is all of the setting off, a hope that nothing
has been left undone. One pair of soft hands flutter
too soon, too soon! Too late, and like a bird,
they settle. Then the light, always stronger than daylight,
that is power an inevitability, glides
over the heat of the tracks. The engine
comes into shape behind it. When the doors
slide open, all this will be over; again
no more than names. But since the names
themselves – stations, churches, wells – were given
in turn to a story, when did it al start, this dash
along a strip of light between two shades?
And yet not done; moving backwards, across
a cleft in the hills, the sun’s rim
a mere gold wire now, picks like a lighthouse beam
an abandoned shepherd’s hut, squalid, ramshackle,
suspended in a clearing. Its fall will be gentle,
its stones will tell no hurt.
LANDMARKS (2015)
I The Lost Child
C'EST LA VIE
LOOM
A CHILD WHITTLED BY TIME
BARE HOUSES
DEBT
BOOM
LAWN
A BOX OF AIR
OUT OF TIME
THE SMILE AND THE TUNNEL
AND WHAT IF DEATH
THE SHORTEST DAY BUT ONE
HAY
BLOOD
SATORI
VESPERS
BONE FLUTE
CHERRIES
A MAP OF THE PARISH OF KILLANNY IN THE 17TH CENTURY
EVENING
THE LOST CHILD
II Landmarks
THE PATH
WALNUT
THE PRUDENCE OF BIRDS
ROSENGARTEN, BERN
TWANN
SOLOTHURN
THOSE FAR-OFF PEAKS
LANDMARKS
I The Lost Child
C'EST LA VIE
A walk
with a water drop
on the point of a pin.
LOOM
Like a spider shuttling
the afternoon has shifted
between major and minor,
a timid warmth,
cold kept at bay,
the friction of something frayed.
A pattern forms
on the loom of emptiness.
A CHILD WHITTLED BY TIME
You move, unmoving,
from one mystery to another
a child whittled by time
thin, straight, sharp-shouldered,
your eyes narrowed
as if they looked out on a siege.
What does the castle of your mind
tell of thirty years,
what fosterage within walls,
the passing seasons weighed in a changing sky?
How light a world
you hold in a closed hand,
a smile that is everything and nothing,
you who were once a cloth, a screen.
BARE HOUSES
My boyhood town gave me its bare houses
to dream against; their walls were screens
where played films never to be seen.
Its dry winds came from the street where Dylan
walked arm in arm with Suze Rotolo,
and when we hunched against the cold
we turned our coats like spies.
And now I think of those old women then,
their covered heads, lips moving soundlessly:
into what bright expanse were they cast
as stain-glass darkened round its leaden veins,
their black beads stirred as if by a breeze?
DEBT
(i.m. J.S.)
You left just in time – am I allowed to say that
in this age that resents the implication of will?
But you went anyhow, before summer had ended,
and your exit was suitably quiet,
just as your last years were hushed;
and the evening coloured with old stories.
I recall the grimness of their first telling,
the happening of some of them, how pain
was tempered and flashed off as wit;
and the buoyancy of those expressions,
how I later heard them in my head
as a bubble expanding, rising –
a stent for the spirit, a child’s joy
in suddenly finding himself wise.
You showed us there were different kinds
of debt, unlisted, uncontracted.
Their being discovered is their being paid off.
And whether on time or late, who knows?
Which brings us back to now, truth and sentiment.
And this: you always knew better than to call it
falling asleep. And now that you’re gone,
irrevocably, what words I have from you
are gripped in the memory: an old tree
still clutching a knuckle of leaves.
BOOM
Under a wall of trees, the far end
of the lake is gleaming. This is how
I remember it, a foil no silver
ever outshone.
But the near bank
is gouged; bitten away, that slope
to where water gently foamed,
its bob of broken reeds,
fat and brown as cigars.
Where are they now, those older boys,
those girls, the air live
with their sophisticated laughter,
their limbs red and glistening?
Vanished like the smell
of suncream, or the shiver on hearing
a song on a new transistor.
A car on the road boom booms,
faint but insistent.
LAWN
With that fear I sometimes have
on taking up a pen, I drove in search
of unmarked bridges, glints
of moving grey that might have been
a backwater; a gap still used, grass flattened,
bushes fused together in an arch.
And there were roads I couldn’t go,
tracks that opened once
into a promise of wholeness
where a sun almost set
before it was time to turn away
and into years of wandering half-sightless
while paths greened over and signposts rusted.
Tractors rolled in fields which stretched
long and bright like strips
of bandages. For the first time overwhelming,
this sense of high summer, of travelling
through your own mistake.
I kept the windows up. I didn’t stop.
I pulled in at an old hotel.
I’d never felt at home here. Now,
my coffee scalding, black, I listened
to a wedding party on the steps
and looked out at the lawn,
a lone man on a wrought-iron chair,
not quite my age, further from home,
struggling as the world he saw supplanted
the one he’d vowed to keep intact.
A BOX OF AIR
Monday, and the sound of the postman,
letterboxes clacking along the opposite row,
he working his way down, then up.
Footsteps, greetings, footsteps; a hurry
as the sky presumably grows dark.
The blinds are drawn. You wait
for the letterbox to open like that wrong
train door a man once disappeared through.
Are you still counting? It was numbers
first overwhelmed you – termites, stars, Hiroshima.
Dizzy alike under the sky at night
or pointed at a screen you took refuge
in a box of air, calmed
by the purity of blank walls,
windows breathing through a hairline crack.
And are your dreams more beautiful
for being the hive your active mind denies?
for to be sure there is a seaside path
that will never leave you, walls overhung
with flowers; you in your twenties seeing for the first time
the far end of the bay; a promise
made to yourself.
A nightly dream, one of you a ghost.
OUT OF TIME
We are nearer the end of the universe
than we are to yesterday.
Today was a day out of time
a light that should not have shone
and she, washing her hands
of her thirty-five years
looked into the sun and was not blinded.
And when she closed her eyes
she saw on her lids the universe
someone not yet born will paint.
Will she be glad to have seen
or will this image be
an apple never shaken from the tree,
shrivelled in the end to a stone?
Look. The leaves that should be dead
are reaching out, following
the sun, like a child’s eye
tracing the bright swing of a toy
and over the valley where the town should be
a mist has settled, veiling the quiet streets
and the tree on a corner where the crows alight.
The air closes round harsh words
like water round a pebble-drop.
The silence is entrancing,
and she, remembering, walks to the gate,
a step, a year, the music
of gravel under her feet
and the drip of suds from her undried hands.
THE SMILE AND THE TUNNEL
As if two wires
had suddenly touched
he is of us, of the world,
its clods and abrasions,
earthed like a small creature
half-in, half-out,
feeling the air,
finding it strange and wonderful
yet not his:
the next movement
will be a backing away
into the smile and the tunnel.
AND WHAT IF DEATH
And what if death
were a figure – any one of many
appearing in the recess of night,
whose familiar face or voice crosses
with you when you wake –
enticing you, finally, forever
into your own dream.
THE SHORTEST DAY BUT ONE
Sun blazed in the rear-view mirror
the shortest day but one
and Wicklow darkened behind me
as I returned to a sense of order,
the order of absence:
a door that only opened for funerals
finally closed,
grasses flattened, the rockery
under its mat of years.
And a hallway as Moses’ rock must have been,
emptied of water, abandoned,
a shell but not a shell.
Two days on. Noon so still
the sun seems trapped,
I turn onto the lane and dwell
on the last of my mother’s generation
adrift on a sea no one can fathom,
a presence seeing but unseen,
no more than the sum
of what she taught, the sound
of her piano in another’s house.
I cross the threshold, and in curtained
dark, something swims across
the trick of sight:
is it really me – or a scene
transplanted years later from some film,
steam on a platform, dark carriages;
I feel in my toes that cold still –
waiting for my uncle, the first
Christmas to stay in my mind,
and that song
forgotten but for its pulsing
through me then, the way it slipped
out of reach like a bird between branches,
and my first knowledge of music
as a place, beyond the next hill.
As so much now, in front, behind;
the baby grand in the parlour,
its keys like stones, wires locked
in the silence of what they once told,
holding nothing, yet waiting to unfold
all music – only to be freed!
I lift the lid and trace
like a silhouette, a scale.
Room by room I let what little
light the year admits,
narrow, cold, entire.
HAY
Unsteady, those glimpses of gold – the sun
on the glass of the great house as we move
towards it through the woods. And then
in full view, it seems a thousand molten
wires have meshed to frame the windows.
Past orchard, sheepfold and the great rolled
meadow, and beyond, the fresh certainty of hay.
But the sun has gone down on more than one
way of life, and the damp that fogs pictures
of shooting parties, will gather in a ball and crush
the promise of restoring fields to what they were.
A dream born of reading Tolstoy too late
at night and too long into life: the only
whispers in hedgerows will be of blood and money.
Our winds are no longer sweet. They carry
blight and the mocking truth that they’ve never changed;
the mind, like the body, faltering to remember a scent
apart from the fact of its once having been,
like childhood or one of those songs we can sing
more perfectly for its essence having vanished.
But you have looked over the steppes, have breathed
air that pains the throat. What was it like
to stand there, at that corner of the year
when the mind can see no green, no gold,
to hope in spite of all: to see beyond
snow’s bullets to the crisp white of a blanket,
the slow, uncertain warmth of a crowded ward,
and the spider lines of her newborn breath on glass?
BLOOD
And as we danced, all the stars fell in the sea.
– Horslips, ‘Stars’
Stars pepper the sky
making the house more isolated still,
describing year by year their endless bleak perfections,
mocking the men who gave them shape.
Diamonds on cloth, they draw darkness,
the eye can’t leave off looking,
the head reels with the infirmity
of a sudden standing up
for which the only cure is myth,
spread across millennia, like stars, like genes:
the first of us upright mimicking with their footprints
that great wheel, bending the bow of a story;
and our own child-sight,
wondering how they came to be,
walking and never losing it,
that gauze above the world’s bed.
Indifferent fire rained about Abraham,
the violence of a billion clashing stones
soft under his feet. He walked and saw
the stars as a mesh of armies,
night’s inky blood, the future:
his, out of his grasp.
No longer the gods’ children,
those never before uncovered, who leaned out
to peer at Galileo and Copernicus,
more and yet more,
endless as a mass of startled birds
then pinned, ringed, numbered.
Who believes they dance
or fall like jewels in the sea?
Some great song, like a bird, was extinguished
when ocean and sky were mapped,
stories became the act of being told,
blood no longer golden, its cells stacked like plates.
And yet we dance, hunger for untruth,
and nightly are amazed
a man has so much blood in him.
SATORI
(i.m. John Tackney)
And what remains
after the light is gone?
- the light it leaves behind
and at the last
a wise head, a whitewashed wall.
VESPERS
“When the light began to turn green
I knew that night was coming.” - Camus, L’Etranger
The room gives, as they say,
onto a square of sky. And in such stillness
as is needed to entice
a bird into the hand,
the edge of that unmoving blue
gives onto all movement,
the vastness of what is never caught,
the painting that exists beyond the frame.
Noises are gone now. Whatever life
the street had, is dispersed, taken indoors
and is suddenly felt more keenly
here where everything is seeping
in and out of walls
like food or tiredness ghosting
through muscle and brain, or colours
washing through the fading mind.
The green of evening is the eye tricking
into truth; dizzy from too long looking
at a fixed point, it cleanses the twilight
of its beauty and thousand tales
and the night is merely itself,
like the tides, nothing more than a motion,
a tiny stirring in the universe
as a bee shakes before settling to sleep.
Each sound has a purity,
muffled, unattached. That dog in the distance
is whole as the stars once were
under which he barks; the sea
underpinning. Room and sky
are one finally, the hour turning
with the unseen certain motion
of a drifting boat.
BONE FLUTE
The door opens like a confessional,
the light is that
of a London Irish pub
when the name on the glass warms briefly;
here the floors, stripped back
to wood, give each step
its due measure of sound.
The blinds are shut, each case
spotlit discreetly. And here again
the bone flute, perfect, in place.
How white and frail, like a flake.
Once I tried to hear its song,
then to picture it animate, complete,
now I know it longing
for its brother bones
for the kiss of clay or teeth
or pining for its spirit scattered
on the lost wind of a sacred rite;
a fair day; that first hush
when glasses are set down.
CHERRIES
The air has the smell of mountain rain
it tells of creatures stirring in the undergrowth
and for the first time this year it’s mild enough
to leave the doors ajar and walk unhindered
through the house. If only thought
would give access as freely; room after room
opens onto the shell of itself, its cold
moving past as if shaken by an animal
as it stretches in the light.
Still a long time until the sun stretches round
to redden that odd painting of Venice,
its walls already pink and orange,
their hanging flowers like medals for withstanding winter.
A touch of spring and everything quickens
- too quick – potted clay still tight,
its seal turning over days to crumb.
But nothing starts, no tip emerges; all stubborn
to their time, as if a knot refused to bud.
We wait still, always; for the moment
or the moment to pass, for memory
to be dragged back from extinction, or burst
out of nothing like a blossom
or blood in water. How long
until we can rejoice again
in the unexpected – like that sudden surge
of water that shocked and delighted me
that very first days at the rocks,
my thin legs almost buckling
under the urge to run, the rest of me
held fast, mesmerised, aware only of wet stone.
And afterwards, how many times I dreamed
I saw the undertow as a dark sleek animal,
frightening but turning away at the last moment,
alarmed in turn by the world
into which I woke, startled
every time by the ceiling’s sheer white.
Is it that memory glows more brightly
the further it has to travel, like a star,
or that colour deadens now, the eye
and what it feeds grown tired
from a lifetime of reacting? Too many books,
perhaps, too little wind. I think of that wiry man
I saw once cutting cherries from a height,
in his eighties then, mind like a thin tree,
heart-tight, layered, moving ever outwards.
A MAP OF THE PARISH OF KILLANNY
IN THE 17TH CENTURY
I
Consider the light we’ve lost
in an age of bulbs;
windows ceiling-high, giving
onto long tables, inks and dyes
running in thick glasses,
and the meticulous hand, the avid eye.
II
We come into our own
and as soon leave it.
Consider too, those trees, how
the paper took to colour,
becoming what it held,
brown and green,
the page that was tree once,
its sap that was rain and earth
parched and brittle now,
an opaque mirror. History.
The living reading the dead.
And carrying on a ritual
enacted before birth. For what are we
without this consciousness
of our not existing: as this paper
is a present dead three hundred years;
as we impose order on a life -
or part thereof – no longer there:
an animal turning three times
round last night’s bedding;
or rubbing an old wound
to assure its having healed.
III
On quiet days the map
as I remember it is a conceit.
Nothing drawn is ever true, paper admits
brush-tip or nib as clay the zig-zag
of running rain. And so the fluidity
of ideas ploughs a path and sticks
to it. That house, strong-walled,
floating in a corner, has no peculiarity,
it rises like a drawing in a child’s book
from a vast imagined grassland.
An age passes with every re-drafting
Recollections become languages,
inimical, taking chunks from each other
or at their purest, passing through,
colliding and splitting off,
altered, true to themselves
like the birth of planets.
This picturing – a vivid flash –
of children in a roll call:
is it the illumination before a long lapse
or the last white heat of a filament burning out?
It may be time to look in boxes under boxes,
to kneel and search until the lower limbs
are dizzy with pins and needles.
EVENING
A restless sky, a hurrying on the pier
before the squall. Sundays to come take shape:
a grey that drops like mercury, and then
the niggling hope that dawn might make a difference.
Evening and its clear sky brings a sense
of being between two endings, and the fear
of going from I to we and back again.
THE LOST CHILD
And after thirty-seven years, I pause
on this first work-free morning
and remember those
who have gone too soon; by their own hand
or driven down in a locking of wheels
and the dull smack of earth on steel;
for whom the present is a mask
fashioned by those they left,
a favourite song become a bitter thing;
who grow old in the children
they never had, in the fading
of those who remain. Yet
for me, in the end
they are forever at a desk,
their faces childlike, questioning.
II Landmarks
THE PATH
Where does it begin, this threading
into a place of strangers,
a wood about to close?
Dark hours in a cell of little learning,
crows on the wind scattering like leaves
as they did twenty years ago:
their sameness, their unrelenting drudgery,
makes them eternal,
like grey clouds, like snow.
Days in the sun are lost,
unique as loved ones
or those few dreams that persist.
No path is marked
by map-makers’ footprints. Only fiction –
line, colour, symbol – endure,
and memories of places
seen once, twice, or not at all.
Viaticum, journey-food.
So too, this peculiar, sudden haunting.
WALNUT
Walking a dirt path, dry and rollered –
even the countryside was level, streams
a grid of tributaries – we came across
a walnut tree. I think back
to its spread, its shade, and how
two thousand years before, an army
of trees swept down from the Juras,
their tops, plumes in a wind
but all I truly remember
is a green shell, soft as a fontanelle,
its undulations like a brain
under my wondering finger.
THE PRUDENCE OF BIRDS
See from a safe distance meltwater
churning grey, chilling summer air,
hear the sudden dearth of birdsong.
Call it, as you would, the neutral simplicity
of ice, heat, bitten earth, acting on each other.
Our truths are grit
swept in a great turbulence,
light and shade, beautiful, brief;
and I incline to the old belief
in the prudence of birds, their patience outlasting
the giant’s cold breath, his angry silver.
The glacier bleeds, settles; then comes
song, timid at first, late-leafing trees
overhanging like horses’ heads.
In all my dreams I never
fell here, where most of all I should,
have woken instead with a sense of cleanness
and having seen the birthplace of the psyche,
the war between movement and stillness.
ROSENGARTEN, BERN
Roses, bones. And below,
the old city glistening
like paint on a mummified finger.
And the bears becoming drab
as the earth they pad
and the sum of their days.
Time on this height
slows to the rhythm
of soil, parting, closing;
the married couple posing
with their backs to the middle ages
will become in time
their own story. Or stories.
The dead, if we think of them,
must be content that the living
have this view at their expense
since beauty, peace
can only be maintained
by a constant hollowing out.
TWANN
The sun will be coming up now on the rows of vines
and later cars will roll up and the immemorial custom
of the lake will be re-enacted. How long
since the first sacrifice, the boat breaking the water’s calm,
the creaking of its oars the only sound?
No silence on the shore now. The only troubles are private,
put aside; children, sandaled even in October, play
a careful distance from spread cloths and charcoal.
But the warmth is making ready to leave, as the swallows
have lately done; if a window catches gold
it will be for the shortest time. Yet Twann stands pure
in a memory of twenty years or more,
held in some dim recess: now for an hour
it gleams like a cross in a procession.
SOLOTHURN
The bells from the Cathedral
travel on a clear day
as far as the Biel Gate
which opens onto houses
that could have come from Dillon Street.
The old city curls
round itself like a nest,
round the number eleven.
The green clock shows no twelve.
And the walls of the Jesuitenkirche
like icing – that first cake,
its ribbon a red sash.
Outside the sun dazzles,
the Aare rubs old against new;
bridges, too many crossings,
a restlessness no history calms,
nor beauty, solid yet
not belonging, like eleven.
THOSE FAR-OFF PEAKS
Like the unattainable white of clouds,
those far-off peaks
Jungfrau, Eiger, Monch,
a purity only distance can confer,
a newly-baptised soul, or music
flawless on first hearing.
No melt-water disgorges its grit
the way time vomits its truth;
snow, sun and sky in the fleeting
balance of a child’s first step.
And as the blood runs ever, infinitesimally,
colder; as the eye withdraws from light
like the erosion of a hill,
there is still the sudden surprise of harmony
and one more time, the mirage of perfection.
LANDMARKS
I
There is first a calm, yet a sense too
of the glacier only lately having moved,
of being somehow at lake’s edge
instead of the edge of wood and mountain.
Lovely, yes; green, pastoral, the very frailty
of wooden churches stronger
than an act of faith. A calm of having
stepped forever out of the primeval,
looking across and down
into the richness of tilth and history.
How this land yields up its stories!
One by one, like the dreams of a child
leaving him until there remains
no more than a handful, worn, distorted,
one grown like the fact of a shadow –
a two-roomed school, grim as the wire
that sets it apart; it admits no light,
neither through glass nor in the mind
of one who would lead, ambition
shrivelled to a paper grid –
words, more words! A figure sick,
frightened, calling for a taper, believing only
in her image on a wall,
grasping the substance of delusion,
young minds scattering like mice
from corner to corner of a box
And the church it faces: barn-shaped,
it gathers in what little harvest
encroaching age provides.
Nowhere here is far from Jung’s country
and the breadth of green is the measure
of snow-skies past and to come.
II
Skirting the woods, the paths move in and out of shadow
and no view is true to memory,
even the signposts are a suggestion – something
may have happened here, an intake of breath,
a line of pollen along the body
and a longing then – for, sure, now –
for the unconsciousness of trees, stock-still,
their leaf and spread outliving names,
the change of language swirling about them like the wind
or the noise of far-off battle:
to be a cell in that great animal, the forest,
and not an ant crawling through the maze of our absences.
An hour’s trek to a well that isn’t here,
on no map now. You feel again
under your outstretched hand, cool air
rising from its depths – but where?
and you fight with the certainty that it wasn’t
a dream last time, and envy the wide-winged bird
circling its distant field. The Roman Well:
always some word will trigger a search,
pick at a scab of loss deep in the psyche
where no art can truly heal; years alone
may soothe it to a pilgrim’s itch, storied, timeless,
and never wholly futile.
The rows of corn, so improbably green
in the baked clay, seem to converge on a point
hidden in a dip. What chance has the mind,
torn between wilderness and order –
and the sky’s relentless, level blue?
III
The air is full of its own strangeness, loaded
with the power to startle – like that ringing
of a bell across a meadow where there is no bell,
where the small yellow flowers have no secret
stretching as they do as far as the neatness of a long road.
Midday, so bright the eyelids fill with a red-gold darkness
and it seems that this breadth, green, yellow, blue, is its own closed room,
and that sound in the air is a knocking on the wall
to be let in or out: or a summoning,
for the snake to slough back into its cast-off skin
and trees to spear their way through the miles of fields
like soldiers, like fathers. Three thousand years
of clearances are a holding at bay; those scattered
houses are small boats ready at any moment to sink.
The grasses, fattened on water, rustle nonetheless
like paper. The sun passing from shadow to shadow
is taking all to itself. Only the forest is spared,
deep-rooted, grown beyond the gift of light.
IV
The stream is a trickle in summer,
last year’s flotsam beginning to bleach,
branches becoming bones.
Flowers like pale blue stars
are forming among the shingle
and a lizard warms its belly on another stone.
A step across and into the flat hectares
where drainage keeps the ground
as it should be, and cars, hidden,
are a steady hum.
Over the meadow missionaries rest.
What would they make of this
enormous neatness: no bears, no wolves,
an element of held breath in our coming and going?
Dizzy on stomach-churning waters,
navigating by breaks in the cloud
and then by mosses and the call of birds
their clearances were an act of acceptance,
that they worked, ate and healed
at the sufferance of the wilderness:
that there was no holding together,
only a holding back, a planting
between one harvest and another,
a prayer between peace and tumult.
Against great pagan fires they pitted their damp bones,
against dawn they tested the entranced mind,
the body in the cell of its own cold.
Some slept in stone; others the bears had
or roots claimed, their tendrils like a child’s fingers
and round their traces boxes grew,
walls, fences, advance and retreat.
But how triangulate the mind?
Only in the clearing haze of chaos
when truth settles like a chill, and fields
yield sustenance and unexpected bones.
V
Bones in the dry bed of dreams,
pinned to a page, sucked dry of life
as air sucks the curve of ink
and no letter illuminated, the room
silent but for the clock chanting
the running down of its own wheels
And the pennants outside, still, breathless,
the train a gliding, yellow dot, Its carriages
a pencil-line drawn along foothills.
White is the only colour; the knight,
the scholar, fade into it as memory
bleeds into the necessities of day.
Down the corridor, mobile phones
are held like scapulars before an altar,
they range along windows like birds
greedy for flies; the snapped to be buried
in piles, world wide: rubble without matter,
the triumph of the immaterial world.
But is it any different from the firing
of a monk’s imagination, his desire
for an unearthly city on a hill?
VI
Evening and an empty platform. The sun
is a haze on the tips of the hills,
the hills themselves like a blanket
ready to be unrolled. And distant, a lake, bottlenecked,
feeding a river, funnelling last winter’s snow
toward the ocean. The last pleasure-steamer
has put in, and that urban sound, quieter than silence,
a settling, a hundred thousand sighs,
falls like a landing of dust.
And more than silence, the emptiness
of waiting for a train, the knowledge of being a dot
on that unending rectangle, the railway cutting,
that time itself is invalid, will only resume
with the first sound, faint, almost beyond hearing,
of an approaching engine. Others come out,
shrouded now; their speech, low, unintelligible,
is all of the setting off, a hope that nothing
has been left undone. One pair of soft hands flutter
too soon, too soon! Too late, and like a bird,
they settle. Then the light, always stronger than daylight,
that is power an inevitability, glides
over the heat of the tracks. The engine
comes into shape behind it. When the doors
slide open, all this will be over; again
no more than names. But since the names
themselves – stations, churches, wells – were given
in turn to a story, when did it al start, this dash
along a strip of light between two shades?
And yet not done; moving backwards, across
a cleft in the hills, the sun’s rim
a mere gold wire now, picks like a lighthouse beam
an abandoned shepherd’s hut, squalid, ramshackle,
suspended in a clearing. Its fall will be gentle,
its stones will tell no hurt.