Part 25 (2/2)

Remember when our electric pump gave out, Priming it with bucketfuls, our idiotic rage And hangdog phone-calls to the farm next door For somebody please to come and fix it?

And when it began to hammer on again, Jubilation at the tap's full force, the sheer Given fact of water, how you felt you'd never Waste one drop but know its worth better always.

Do you think we could run through all that one more time?

I'll be Grotus, you be Coventina.

Wolfe Tone

Light as a skiff, manoeuvrable

yet outmanoeuvred, I affected epaulettes and a c.o.c.kade, wrote a style well-bred and impervious to the solidarity I angled for, and played the ancient Roman with a razor.

I was the shouldered oar that ended up far from the brine and whiff of venture, like a scratching-post or a crossroads flagpole, out of my element among small farmers I who once wakened to the shouts of men rising from the bottom of the sea, men in their s.h.i.+rts mounting through deep water when the Atlantic stove our cabin's dead lights in and the big fleet split and Ireland dwindled as we ran before the gale under bare poles.

From the Canton of Expectation

I.

We lived deep in a land of optative moods, under high, banked clouds of resignation.

A rustle of loss in the phrase Not in our lifetime, the broken nerve when we prayed Vouchsafe or Deign, were creditable, sufficient to the day.

Once a year we gathered in a field of dance platforms and tents where children sang songs they had learned by rote in the old language.

An auctioneer who had fought in the brotherhood enumerated the humiliations we always took for granted, but not even he considered this, I think, a call to action.

Iron-mouthed loudspeakers shook the air yet n.o.body felt blamed. He had confirmed us.

When our rebel anthem played the meeting shut we turned for home and the usual hara.s.sment by militiamen on overtime at roadblocks.

II.

And next thing, suddenly, this change of mood.

Books open in the newly wired kitchens.

Young heads that might have dozed a life away against the flanks of milking cows were busy paving and pencilling their first causeways across the prescribed texts. The paving stones of quadrangles came next and a grammar of imperatives, the new age of demands.

They would banish the conditional for ever, this generation born impervious to the triumph in our cries of de profundis.

Our faith in winning by enduring most they made anathema, intelligences brightened and unmannerly as crowbars.

III.

What looks the strongest has outlived its term.

The future lies with what's affirmed from under.

These things that corroborated us when we dwelt under the aegis of our stealthy patron, the guardian angel of pa.s.sivity, now sink a fang of menace in my shoulder.

I repeat the word 'stricken' to myself and stand bareheaded under the banked clouds edged more and more with bra.s.sy thunderlight.

I yearn for hammerblows on clinkered planks, the uncompromised report of driven thole-pins, to know there is one among us who never swerved from all his instincts told him was right action, who stood his ground in the indicative, whose boat will lift when the cloudburst happens.

The Mud Vision

Statues with exposed hearts and barbed-wire crowns

Still stood in alcoves, hares flitted beneath The dozing bellies of jets, our menu-writers And punks with aerosol sprays held their own With the best of them. Satellite link-ups Wafted over us the blessings of popes, heliports Maintained a charmed circle for idols on tour And casualties on their stretchers. We sleepwalked The line between panic and formulae, screentested Our first native models and the last of the mummers, Watching ourselves at a distance, advantaged And airy as a man on a springboard Who keeps limbering up because the man cannot dive.

And then in the foggy midlands it appeared, Our mud vision, as if a rose window of mud Had invented itself out of the glittery damp, A gossamer wheel, concentric with its own hub Of nebulous dirt, sullied yet lucent.

We had heard of the sun standing still and the sun That changed colour, but we were vouchsafed Original clay, transfigured and spinning.

And then the sunsets ran murky, the wiper Could never entirely clean off the windscreen, Reservoirs tasted of silt, a light fuzz Accrued in the hair and the eyebrows, and some Took to wearing a smudge on their foreheads To be prepared for whatever. Vigils Began to be kept around puddled gaps, On altars bulrushes ousted the lilies And a rota of invalids came and went On beds they could lease placed in range of the shower.

A generation who had seen a sign!

Those nights when we stood in an umber dew and smelled Mould in the verbena, or woke to a light Furrow-breath on the pillow, when the talk Was all about who had seen it and our fear Was touched with a secret pride, only ourselves Could be adequate then to our lives. When the rainbow Curved flood-brown and ran like a water-rat's back So that drivers on the hard shoulder switched off to watch, We wished it away, and yet we presumed it a test That would prove us beyond expectation.

We lived, of course, to learn the folly of that.

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