Part 3 (2/2)

The crews will answer, 'Once the season's in.'

6 THE RETURN.

In ponds, drains, dead ca.n.a.ls

she turns her head back, older now, following whim deliberately till she's at sea in gra.s.s and d.a.m.ned if she'll stop so it's new trenches, sunk pipes, swamps, running streams, the lough, the river. Her stomach shrunk, she exhilarates in mid-water. Its throbbing is speed through days and weeks.

Who knows now if she knows her depth or direction?

She's pa.s.sed Malin and Tory, silent, wakeless, a wisp, a wick that is its own taper and light through the weltering dark.

Where she's lost once she lays ten thousand feet down in her origins. The current carries slicks of orphaned sp.a.w.n.

7 VISION.

Unless his hair was fine-combed

The lice, they said, would gang up Into a mealy rope And drag him, small, dirty, doomed, Down to the water. He was Cautious then in riverbank Fields. Thick as a birch trunk, That cable flexed in the gra.s.s Every time the wind pa.s.sed. Years Later in the same fields He stood at night when eels Moved through the gra.s.s like hatched fears Towards the water. To stand In one place as the field flowed Past, a jellied road, To watch the eels crossing land Re-wound his world's live girdle.

Phosph.o.r.escent, sinewed slime Continued at his feet. Time Confirmed the horrid cable.

The Given Note

On the most westerly Blasket

In a dry-stone hut He got this air out of the night.

Strange noises were heard By others who followed, bits of a tune Coming in on loud weather Though nothing like melody.

He blamed their fingers and ear As unpractised, their fiddling easy For he had gone alone into the island And brought back the whole thing.

The house throbbed like his full violin.

So whether he calls it spirit music Or not, I don't care. He took it Out of wind off mid-Atlantic.

Still he maintains, from nowhere.

It comes off the bow gravely, Rephrases itself into the air.

Whinlands

All year round the whin

Can show a blossom or two But it's in full bloom now.

As if the small yolk stain From all the birds' eggs in All the nests of the spring Were spiked and hung Everywhere on bushes to ripen.

Hills oxidize gold.

Above the smoulder of green shoot And dross of dead thorns underfoot The blossoms scald.

Put a match under Whins, they go up of a sudden.

They make no flame in the sun But a fierce heat tremor Yet incineration like that Only takes the thorn.

The tough sticks don't burn, Remain like bone, charred horn.

Gilt, jaggy, springy, frilled This stunted, dry richness Persists on hills, near stone ditches, Over flintbed and battlefield.

The Plantation

Any point in that wood

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