Excerpt from 'Electric Light'
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Chapter OneContentsI At Toomebridge........................................3 Perch.................................................4 Lupins................................................5 Out of the Bag........................................6 Bann Valley Eclogue...................................12 Montana...............................................14 The Loose Box.........................................15 Turpin Song...........................................19 The Border Campaign...................................21 Known World...........................................22 The Little Canticles of Asturias......................28 Ballynahinch Lake.....................................30 The Clothes Shrine....................................32 Red, White and Blue...................................33 Virgil: Eclogue IX....................................38 Glanmore Eclogue......................................42 Sonnets from Hellas...................................45 1. Into Arcadia.......................................45 2. Conkers............................................46 3. Pylos..............................................47 4. The Augean Stables.................................48 5. Castalian Spring...................................49 6. Desfina............................................50 The Gaeltacht.........................................51 The Real Names........................................52 The Bookcase..........................................60 Vitruviana............................................63 Ten Glosses...........................................65 The Fragment..........................................70 II On His Work in the English Tongue.....................73 Audenesque............................................77 To the Shade of Zbigniew Herbert......................81 "Would They Had Stay'd"...............................82 Late in the Day.......................................85 Arion.................................................87 Bodies and Souls......................................88 Clonmany to Ahascragh.................................90 Sruth.................................................92 Seeing the Sick.......................................94 Electric Light........................................96 Chapter OneAt ToomebridgeWhere the flat water Came pouring over the weir out of Lough Neagh As if it had reached an edge of the flat earth And fallen shining to the continuous Present of the Bann. Where the checkpoint used to be, Where the rebel boy was hanged in '98. Where negative ions in the open air Are poetry to me. As once before The slime and silver of the fattened eel. Perch Perch on their water-perch hung in the clear Bann River Near the clay bank in alder-dapple and waver, Perch we called "grunts," little flood-slubs, runty and ready, I saw and I see in the river's glorified body That is passable through, but they're bluntly holding the pass, Under the water-roof, over the bottom, adoze, Guzzling the current, against it, all muscle and slur In the finland of perch, the fenland of alder, on air That is water, on carpets of Bann stream, on hold In the everything flows and steady go of the world. Lupins They stood. And stood for something, Just by standing. In waiting. Unavailable. But there For sure. Sure and unbending. Rose-fingered dawn's and navy midnight's flower. Seed packets to begin with, pink and azure, Sifting lightness and small jittery promise: Lupin spires, erotics of the future, Lip-brush of the blue and earth's deep purchase. O pastel turrets, pods and tapering stalks That stood their ground for all our summer wending And even when they blanched would never balk. And none of this surpassed our understanding. Out of the Bag I All of us came in Doctor Kerlin's bag. He'd arrive with it, disappear to the room And by the time he'd reappear to wash Those nosy, rosy, big, soft hands of his In the scullery basin, its lined insides (The colour of a spaniel's inside lug) Were empty for all to see, the trap-sprung mouth Unsnibbed and gaping wide. Then like a hypnotist Unwinding us, he'd wind the instruments Back into their lining, tie the cloth Like an apron round itself, Darken the door and leave With the bag in his hand, a plump ark by the keel ... Until the next time came and in he'd come In his fur-lined collar that was also spaniel-coloured And go stooping up to the room again, a whiff Of disinfectant, a Dutch interior gleam Of waistcoat satin and highlights on the forceps. Getting the water ready, that was next- Not plumping hot, and not lukewarm, but soft, Sud-luscious, saved for him from the rain-butt And savoured by him afterwards, all thanks Denied as he towelled hard and fast, Then held his arms out suddenly behind him To be squired and silk-lined into the camel coat. At which point he once turned his eyes upon me, Hyperborean, beyond-the-north-wind blue, Two peepholes to the locked room I saw into Every time his name was mentioned, skimmed Milk and ice, swabbed porcelain, the white And chill of tiles, steel hooks, chrome surgery tools And blood dreeps in the sawdust where it thickened At the foot of each cold wall. And overhead The little, pendent, teat-hued infant parts Strung neatly from a line up near the ceiling- A toe, a foot and shin, an arm, a cock A bit like the rosebud in his buttonhole. II Poeta doctus Peter Levi says Sanctuaries of Asclepius (called asclepions) Were the equivalent of hospitals In ancient Greece. Or of shrines like Lourdes, Says poeta doctus Graves. Or of the cure By poetry that cannot be coerced, Say I, who realized at Epidaurus That the whole place was a sanatorium With theatre and gymnasium and baths, A site of incubation, where "incubation" Was technical and ritual, meaning sleep When epiphany occurred and you met the god ... Hatless, groggy, shadowing myself As the thurifer I was in an open air procession In Lourdes in '56 When I nearly fainted from the heat and fumes, Again I nearly fainted as I bent To pull a bunch of grass and hallucinated Doctor Kerlin at the steamed-up glass Of our scullery window, starting in to draw With his large pink index finger dot-faced men With button-spots in a straight line down their fronts And women with dot breasts, giving them all A set of droopy sausage-arms and legs That soon began to run. And then as he dipped and laved In the generous suds again, miraculum: The baby bits all came together swimming Into his soapy big hygienic hands And I myself came to, blinded with sweat, Blinking and shaky in the windless light. III Bits of the grass I pulled I posted off To one going into chemotherapy And one who had come through. I didn't want To leave the place or link up with the others. It was mid-day, mid-May, pre-tourist sunlight In the precincts of the god, The very site of the temple of Asclepius. I wanted nothing more than to lie down Under hogweed, under seeded grass And to be visited in the very eye of the day By Hygeia, his daughter, her name still clarifying The haven of light she was, the undarkening door. IV The room I came from and the rest of us all came from Stays pure reality where I stand alone, Standing the passage of time, and she's asleep In sheets put on for the doctor, wedding presents That showed up again and again, bridal And usual and useful at births and deaths. Me at the bedside, incubating for real, Peering, appearing to her as she closes And opens her eyes, then lapses back Into a faraway smile whose precinct of vision I would enter every time, to assist and be asked In that hoarsened whisper of triumph, "And what do you think Of the new wee baby the doctor brought for us When I was asleep?" Bann Valley Eclogue Sicelides Musae, paulo maiora canamus -VIRGIL, Eclogue IV POET: Bann Valley Muses, give us a song worth singing, Something that rises like the curtain in Those words And it came to pass or In the beginning. Help me to please my hedge-schoolmaster Virgil And the child that's due. Maybe, heavens, sing Better times for her and her generation. VIRGIL: Here are my words you'll have to find a place for: Carmen, ordo, nascitur, saeculum, gens. Their gist in your tongue and province should be clear Even at this stage. Poetry, order, the times, The nation, wrong and renewal, then an infant birth And a flooding away of all the old miasma. Whatever stains you, you rubbed it into yourselves: Earth mark, birth mark, mould like the bloodied mould On Romulus's ditch-back. But when the waters break Banns stream will overflow, the old markings Will avail no more to keep east bank from west. The valley will be washed like the new baby. POET: Pacatum orbem: your words are too much nearly. Even "orb" by itself. What on earth could match it? And then, last month, at noon-eclipse, wind dropped. A millennial chill, birdless and dark, prepared. A firstness steadied, a lastness, a born awareness As name dawned into knowledge: I saw the orb. VIRGIL: Eclipses won't be for this child. The cool she'll know Will be the pram hood over her vestal head. Big dog daisies will get fanked up in the spokes. She'll lie on summer evenings listening to A chug and slug going on in the milking parlour. Let her never hear close gunfire or explosions. POET: Why do I remember St. Patrick's mornings, Being sent by my mother to the railway line For the little trefoil, untouchable almost, the shamrock With its twining, binding, creepery, tough, thin roots All over the place, in the stones between the sleepers. Dew-scales shook off the leaves. Tear-ducts asperging. Child on the way, it won't be long until You land among us. Your mother's showing signs, Out for her sunset walk among big round bales. Planet earth like a teething ring suspended Hangs by its world-chain. Your pram waits in the corner. Cows are let out. They're sluicing the milk-house floor. Montana The stable door was open, the upper half, When I looked back. I was five years old And Dologhan stood watching me go off, John Dologhan, the best milker ever To come about the place. He sang "The Rose of Mooncoin" with his head to the cow's side. He would spin his table knife and when the blade Stopped with its point towards me, a bright path Opened between us like a recognition That made no sense, like my memory of him standing Behind the half door, holding up the winkers. Even then he was like an apparition, A rambler from the Free State and a gambler, All eyes as the pennies rose and slowed On Sunday mornings under Butler's Bridge And downed themselves into that tight-bunched crowd Of the pitch-and-toss school. Sunlight on far lines, On the creosoted sleepers and hot stones. And Dologhan, who'd worked in Montana once, With the whole day off, in the cool shade of the arch. The Loose Box Back at the dark end, slats angled tautly down From a breast-high ben to the foot of the stable wall- Silked and seasoned timber of the hayrack. Marsupial brackets .... And a deep-littered silence Off odourless, untainting, fibrous horsedung. * * * On an old recording Patrick Kavanagh states That there's health and worth in any talk about The properties of land. Sandy, glarry, Mossy, heavy, cold, the actual soil Almost doesn't matter; the main thing is An inner restitution, a purchase come by By pacing it in words that make you feel You've found your feet in what "surefooted" means And in the ground of your own understanding- Like Heracles stepping in and standing under Atlas's sky-lintel, as earthed and heady As I am when I talk about the loose box. * * * And they found the infant wrapped in swaddling clothes And laid in a manger. But the plaster child in nappies, Bare baby-breasted little rigor vitae, Crook-armed, seed-nailed, nothing but gloss and chill- He wasn't right at all. And no hayrack To be seen. The solid stooping shepherds, The stiff-lugged donkey, Joseph, Mary, each Figure in the winter crib was well And truly placed. There was even real straw On the side-altar. And an out-of-scale, Too crockery, kneeling cow. And fairy lights. But no, no fodder-billowed armfuls spilling over ... At the altar rail I knelt and learnt almost Not to admit the let-down to myself. * * * Stable child, grown stabler when I read In adolescence Thomas downs Hardy- Not, oddly enough, his Christmas Eve night-piece About the oxen in their bedded stall, But the threshing scene in Tess of the D'Urbervilles— That magnified my soil. Raving machinery, The thresher bucking sky, rut-shuddery, A headless Trojan horse expelling straw From where the head should be, the underjaws Like staircases set champing-it hummed and slugged While the big sag and slew of the canvas belt That would cut your head off if you didn't watch Flowed from the flywheel. And comes flowing back, The whole mote-sweaty havoc and mania Of threshing day, the feeders up on top Like pyre-high Aztec priests gutting forked sheaves And paying them ungirded to the drum. Slack of gulped straw, the belly-taut of seedbags. And in the stilly night, chaff piled in ridges, Earth raw where the four wheels rocked and battled. * * * Michael Collins, ambushed at Beal na Blath, At the Pass of Flowers, the Blossom Gap, his own Bloom-drifted, soft Avernus-mouth, Has nothing to hold on to and falls again Willingly, lastly, foreknowledgeably deep Into the hay-floor that gave once in his childhood Down through the bedded mouth of the loft trapdoor, The loosening fodder-chute, the aftermath ... This has been told of Collins and retold By his biographer: One of his boy-deeds Was to enter the hidden jaws of that hay crevasse And get to his feet again and come unscathed Through a dazzle of pollen scarves to breathe the air. True or not true, the fall within his fall, That drop through the flower-floor lets him find his feet In an underworld of understanding Better than any newsreel lying-in-state Or footage of the laden gun-carriage And grim cortege could ever manage to. Or so it can be stated In the must and drift of talk about the loose box. Turpin Song The horse pistol, we called it: Brass inlay smooth in the stock, Two hammers cocked like lugs, Two mottled metal barrels, Sooty nostrilled, levelled. Bracketed over the door Of the lower bedroom, a ghost Heft that we longed to feel, Two fingers on two triggers, The full of your hand of haft. Where was the Great North Road? Who rode in a tricorn hat? Bob Cushley with his jennet? Ned Kane in his pony and trap? The thing was out of place. When I lift up my eyes at the start Of Stanley Kubrick's film A horse pistol comes tumbling From over the door of the world And it's nineteen forty-eight Or -nine, we have transgressed, We've got our hands on it And it lies there, broken in bits. Wind blows through the open hayshed. I lift up my eyes with the apes. The Border Campaign for Nadine Gordimer
Soot-streaks down the courthouse wall, a hole
Smashed in the roof, the rafters in the rain
Still smouldering:
when I heard the word "attack"
In St. Columb's College in nineteen fifty-six
It left me winded, left nothing between me
And the sky that moved beyond my boarder's dormer
The way it would have moved the morning after
Savagery in Heorot, its reflection placid
In those waterlogged huge pawmarks Grendel left
On the boreen to the marsh.
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Electric Light