Part 20 (2/2)

The small crab-apple physiognomies on high crosses, carved heads in abbeys ...

Why else dig in for years in that hard place in a muck of bigotry under the walls picking through shards and Williamite cannon b.a.l.l.s?

But all that we just turned to banter too.

I felt that I should have seen far more of you and maybe would have but dead at thirty-two!

Ah poet, lucky poet, tell me why what seemed deserved and promised pa.s.sed me by?'

I could not speak. I saw a h.o.a.rd of black basalt axeheads, smooth as a beetle's back, a cairn of stone force that might detonate, the eggs of danger. And then I saw a face he had once given me, a plaster cast of an abbess, done by the Gowran master, mild-mouthed and cowled, a character of grace.

'Your gift will be a candle in our house '

But he had gone when I looked to meet his eyes and hunkering instead there in his place was a bleeding, pale-faced boy, plastered in mud.

'The red-hot pokers blazed a lovely red in Jerpoint the Sunday I was murdered,'

he said quietly. 'Now do you remember?

You were there with poets when you got the word and stayed there with them, while your own flesh and blood was carted to Bellaghy from the Fews.

They showed more agitation at the news than you did.'

'But they were getting crisis first-hand, Colum, they had happened in on live sectarian a.s.sa.s.sination.

I was dumb, encountering what was destined.'

And so I pleaded with my second cousin.

'I kept seeing a grey stretch of Lough Beg and the strand empty at daybreak.

I felt like the bottom of a dried-up lake.'

'You saw that, and you wrote that not the fact.

You confused evasion and artistic tact.

The Protestant who shot me through the head I accuse directly, but indirectly, you who now atone perhaps upon this bed for the way you whitewashed ugliness and drew the lovely blinds of the Purgatorio and saccharined my death with morning dew.'

Then I seemed to waken out of sleep among more pilgrims whom I did not know drifting to the hostel for the night.

IX.

'My brain dried like spread turf, my stomach Shrank to a cinder and tightened and cracked.

Often I was dogs on my own track Of blood on wet gra.s.s that I could have licked.

Under the prison blanket, an ambush Stillness I felt safe in settled round me.

Street lights came on in small towns, the bomb flash Came before the sound, I saw country I knew from Glenshane down to Toome And heard a car I could make out years away With me in the back of it like a white-faced groom, A hit-man on the brink, emptied and deadly.

When the police yielded my coffin, I was light As my head when I took aim.'

This voice from blight And hunger died through the black dorm: There he was, laid out with a drift of Ma.s.s cards At his shrouded feet. Then the firing party's Volley in the yard. I saw woodworm In gate posts and door jambs, smelt mildew From the byre loft where he had watched and hid From fields that his draped coffin would raft through.

Unquiet soul, they should have buried you In the bog where you threw your first grenade, Where only helicopters and curlews Make their maimed music, and sphagnum moss Could teach you its medicinal repose Until, when the weasel whistles on its tail, No other weasel will obey its call.

I dreamt and drifted. All seemed to run to waste As down a swirl of mucky, glittering flood Strange polyp floated like a huge corrupt Magnolia bloom, surreal as a shed breast, My softly awash and blanching self-disgust.

And I cried among night waters, 'I repent My unweaned life that kept me competent To sleepwalk with connivance and mistrust.'

Then, like a pistil growing from the polyp, A lighted candle rose and steadied up Until the whole bright-masted thing retrieved A course and the currents it had gone with Were what it rode and showed. No more adrift, My feet touched bottom and my heart revived.

Then something round and clear And mildly turbulent, like a bubbleskin Or a moon in smoothly rippled lough water Rose in a cobwebbed s.p.a.ce: the molten Inside-sheen of an instrument Revolved its polished convexes full Upon me, so close and brilliant I seemed to pitch back in a headlong fall.

And then it was the clarity of waking To sunlight and a bell and gus.h.i.+ng taps In the next cubicle. Still there for the taking!

The old bra.s.s trumpet with its valves and stops I found once in loft thatch, a mystery I s.h.i.+ed from then for I thought such trove beyond me.

'I hate how quick I was to know my place.

I hate where I was born, hate everything That made me biddable and unforthcoming,'

I mouthed at my half-composed face In the shaving mirror, like somebody Drunk in the bathroom during a party, Lulled and repelled by his own reflection.

As if the cairnstone could defy the cairn.

As if the eddy could reform the pool.

As if a stone swirled under a cascade, Eroded and eroding in its bed, Could grind itself down to a different core.

Then I thought of the tribe whose dances never fail For they keep dancing till they sight the deer.

X.

Morning stir in the hostel. A pot hooked on forged links. Soot flakes. Plumping water.

The open door brilliant with sunlight.

Hearthsmoke rambling and a thud of earthenware drumming me back until I saw the mug beyond my reach on its high shelf, the one patterned with blue cornflowers, sprig after sprig repeating round it, as quiet as a milestone ...

When had it not been there? There was one night when fit-up actors used it for a prop and I sat in the dark hall estranged from it as a couple vowed and called it their loving cup and held it in our gaze until the curtain jerked shut with an ordinary noise.

Dipped and glamoured then by this translation, it was restored to its old haircracked doze on the mantelpiece, its parchment glazes fast as the otter surfaced once with Ronan's psalter miraculously unharmed, that had been lost a day and a night under the lough water.

And so the saint praised G.o.d on the lough sh.o.r.e for that dazzle of impossibility I credited again in the sun-filled door, so absolutely light it could put out fire.

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