Part 6 (2/2)

Yesterday rocks sang when we tapped Stalact.i.tes in the cave's old, dripping dark Our love calls tiny as a tuning fork.

Serenades

The Irish nightingale

Is a sedge-warbler, A little bird with a big voice Kicking up a racket all night.

Not what you'd expect From the musical nation.

I haven't even heard one Nor an owl, for that matter.

My serenades have been The broken voice of a crow In a draught or a dream, The wheeze of bats Or the ack-ack Of the tramp corncrake Lost in a no-man's-land Between combines and chemicals.

So fill the bottles, love, Leave them inside their cots, And if they do wake us, well, So would the sedge-warbler.

Sh.o.r.e Woman Man to the hills, woman to the sh.o.r.e.

Gaelic proverb

I have crossed the dunes with their whistling bent

Where dry loose sand was riddling round the air And I'm walking the firm margin. White pocks Of c.o.c.kle, blanched roofs of clam and oyster h.o.a.rd the moonlight, woven and unwoven Off the bay. At the far rocks A pale sud comes and goes.

Under boards the mackerel slapped to death Yet still we took them in at every cast, Stiff flails of cold convulsed with their first breath.

My line plumbed certainly the undertow, Loaded against me once I went to draw And flashed and fattened up towards the light.

He was all business in the stern. I called 'This is so easy that it's hardly right,'

But he unhooked and coped with frantic fish Without speaking. Then suddenly it lulled, We'd crossed where they were running, the line rose Like a let-down and I was conscious How far we'd drifted out beyond the head.

'Count them up at your end,' was all he said Before I saw the porpoises' thick backs Cartwheeling like the flywheels of the tide, Soapy and s.h.i.+ning. To have seen a hill Splitting the water could not have numbed me more Than the close irruption of that school, Tight viscous muscle, hooped from tail to snout, Each one revealed complete as it bowled out And under.

They will attack a boat.

I knew it and I asked him to put in But he would not, declared it was a yarn My people had been fooled by far too long And he would prove it now and settle it.

Maybe he shrank when those sloped oily backs Propelled towards us: I lay and screamed Under splashed brine in an open rocking boat, Feeling each dunt and slither through the timber, Sick at their huge pleasures in the water.

I sometimes walk this strand for thanksgiving Or maybe it's to get away from him Skittering his spit across the stove. Here Is the taste of safety, the shelving sand Harbours no worse than razor-sh.e.l.l or crab Though my father recalls carca.s.ses of whales Collapsed and gasping, right up to the dunes.

But tonight such moving sinewed dreams lie out In darker fathoms, far beyond the head.

Astray upon a debris of scrubbed sh.e.l.ls Between parched dunes and salivating wave, I have rights on this fallow avenue, A membrane between moonlight and my shadow.

Limbo

Fishermen at Ballyshannon

Netted an infant last night Along with the salmon.

An illegitimate sp.a.w.ning, A small one thrown back To the waters. But I'm sure As she stood in the shallows Ducking him tenderly Till the frozen k.n.o.bs of her wrists Were dead as the gravel, He was a minnow with hooks Tearing her open.

She waded in under The sign of her cross.

He was hauled in with the fish.

Now limbo will be A cold glitter of souls Through some far briny zone.

Even Christ's palms, unhealed, Smart and cannot fish there.

Bye-Child He was discovered in the henhouse where she had confined him.

He was incapable of saying anything.

When the lamp glowed,

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