Part 27 (2/2)
You also loved lines pegged out in the garden, The spade nicking the first straight edge along The tight white string. Or string stretched perfectly To make the outline of a house foundation, Pale timber battens set at right angles For every corner, each freshly sawn new board Spick and span in the oddly pa.s.sive gra.s.s.
Or the imaginary line straight down A field of grazing, to be ploughed open From the rod stuck in one headrig to the rod Stuck in the other.
III.
All these things entered you As if they were both the door and what came through it.
They marked the spot, marked time and held it open.
A mower parted the bronze sea of corn.
A windla.s.s hauled the centre out of water.
Two men with a cross-cut kept it swimming Into a felled beech backwards and forwards So that they seemed to row the steady earth.
Man and Boy
I.
'Catch the old one first,'
(My father's joke was also old, and heavy And predictable). 'Then the young ones Will all follow, and Bob's your uncle.'
On slow bright river evenings, the sweet time Made him afraid we'd take too much for granted And so our spirits must be lightly checked.
Blessed be down-to-earth! Blessed be highs!
Blessed be the detachment of dumb love In that broad-backed, low-set man Who feared debt all his life, but now and then Could make a splash like the salmon he said was 'As big as a wee pork pig by the sound of it'.
II.
In earshot of the pool where the salmon jumped Back through its own unheard concentric soundwaves A mower leans forever on his scythe.
He has mown himself to the centre of the field And stands in a final perfect ring Of sunlit stubble.
'Go and tell your father,' the mower says (He said it to my father who told me), 'I have it mowed as clean as a new sixpence.'
My father is a barefoot boy with news, Running at eye-level with weeds and stooks On the afternoon of his own father's death.
The open, black half of the half-door waits.
I feel much heat and hurry in the air.
I feel his legs and quick heels far away And strange as my own when he will piggyback me At a great height, light-headed and thin-boned, Like a witless elder rescued from the fire.
Seeing Things
I.
Inishbofin on a Sunday morning.
Sunlight, turfsmoke, seagulls, boatslip, diesel.
One by one we were being handed down Into a boat that dipped and s.h.i.+lly-shallied Scaresomely every time. We sat tight On short cross-benches, in nervous twos and threes, Obedient, newly close, n.o.body speaking Except the boatmen, as the gunwales sank And seemed they might s.h.i.+p water any minute.
The sea was very calm but even so, When the engine kicked and our ferryman Swayed for balance, reaching for the tiller, I panicked at the s.h.i.+ftiness and heft Of the craft itself. What guaranteed us That quick response and buoyancy and swim Kept me in agony. All the time As we went sailing evenly across The deep, still, seeable-down-into water, It was as if I looked from another boat Sailing through air, far up, and could see How riskily we fared into the morning, And loved in vain our bare, bowed, numbered heads.
II.
Claritas. The dry-eyed Latin word Is perfect for the carved stone of the water Where Jesus stands up to his unwet knees And John the Baptist pours out more water Over his head: all this in bright sunlight On the facade of a cathedral. Lines Hard and thin and sinuous represent The flowing river. Down between the lines Little antic fish are all go. Nothing else.
And yet in that utter visibility The stone's alive with what's invisible: Waterweed, stirred sand-grains hurrying off, The shadowy, unshadowed stream itself.
All afternoon, heat wavered on the steps And the air we stood up to our eyes in wavered Like the zig-zag hieroglyph for life itself.
III.
Once upon a time my undrowned father Walked into our yard. He had gone to spray Potatoes in a field on the riverbank And wouldn't bring me with him. The horse-sprayer Was too big and new-fangled, bluestone might Burn me in the eyes, the horse was fresh, I Might scare the horse, and so on. I threw stones At a bird on the shed roof, as much for The clatter of the stones as anything, But when he came back, I was inside the house And saw him out the window, scatter-eyed And daunted, strange without his hat, His step unguided, his ghosthood immanent.
When he was turning on the riverbank, The horse had rusted and reared up and pitched Cart and sprayer and everything off balance So the whole rig went over into a deep Whirlpool, hoofs, chains, shafts, cartwheels, barrel And tackle, all tumbling off the world, And the hat already merrily swept along The quieter reaches. That afternoon I saw him face to face, he came to me With his damp footprints out of the river, And there was nothing between us there That might not still be happily ever after.
An August Night
His hands were warm and small and knowledgeable.
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