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When you have nothing more to say, just drive
For a day all round the peninsula.
The sky is tall as over a runway,
The land without marks, so you will not arrive
But pass through, though always skirting landfall.
At dusk, horizons drink down sea and hill,
The ploughed field swallows the whitewashed gable
And you're in the dark again. Now recall
The glazed foreshore and silhouetted log,
That rock where breakers shredded into rags,
The leggy birds stilted on their own legs,
Islands riding themselves out into the fog,
And drive back home, still with nothing to say
Except that now you will uncode all landscapes
By this: things founded clean on their own shapes,
Water and ground in their extremity.
I sense the pads
unfurling under grass and clover:
if I lie with my ear
in this loop of silence
long enough, thigh-bone
and shoulder against the phantom ground,
I expect to pick up
a small drumming
and must not be surprised
in bursting air
to find myself snared, swinging
an ear-ring of sharp wire.
Light was calloused in the leaded panes of the college chapel and shafted into the terrazzo
rink of the sanctuary. The duty priest tested his diction against pillar and plaster, we
tested our elbows on the hard bevel of the benches or split the gold-barred thickness of
our missals.
I could make a book of hours of those six years, a Flemish calendar of rite
and pastime set on a walled hill. Look: there is a hillside cemetery behind us and across the
river the plough going in a field and in between, the gated town. Here, an obedient clerk
kissing a bishop's ring, here a frieze of seasonal games, and here the assiduous illuminator
himself, bowed to his desk in a corner.
In the study hall my hand was cold as a scribe's in winter. The supervisor
rustled past, sibilant, vapouring into his breviary, his welted brogues unexpectedly secular
under the soutane. Now I bisected the line AB, now found my foothold in a main vern in Livy.
From my dormer after lights out I revised the constellations and in the morning broke the ice
on an enamelled water-jig with exhilarated self-regard.
I can feel the tug
of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.
It blows her nipples
to amber beads,
it shakes the frail rigging
of her ribs.
I can see her drowned
body in the bog,
the weighing stone,
the floating rods and boughs.
Under which at first
she was a barked sapling
that is dug up
oak-bone, brain-firkin:
her shaved head
like a stubble of black corn,
her blindfold a soiled bandage,
her noose a ring
to store
the memories of love.
Little adulteress,
before they punished you
you were flaxen-haired,
undernourished, and your
tar-black face was beautiful.
My poor scapegoat,
I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur
of your brain's exposed
and darkened combs,
your muscles' webbing
and all your numbered bones:
I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,
who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.
A rowan like a lipsticked girl.
Between the by-road and the main road
Alder trees at a wet and dripping distance
Stand off among the rushes.
There are the mud-flowers of dialect
And the immortelles of perfect pitch
And that moment when the bird sings very close
To the music of what happens.
When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes
From each other's work would bring us to our senses.
So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying
I remembered her head bent towards my head,
Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives -
Never closer the whole rest of our lives.
Poems 1966-1996
