North (3 page)
Here is the girl's head like an exhumed gourd.
Oval-faced, prune-skinned, prune-stones for teeth.
They unswaddled the wet fern of her hair
And made an exhibition of its coil,
Let the air at her leathery beauty.
Pash of tallow, perishable treasure:
Her broken nose is dark as a turf clod,
Her eyeholes blank as pools in the old workings.
Diodorus Siculus confessed
His gradual ease among the likes of this:
Murdered, forgotten, nameless, terrible
Beheaded girl, outstaring axe
And beatification, outstaring
What had begun to feel like reverence.
I
Kinned by hieroglyphic
peat on a spreadfield
to the strangled victim,
the love-nest in the bracken,
I step through origins
like a dog turning
its memories of wilderness
on the kitchen mat:
the bog floor shakes,
water cheeps and lisps
as I walk down
rushes and heather.
I love this turf-face,
its black incisions,
the cooped secrets
of process and ritual;
I love the spring
off the ground,
each bank a gallows drop,
each open pool
the unstopped mouth
of an urn, a moon-drinker,
not to be sounded
by the naked eye.
II
Quagmire, swampland, morass:
the slime kingdoms,
domains of the cold-blooded,
of mud pads and dirtied eggs.
But bog
meaning soft,
the fall of windless rain,
pupil of amber.
Ruminant ground,
digestion of mollusc
and seed-pod,
deep pollen-bin.
Earth-pantry, bone vault,
sun-bank, embalmer
of votive goods
and sabred fugitives.
Insatiable bride.
Sword-swallower,
casket, midden,
floe of history.
Ground that will strip
its dark side,
nesting ground,
outback of my mind.
III
I found a turf-spade
hidden under bracken,
laid flat, and overgrown
with a green fog.
As I raised it
the soft lips of the growth
muttered and split,
a tawny rut
opening at my feet
like a shed skin,
the shaft wettish
as I sank it upright
and beginning to
steam in the sun.
And now they have twinned
that obelisk:
among the stones,
under a bearded cairn
a love-nest is disturbed,
catkin and bog-cotton tremble
as they raise up
the cloven oak-limb.
I stand at the edge of centuries
facing a goddess.
IV
This centre holds
and spreads,
sump and seedbed,
a bag of waters
and a melting grave.
The mothers of autumn
sour and sink,
ferments of husk and leaf
deepen their ochres.
Mosses come to a head,
heather unseeds,
brackens deposit
their bronze.
This is the vowel of earth
dreaming its root
in flowers and snow,
mutation of weathers
and seasons,
a windfall composing
the floor it rots into.
I grew out of all this
like a weeping willow
inclined to
the appetites of gravity.
V
The hand-carved felloes
of the turf-cart wheels
buried in a litter
of turf mould,
the cupid's bow
of the tail-board,
the socketed lips
of the cribs:
I deified the man
who rode there,
god of the waggon,
the hearth-feeder.
I was his privileged
attendant, a bearer
of bread and drink,
the squire of his circuits.
When summer died
and wives forsook the fields
we were abroad,
saluted, given right-of-way.
Watch our progress
down the haw-lit hedges,
my manly pride
when he speaks to me.
VI
And you, Tacitus,
observe how I make my grove
on an old crannog
piled by the fearful dead:
a desolate peace.
Our mother ground
is sour with the blood
of her faithful,
they lie gargling
in her sacred heart
as the legions stare
from the ramparts.
Come back to this
'island of the ocean'
where nothing will suffice.
Read the inhumed faces
of casualty and victim;
report us fairly,
how we slaughter
for the common good
and shave the heads
of the notorious,
how the goddess swallows
our love and terror.
I
Speaking broad Devonshire,
Ralegh has backed the maid to a tree
As Ireland is backed to England
And drives inland
Till all her strands are breathless:
'Sweesir, Swatter! Sweesir, Swatter!'
He is water, he is ocean, lifting
Her farthingale like a scarf of weed lifting
In the front of a wave.
II
Yet his superb crest inclines to Cynthia
Even while it runs its bent
In the rivers of Lee and Blackwater.
Those are the plashy spots where he would lay
His cape before her. In London, his name
Will rise on water, and on these dark seepings:
Smerwick sowed with the mouthing corpses
Of six hundred papists, 'as gallant and good
Personages as ever were beheld.'
III
The ruined maid complains in Irish,
Ocean has scattered her dreams of fleets,
The Spanish prince has spilled his gold
And failed her. Iambic drums
Of English beat the woods where her poets
Sink like Onan. Rush-light, mushroom-flesh,
She fades from their somnolent clasp
Into ringlet-breath and dew,
The ground possessed and repossessed.
He courted her
With a decadent sweet art
Like the wind's vowel
Blowing through the hazels:
'Are you Diana...?'
And was he Actaeon,
His high lament
The stag's exhausted belling?
I
To-night, a first movement, a pulse,
As if the rain in bogland gathered head
To slip and flood: a bog-burst,
A gash breaking open the ferny bed.
Your back is a firm line of eastern coast
And arms and legs are thrown
Beyond your gradual hills. I caress
The heaving province where our past has grown.
I am the tall kingdom over your shoulder
That you would neither cajole nor ignore.
Conquest is a lie. I grow older
Conceding your half-independent shore
Within whose borders now my legacy
Culminates inexorably.
II
And I am still imperially
Male, leaving you with the pain,
The rending process in the colony,
The battering ram, the boom burst from within.
The act sprouted an obstinate fifth column
Whose stance is growing unilateral.
His heart beneath your heart is a wardrum
Mustering force. His parasitical
And ignorant little fists already
Beat at your borders and I know they're cocked
At me across the water. No treaty
I foresee will salve completely your tracked
And stretchmarked body, the big pain
That leaves you raw, like opened ground, again.
Gunfire barks its questions off Cavehill
And the profiled basalt maintains its stare
South: proud, protestant and northern, and male.
Adam untouched, before the shock of gender.
They still shoot here for luck over a bridegroom.
The morning I drove out to bed me down
Among my love's hideouts, her pods and broom,
They fired above my car the ritual gun.
Sky-born and royal,
snake-choker, dung-heaver,
his mind big with golden apples,
his future hung with trophies,
Hercules has the measure
of resistance and black powers
feeding off the territory.
Antaeus, the mould-hugger,
is weaned at last:
a fall was a renewal
but now he is raised up---
the challenger's intelligence
is a spur of light,
a blue prong graiping him
out of his element
into a dream of loss
and origins---the cradling dark,
the river-veins, the secret gullies
of his strength,
the hatching grounds
of cave and souterrain,
he has bequeathed it all
to elegists. Balor will die
and Byrthnoth and Sitting Bull.
Hercules lifts his arms
in a remorseless V,
his triumph unassailed
by the powers he has shaken,
and lifts and banks Antaeus
high as a profiled ridge,
a sleeping giant,
pap for the dispossessed.
Archimedes thought he could move the world if he could find the right place to position his lever. Billy Hunter said Tarzan shook the world when he jumped down out of a tree.
I sink my crowbar in a chink I know under the masonry of state and statute, I swing on a creeper of secrets into the Bastille. My wronged people cheer from their cages. The guard-dogs are unmuzzled, a soldier pivots a muzzle at the butt of my ear, I am stood blindfolded with my hands above my head until I seem to be swinging from a strappado.
The commandant motions me to be seated. 'I am honoured to add a poet to our list.' He is amused and genuine. 'You'll be safer here, anyhow.'
In the cell, I wedge myself with outstretched arms in the corner and heave, I jump on the concrete flags to test them. Were those your eyes just now at the hatch?
I
I'm writing just after an encounter
With an English journalist in search of 'views
On the Irish thing'. I'm back in winter
Quarters where bad news is no longer news,
Where media-men and stringers sniff and point,
Where zoom lenses, recorders and coiled leads
Litter the hotels. The times are out of joint
But I incline as much to rosary beads
As to the jottings and analyses
Of politicians and newspapermen
Who've scribbled down the long campaign from gas
And protest to gelignite and sten,
Who proved upon their pulses 'escalate',
'Backlash' and 'crack down', 'the provisional wing',
'Polarization' and 'long-standing hate'.
Yet I live here, I live here too, I sing,
Expertly civil-tongued with civil neighbours
On the high wires of first wireless reports,
Sucking the fake taste, the stony flavours
Of those sanctioned, old, elaborate retorts:
'Oh, it's disgraceful, surely, I agree,'
'Where's it going to end?' 'It's getting worse.'
'They're murderers,' 'Internment, understandably...'
The 'voice of sanity' is getting hoarse.
II
Men die at hand. In blasted street and home
The gelignite's a common sound effect:
As the man said when Celtic won, 'The Pope of Rome
's a happy man this night.' His flock suspect
In their deepest heart of hearts the heretic
Has come at last to heel and to the stake.
We tremble near the flames but want no truck
With the actual firing. We're on the make
As ever. Long sucking the hind tit
Cold as a witch's and as hard to swallow
Still leaves us fork-tongued on the border bit:
The liberal papist note sounds hollow
When amplified and mixed in with the bangs
That shake all hearts and windows day and night.
(It's tempting here to rhyme on 'labour pangs'
And diagnose a rebirth in our plight
But that would be to ignore other symptoms.
Last night you didn't need a stethoscope
To hear the eructation of Orange drums
Allergic equally to Pearse and Pope.)
On all sides 'little platoons' are mustering---
The phrase is Cruise O'Brien's via that great
Backlash, Burke---while I sit here with a pestering
Drouth for words at once both gaff and bait
To lure the tribal shoals to epigram
And order. I believe any of us
Could draw the line through bigotry and sham,
Given the right line, aere perennius.
