Part 7 (1/2)

A yolk of light In their back window, The child in the outhouse Put his eye to a c.h.i.n.k Little henhouse boy, Sharp-faced as new moons Remembered, your photo still Glimpsed like a rodent On the floor of my mind, Little moon man, Kennelled and faithful At the foot of the yard, Your frail shape, luminous, Weightless, is stirring the dust, The cobwebs, old droppings Under the roosts And dry smells from sc.r.a.ps She put through your trapdoor Morning and evening.

After those footsteps, silence; Vigils, solitudes, fasts, Unchristened tears, A puzzled love of the light.

But now you speak at last With a remote mime Of something beyond patience, Your gaping wordless proof Of lunar distances Travelled beyond love.

Good-night

A latch lifting, an edged den of light

Opens across the yard. Out of the low door They stoop into the honeyed corridor, Then walk straight through the wall of the dark.

A puddle, cobble-stones, jambs and doorstep Are set steady in a block of brightness.

Till she strides in again beyond her shadows And cancels everything behind her.

Fireside

Always there would be stories of lights

hovering among bushes or at the foot of a meadow; maybe a goat with cold horns pluming into the moon; a tingle of chains on the midnight road. And then maybe word would come round of that watery art, the lamping of fishes, and I'd be mooning my flashlamp on the licked black pelt of the stream, my left arm splayed to take a heavy pour and run of the current occluding the net. Was that the beam buckling over an eddy or a gleam of the fabulous? Steady the light and come to your senses, they're saying good-night.

Westering in California

I sit under Rand McNally's

'Official Map of the Moon'

The colour of frogskin, Its enlarged pores held Open and one called 'Pitiscus' at eye level Recalling the last night In Donegal, my shadow Neat upon the whitewash From her bony s.h.i.+ne, The cobbles of the yard Lit pale as eggs.

Summer had been a free fall Ending there, The empty amphitheatre Of the west. Good Friday We had started out Past s...o...b..inds drawn on the afternoon, Cars stilled outside still churches, Bikes tilting to a wall; We drove by, A dwindling interruption, As clappers smacked On a bare altar And congregations bent To the studded crucifix.

What nails dropped out that hour?

Roads unreeled, unreeled Falling light as casts Laid down On s.h.i.+ning waters.

Under the moon's stigmata Six thousand miles away, I imagine untroubled dust, A loosening gravity, Christ weighing by his hands.

from STATIONS (1975)

Nesting-Ground

The sandmartins' nests were loopholes of darkness in the riverbank. He could imagine his arm going in to the armpit, sleeved and straitened, but because he had once felt the cold p.r.i.c.k of a dead robin's claw and the surprising density of its tiny beak he only gazed.

He heard cheeping far in but because the men had once shown him a rat's nest in the b.u.t.t of a stack where chaff and powdered cornstalks adhered to the moist pink necks and backs he only listened.

As he stood sentry, gazing, waiting, he thought of putting his ear to one of the abandoned holes and listening for the silence under the ground.

July The drumming started in the cool of the evening, as if the dome of air were lightly hailed on. But no. The drumming murmured from beneath that drum.

The drumming didn't murmur, rather hammered. Soundsmiths found a rhythm gradually. On the far bench of the hills tuns and ingots were being beaten thin.

The hills were a bellied sound-box resonating, a low d.y.k.e against diurnal roar, a tidal wave that stayed, that still might open.

Through red seas of July the Orange drummers led a chosen people through their dream. Dilations and engorgings, contrapuntal; slashers in s.h.i.+rt-sleeves, collared in the sunset, policemen flanking them like anthracite.

The air grew dark, cloud-barred, a butcher's ap.r.o.n. The night hushed like a white-mothed reach of water, miles downstream from the battle, a skein of blood still lazing in the channel.

England's Difficulty I moved like a double agent among the big concepts.

The word 'enemy' had the toothed efficiency of a mowing machine. It was a mechanical and distant noise beyond that opaque security, that autonomous ignorance.

'When the Germans bombed Belfast it was the bitterest Orange parts were hit the worst.'

I was on somebody's shoulder, conveyed through the starlit yard to see the sky glowing over Anahorish. Grown-ups lowered their voices and resettled in the kitchen as if tired out after an excursion.

Behind the blackout, Germany called to lamplit kitchens through fretted baize, dry battery, wet battery, capillary wires, domed valves that squeaked and burbled as the dial-hand absolved Stuttgart and Leipzig.