Part 13 (1/2)

The intelligence in his bone.

The unquestionable houseboy's shoulders that could have been my own.

The Singer's House

When they said Carrickfergus I could hear

the frosty echo of saltminers' picks.

I imagined it, chambered and glinting, a towns.h.i.+p built of light.

What do we say any more to conjure the salt of our earth?

So much comes and is gone that should be crystal and kept, and amicable weathers that bring up the grain of things, their tang of season and store, are all the packing we'll get.

So I say to myself Gweebarra and its music hits off the place like water hitting off granite.

I see the glittering sound framed in your window, knives and forks set on oilcloth, and the seals' heads, suddenly outlined, scanning everything.

People here used to believe that drowned souls lived in the seals.

At spring tides they might change shape.

They loved music and swam in for a singer who might stand at the end of summer in the mouth of a whitewashed turf-shed, his shoulder to the jamb, his song a rowboat far out in evening.

When I came here first you were always singing, a hint of the clip of the pick in your winnowing climb and attack.

Raise it again, man. We still believe what we hear.

The Guttural Muse

Late summer, and at midnight

I smelt the heat of the day: At my window over the hotel car park I breathed the muddied night airs off the lake And watched a young crowd leave the discotheque.

Their voices rose up thick and comforting As oily bubbles the feeding tench sent up That evening at dusk the slimy tench Once called the 'doctor fish' because his slime Was said to heal the wounds of fish that touched it.

A girl in a white dress Was being courted out among the cars: As her voice swarmed and puddled into laughs I felt like some old pike all badged with sores Wanting to swim in touch with soft-mouthed life.

Glanmore Sonnets for Ann Saddlemyer 'our heartiest welcomer'

I.

Vowels ploughed into other: opened ground.

The mildest February for twenty years Is mist bands over furrows, a deep no sound Vulnerable to distant gargling tractors.

Our road is steaming, the turned-up acres breathe.

Now the good life could be to cross a field And art a paradigm of earth new from the lathe Of ploughs. My lea is deeply tilled.

Old plough-socks gorge the subsoil of each sense And I am quickened with a redolence Of farmland as a dark unblown rose.

Wait then ... Breasting the mist, in sowers' ap.r.o.ns, My ghosts come striding into their spring stations.

The dream grain whirls like freakish Easter snows.

II.

Sensings, mountings from the hiding places, Words entering almost the sense of touch, Ferreting themselves out of their dark hutch 'These things are not secrets but mysteries,'

Oisin Kelly told me years ago In Belfast, hankering after stone That connived with the chisel, as if the grain Remembered what the mallet tapped to know.

Then I landed in the hedge-school of Glanmore And from the backs of ditches hoped to raise A voice caught back off slug-horn and slow chanter That might continue, hold, dispel, appease: Vowels ploughed into other, opened ground, Each verse returning like the plough turned round.

III.

This evening the cuckoo and the corncrake (So much, too much) consorted at twilight.

It was all crepuscular and iambic.

Out on the field a baby rabbit Took his bearings, and I knew the deer (I've seen them too from the window of the house, Like connoisseurs, inquisitive of air) Were careful under larch and May-green spruce.

I had said earlier, 'I won't relapse From this strange loneliness I've brought us to.

Dorothy and William ' She interrupts: 'You're not going to compare us two... ?'

Outside a rustling and twig-combing breeze Refreshes and relents. Is cadences.

IV.

I used to lie with an ear to the line For that way, they said, there should come a sound Escaping ahead, an iron tune Of f.l.a.n.g.e and piston pitched along the ground, But I never heard that. Always, instead, Struck couplings and shuntings two miles away Lifted over the woods. The head Of a horse swirled back from a gate, a grey Turnover of haunch and mane, and I'd look Up to the cutting where she'd soon appear.

Two fields back, in the house, small ripples shook Silently across our drinking water (As they are shaking now across my heart) And vanished into where they seemed to start.

V.

Soft corrugations in the boortree's trunk, Its green young shoots, its rods like freckled solder: It was our bower as children, a greenish, dank And snapping memory as I get older.