District and Circle (4 page)

Edward Thomas in his khaki tunic

Like one of the Evans brothers out of Leitrim,

Demobbed, “not much changed,” sandy moustached and

     freckled

From being, they said, with Monty in the desert.

The Lagans Road ran for about three quarters of a mile across an area of wetlands. It was one of those narrow country roads with weeds in the middle, grass verges, and high hedges on either side, and all around it marsh and rushes and little shrubs and birch trees. For a minute or two every day, therefore, you were in the wilderness, but on the first morning I went to school it was as if the queen of elfland was leading me away. The McNicholls were neighbours and Philomena McNicholl had been put in charge of me during those first days. Ginger hair, freckled face, green gymfrock—a fey, if ever there was one. I remember my first sight of the school, a couple of low-set Nissen huts raising their corrugated backs above the hedges. From about a quarter of a mile away I could see youngsters running about in the road in front of the buildings and hear shouting in the playground. Years later, when I read an account of how the Indians of the Pacific Northwest foresaw their arrival in the land of the dead—coming along a forest path where other travellers’ cast-offs lay scattered on the bushes, hearing voices laughing and calling, knowing there was a life in the clearing up ahead that would be familiar, but feeling at the same time lost and homesick—it struck me I had already experienced that kind of arrival. Next thing in the porch I was faced with rows of coathooks nailed up at different heights along the wall, so that everyone in the different classes could reach them, everyone had a place to hang overcoat or scarf and proceed to the strange room, where our names were new in the roll-book and would soon be called.

Even though we called them “the gypsies,” we knew that gypsies were properly another race. They inhabited the land of Eros, glimpsed occasionally when the circus rolled into a field and a fortune-teller, swathed in her silks and beads, inclined to us from the back door of a caravan. The people we called “the gypsies” we would now call travellers, although at that time in that place “tinker” was an honourable term, signifying tin-smiths, whitesmiths, pony keepers, regulars on the doorstep, squatters on the long acre. Marvellous upfront women in unerotic woollen shawls, woven in big tartan patterns of tan and mossy green, their baskets full of dyed wooden flowers, their speech cadenced to beg and keep begging with all the stamina of a cantor. Walking the roads in ones and twos, children on their arms or at their heels. Squaws of the ditchback, in step with Yeats’s “tall dames” walking in Avalon.

You encountered them in broad daylight, going about their usual business, yet there was always a feeling that they were coming towards you out of storytime. One of the menfolk, as often as not, with a bit of a halter, you on your way to school, he with a smell of woodsmoke off him, asking if you’d seen an old horse anywhere behind the hedges. The stillness of the low tarpaulin tent as you approached and passed, the green wood in the fire spitting under a pot slung from a tripod. Every time they landed in the district, there was an extra-ness in the air, as if a gate had been left open in the usual life, as if something might get in or get out.

There’s no heat in the bus, but the engine’s running and up where a destination should be showing it just says PRIVATE, so it must be ours. We’re back in the days of peaked caps and braid piping, drivers mounting steps as ominously as hangmen, conductors with plump bags of coin, the ticket punch a-dangle on its chain. But this is a special bus, so there’ll be no tickets, no conductor, and no fare collection until the load is full.

The stops are the same as every other time, clusters of us with suitcases assembled in shop doorways or at the appointed crossroads, the old bus getting up speed wherever the going’s good, but now she’s changing down on Glenshane Pass. The higher she goes, the heavier she pulls, and yet there’s no real hurry. Let the driver keep doing battle with the gear-stick, let his revs and double-clutchings drag the heart, anything to put off that last stop when he slows down at the summit and turns and seems about to take us back. Instead of which he halts, pulls on the handbrake, gives us time to settle, then switches off.

When we start again, the full lock of the steering will be held, the labour of cut and spin leave tyre-marks in the gravel, the known country fall away behind us. But for the moment it’s altogether quiet, the whole bus shakes as he bangs the cabin door shut, comes round the side and in to lift the money. Unfamiliar, uninvolved, almost, it seems, angered, he deals with us one by one, as one by one we go farther into ourselves, wishing we were him on the journey back, flailing downhill with the windows all lit up, empty and faster and angrier bend after bend.

A first green braird: the hawthorn half in leaf.

Her funeral filled the road

And could have stepped from some old photograph

Of a Breton
pardon,
remote

Familiar women and men in caps

Walking four abreast, soon falling quiet.

Then came the throttle and articulated whops

Of a helicopter crossing, and afterwards

Awareness of the sound of our own footsteps,

Of open air, and the life behind those words

“Open” and “air.” I remembered her aghast,

Foetal, shaking, sweating, shrunk, wet-haired,

A beaten breath, a misting mask, the flash

Of one wild glance, like ghost surveillance

From behind a gleam of helicopter glass.

A lifetime, then the deathtime: reticence

Keeping us together when together,

All declaration deemed outspokenness.

Favourite aunt, good sister, faithful daughter,

Delicate since childhood, tough alloy

Of disapproval, kindness, and
hauteur,

She took the risk, at last, of certain joys—

Her birdtable and jubilating birds,

The “fashion” in her wardrobe and her tallboy.

Weather, in the end, would say our say.

Reprise of griefs in summer’s clearest mornings,

Children’s deaths in snowdrops and the may,

Whole requiems at the sight of plants and gardens …

They bore her lightly on the bier. Four women,

Four friends—she would have called them girls—stepped in

And claimed the final lift beneath the hawthorn.

The road taken

to bypass Cavan

took me west,

(a sign mistaken)

so at Derrylin

I turned east.

Sun on ice,

white floss

on reed and bush,

the bridge-iron cast

in an Advent silence

I drove across,

then pulled in,

parked, and sat

breathing mist

on the windscreen.

Requiescat …

I got out

well happed up,

stood at the frozen

shore gazing

at rimed horizon,

my first stop

like this in years.

And blessed myself

in the name of the nonce

and happenstance,

the
Who knows

and
What nexts

and
So be its.

in memory of Ted Hughes

“And what was it like,” I asked him,

“Meeting Eliot?”

                             
“When he looked at you,”

He said, “it was like standing on a quay

Watching the prow of the
Queen Mary

Come towards you, very slowly.”

                                                        
Now it seems

I’m standing on a pierhead watching him

All the while watching me as he rows out

And a wooden end-stopped stern

Labours and shimmers and dips,

Making no real headway.

in memory of Czeslaw Milosz

“Like everybody else, I bowed my head

during the consecration of the bread and wine,

lifted my eyes to the raised host and raised chalice,

believed (whatever it means) that a change occurred.

I went to the altar rails and received the mystery

on my tongue, returned to my place, shut my eyes fast, made

an act of thanksgiving, opened my eyes, and felt

time starting up again.

                                         
There was never a scene

when I had it out with myself or with another.

The loss occurred off stage. And yet I cannot

disavow words like ‘thanksgiving’ or ‘host’

or ‘communion bread.’ They have an undying

tremor and draw, like well water far down.”

You’re off, a pilgrim, in the age of steam:

Derry, Dun Laoghaire, Dover, Rue du Bac

(Prayers for the Blessed M. M. Alacoque,

That she be canonized). Then leisure time

That evening in Paris, whence to Lourdes,

Learning to trust your learning on the way:

“Non, pas de vin, merci. Mais oui, du thé,”

And the waiter’s gone to take you at your word.

Hotel de quoi
in
Rue de quoi
? All gone.

But not your designation,
brancardier,

And your coloured bandolier, as you lift and lay

The sick on stretchers in precincts of the shrine

Or on bleak concrete to await their bath.

And always the word “cure” hangs in the air

Like crutches hung up near the grotto altar.

And always prayers out loud or under breath.

Belgian miners in blue dungarees

March in procession, carrying brass lamps.

Sodalities with sashes, poles, and pennants

Move up the line. Mantillas, rosaries,

And the
unam sanctam catholicam
acoustic

Of that underground basilica—maybe

Not gone but not what was meant to be,

The concrete reinforcement of the Mystical

Body, the Eleusis of its age.

I brought back one plastic canteen litre

On a shoulder strap (
très chic
) of the Lourdes water.

One small glass dome that englobed an image

Of the Virgin above barefoot Bernadette—

Shake it and the clear liquid would snow

Flakes like white angel feathers on the grotto.

And (for stretcher-bearing work) a certificate.

Q. Do you renounce the world?

A. I do renounce it.

Barrie Cooke has begun to paint “godbeams,”

Vents of brightness that make the light of heaven

Look like stretched sheets of fluted silk or rayon

In an old-style draper’s window. Airslides, scrims,

And scumble. Columnar sift. But his actual palette

Is ever sludge and smudge, as if a shower

Made puddles on the spirit’s winnowing floor.

What it reminds me of is a wet night

In Belfast, around Christmas, when the man

Who played the saw inside the puddled doorway

Of a downtown shop, in light from a display

Of tinselled stuffs and sleigh bells blinking neon,

Started to draw his bow across the blade.

The stainless steel was oiled or Vaselined,

The saw stood upside down, and his left hand

Pressed light or heavy as the tune required

Flop-wobble grace note or high banshee whine.

Rain spat upon his threadbare gaberdine,

Into his cap where the occasional tossed coin

Basked on damp lining, the raindrops glittering

Like the saw’s greased teeth his bow caressed and crossed

Back across unharmed. “The art of oil painting—

Daubs fixed on canvas—is a paltry thing

Compared with what cries out to be expressed,”

The poet said, who lies this god-beamed day

Coffined in Kraków, as out of this world now

As the untranscendent music of the saw

He might have heard in Vilnius or Warsaw

And would not have renounced, however paltry.

In Iowa once, among the Mennonites

In a slathering blizzard, conveyed all afternoon

Through sleet-glit pelting hard against the windscreen

And a wiper’s strong absolving slumps and flits,

I saw, abandoned in the open gap

Of a field where wilted corn stalks flagged the snow,

A mowing machine. Snow brimmed its iron seat,

Heaped each spoked wheel with a thick white brow,

And took the shine off oil in the black-toothed gears.

Verily I came forth from that wilderness

As one unbaptized who had known darkness

At the third hour and the veil in tattters.

In Iowa once. In the slush and rush and hiss

Not of parted but as of rising waters.

The three-tongued glacier has begun to melt.

What will we do, they ask, when boulder-milt

Comes wallowing across the delta flats

And the miles-deep shag ice makes its move?

I saw it, ridged and rock-set, from above,

Undead grey-gristed earth-pelt, aeon-scruff,

And feared its coldness that still seemed enough

To iceblock the plane window dimmed with breath,

Deepfreeze the seep of adamantine tilth

And every warm, mouthwatering word of mouth.

A cold clutch, a whole nestful, all but hidden

In last year’s autumn leaf-mould, and I knew

By the mattness and the stillness of them, rotten,

Making death sweat of a morning dew

That didn’t so much shine the shells as damp them.

I was down on my hands and knees there in the wet