Part 11 (1/2)

Each arm extended by a seasoned rod, He parades behind it. And though the drummers Are granted pa.s.sage through the nodding crowd, It is the drums preside, like giant tumours.

To every c.o.c.ked ear, expert in its greed, His battered signature subscribes 'No Pope'.

The goatskin's sometimes plastered with his blood.

The air is pounding like a stethoscope.

4 SUMMER 1969.

While the Constabulary covered the mob

Firing into the Falls, I was suffering Only the bullying sun of Madrid.

Each afternoon, in the ca.s.serole heat Of the flat, as I sweated my way through The life of Joyce, stinks from the fishmarket Rose like the reek off a flax-dam.

At night on the balcony, gules of wine, A sense of children in their dark corners, Old women in black shawls near open windows, The air a canyon rivering in Spanish.

We talked our way home over starlit plains Where patent leather of the Guardia Civil Gleamed like fish-bellies in flax-poisoned waters.

'Go back,' one said, 'try to touch the people.'

Another conjured Lorca from his hill.

We sat through death-counts and bullfight reports On the television, celebrities Arrived from where the real thing still happened.

I retreated to the cool of the Prado.

Goya's 'Shootings of the Third of May'

Covered a wall the thrown-up arms And spasm of the rebel, the helmeted And knapsacked military, the efficient Rake of the fusillade. In the next room, His nightmares, grafted to the palace wall Dark cyclones, hosting, breaking; Saturn Jewelled in the blood of his own children, Gigantic Chaos turning his brute hips Over the world. Also, that holmgang Where two berserks club each other to death For honour's sake, greaved in a bog, and sinking.

He painted with his fists and elbows, flourished The stained cape of his heart as history charged.

5 FOSTERAGE.

for Michael McLaverty

'Description is revelation!' Royal Avenue, Belfast, 1962, A Sat.u.r.day afternoon, glad to meet Me, newly cubbed in language, he gripped My elbow. 'Listen. Go your own way.

Do your own work. Remember Katherine Mansfield I will tell How the laundry basket squeaked ... that note of exile.'

But to h.e.l.l with overstating it: 'Don't have the veins bulging in your Biro.'

And then, 'Poor Hopkins!' I have the Journals He gave me, underlined, his buckled self Obeisant to their pain. He discerned The lineaments of patience everywhere And fostered me and sent me out, with words Imposing on my tongue like obols.

6 EXPOSURE.

It is December in Wicklow:

Alders dripping, birches Inheriting the last light, The ash tree cold to look at.

A comet that was lost Should be visible at sunset, Those million tons of light Like a glimmer of haws and rose-hips, And I sometimes see a falling star.

If I could come on meteorite!

Instead I walk through damp leaves, Husks, the spent flukes of autumn, Imagining a hero On some muddy compound, His gift like a slingstone Whirled for the desperate.

How did I end up like this?

I often think of my friends'

Beautiful prismatic counselling And the anvil brains of some who hate me As I sit weighing and weighing My responsible tristia.