Part 32 (2/2)

Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth Crept up through him? Is there distance in his head?

Alone and mirrored clear in love's deep river, 'To labour and not to seek reward,' he prays, A prayer his body makes entirely For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird And on the riverbank forgotten the river's name.

from The Flight Path

IV.

The following for the record, in the light Of everything before and since: One bright May morning, nineteen seventy-nine, Just off the red-eye special from New York, I'm on the train for Belfast. Plain, simple Exhilaration at being back: the sea At Skerries, the nuptial hawthorn bloom, The trip north taking sweet hold like a chain On every bodily sprocket.

Enter then As if he were some film noir border guard Enter this one I'd last met in a dream, More grimfaced now than in the dream itself When he'd flagged me down at the side of a mountain road, Come up and leant his elbow on the roof And explained through the open window of the car That all I'd have to do was drive a van Carefully in to the next customs post At Pettigo, switch off, get out as if I were on my way with dockets to the office But then instead I'd walk ten yards more down Towards the main street and get in with here Another schoolfriend's name, a wink and smile, I'd know him all right, he'd be in a Ford And I'd be home in three hours' time, as safe As houses ...

So he enters and sits down Opposite and goes for me head on.

'When, for f.u.c.k's sake, are you going to write Something for us? 'If I do write something, Whatever it is, I'll be writing for myself.'

And that was that. Or words to that effect.

The jail walls all those months were smeared with s.h.i.+te.

Out of Long Kesh after his dirty protest The red eyes were the eyes of Ciaran Nugent Like something out of Dante's scurfy h.e.l.l, Drilling their way through the rhymes and images Where I too walked behind the righteous Virgil, As safe as houses and translating freely: When he had said all this, his eyes rolled And his teeth, like a dog's teeth clamping round a bone, Bit into the skull and again took hold.

V.

When I answered that I came from 'far away', The policeman at the roadblock snapped, 'Where's that?'

He'd only half-heard what I said and thought It was the name of some place up the country.

And now it is both where I have been living And where I left a distance still to go Like starlight that is light years on the go From far away and takes light years arriving.

Mycenae Lookout for Cynthia and Dimitri Hadzi The ox is on my tongue Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1 THE WATCHMAN'S WAR

Some people wept, and not for sorrow joy

That the king had armed and upped and sailed for Troy, But inside me like struck sound in a gong That killing-fest, the life-warp and world-wrong It brought to pa.s.s, still augured and endured.

I'd dream of blood in bright webs in a ford, Of bodies raining down like tattered meat On top of me asleep and me the lookout The queen's command had posted and forgotten, The blind spot her farsightedness relied on.

And then the ox would lurch against the gong And deaden it and I would feel my tongue Like the dropped gangplank of a cattle truck, Trampled and rattled, running p.i.s.s and muck, All swimmy-trembly as the lick of fire, A victory beacon in an abattoir ...

Next thing then I would waken at a loss, For all the world a sheepdog stretched in gra.s.s, Exposed to what I knew, still honour-bound To concentrate attention out beyond The city and the border, on that line Where the blaze would leap the hills when Troy had fallen.

My sentry work was fate, a home to go to, An in-between-times that I had to row through Year after year: when the mist would start To lift off fields and inlets, when morning light Would open like the grain of light being split, Day in, day out, I'd come alive again, Silent and sunned as an esker on a plain, Up on my elbows, gazing, biding time In my outpost on the roof ... What was to come Out of that ten years' wait that was the war Flawed the black mirror of my frozen stare.

If a G.o.d of justice had reached down from heaven For a strong beam to hang his scale-pans on He would have found me tensed and ready-made.

I balanced between destiny and dread And saw it coming, clouds bloodshot with the red Of victory fires, the raw wound of that dawn Igniting and erupting, bearing down Like lava on a fleeing population ...

Up on my elbows, head back, shutting out The agony of Clytemnestra's love-shout That rose through the palace like the yell of troops Hurled by King Agamemnon from the s.h.i.+ps.

2 Ca.s.sandra No such thing as innocent bystanding.

Her soiled vest, her little b.r.e.a.s.t.s, her clipped, devast- ated, scabbed punk head, the char-eyed famine gawk she looked camp-f.u.c.ked and simple.

People could feel a missed trueness in them focus, a homecoming in her dropped-wing, half-calculating bewilderment.

No such thing as innocent.

Old King c.o.c.k- of-the-Walk was back, King Kill- the-Child- and-Take- What-Comes, King Agamem- non's drum- balled, old buck's stride was back.

And then her Greek words came, a lamb at lambing time, bleat of clair- voyant dread, the gene-hammer and tread of the roused G.o.d.

And the result- ant shock desire in bystanders to do it to her there and then.

Little rent c.u.n.t of their guilt: in she went to the knife, to the killer wife, to the net over her and her slaver, the Troy reaver, saying, 'A wipe of the sponge, that's it.

The shadow-hinge swings unpredict- ably and the light's blanked out.'

3 HIS DAWN VISION.

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