Read District and Circle Online
Authors: Seamus Heaney
For the bark, dulled argent, roundly wrapped
And pigeon-collared.
For the splitter-splatter, guttering
Rain-flirt leaves.
For the snub and clot of the first green cones,
Smelted emerald, chlorophyll.
For the scut and scat of cones in winter,
So rattle-skinned, so fossil-brittle.
For the alder-wood, flame-red when torn
Branch from branch.
But mostly for the swinging locks
Of yellow catkins,
Plant it, plant it,
Streel-head in the rain.
Not the brown and fawn car rug, that first one
Spread on sand by the sea but breathing land-breaths,
Its vestal folds unfolded, its comfort zone
Edged with a fringe of sepia-coloured wool tails.
Not the one scraggy with crusts and eggshells
And olive stones and cheese and salami rinds
Laid out by the torrents of the Guadalquivir
Where we got drunk before the corrida.
Instead, again, it’s locked-park Sunday Belfast,
A walled back yard, the dust-bins high and silent
As a page is turned, a finger twirls warm hair,
And nothing gives on the rug or the ground beneath it.
I lay at my length and felt the lumpy earth,
Keen-sensed more than ever through discomfort,
But never shifted off the plaid square once.
When we moved I had your measure and you had mine.
Axe-thumps outside
like wave-hits through
a night ferry:
you
whom I cleave to, hew to,
splitting firewood.
Fiddlehead ferns are a delicacy where? Japan? Estonia? Ireland long ago?
I say Japan because when I think of those delicious things I think of my friend Toraiwa, and the surprise I felt when he asked me about the erotic. He said it belonged in poetry and he wanted more of it.
So here they are, Toraiwa, frilled, infolded, tenderized, in a little steaming basket, just for you.
Niall FitzDuff brought a jar
of crab apple jelly
made from crabs off the tree
that grew at Duff’s Corner—
still grows at Duff’s Corner—
a tree I never once saw
with crab apples on it.
Contrary, unflowery
sky-whisk and bristle, more
twig-fret than fruit-fort,
crabbed
as crabbed could be—
that was the tree
I remembered.
But then—
O my Pablo of earthlife—
when I tasted the stuff
it was freshets and orbs.
My eyes were on stalks,
I was back in an old
rutted cart road, making
the rounds of the district, breasting
its foxgloves, smelling
cow-parsley and nettles, all
of high summer’s smoulder
under our own tree ascendant
in Tamlaghtduff,
its crab-hoard and—yes,
in pure hindsight—corona
of gold.
of gold.
For now,
O my home truth Neruda,
round-faced as the crowd
at the crossroads, with your eyes
I see it, now taste-bud
and tear-duct melt down
and I spread the jelly on thick
as if there were no tomorrow.
And so with tuck and tightening of blouse
And vigorous advance of knee, she was young
Again as the year, out weeding rigs
In the same old skirt and brogues, on top of things
Every time she straightened. And a credit.
Every time she straightened.
Her oatmeal tweed
With pinpoints of red haw and yellow whin,
Its threadbare workadayness hard and common;
Her quick step; her dry hand; all things well-sped;
Her open and closed relations with earth’s work;
And everything passed on without a word.
Heavy, helpless, carefully manhandled
Upstairs every night in a wooden chair
She sat in all day as the sun sundialled
Window-splays across the quiet floor …
Her body heat had entered the braced timber
Two would take hold of, by weighted leg and back,
Tilting and hoisting, the one on the lower step
Bearing the brunt, the one reversing up
Not averting eyes from her hurting bulk,
And not embarrassed, but never used to it.
I think of her warm brow we might have once
Bent to and kissed before we kissed it cold.
Come just after the sun has gone down, watch
This deepening of green in the evening sward:
Is it not as if we’d long since garnered
And stored within ourselves a something which
From feeling and from feeling recollected,
From new hope and half forgotten joys,
And from an inner dark infused with these,
Issues in thoughts as ripe as windfalls scattered
Here under trees like trees in a Dürer woodcut—
Pendent, pruned, the husbandry of years
Gravid in them until the fruit appears—
Ready to serve, replete with patience, rooted
In the knowledge that no matter how above
Measure or expectation, all must be
Harvested and yielded, when a long life willingly
Cleaves to what’s willed and grows in mute resolve.
The hosed-down chamfered concrete pleases him.
He’ll wait a while before he kills the light
On the cleaned up yard, its pails and farrowing crate,
And the cast-iron pump immobile as a herm
Upstanding elsewhere, in another time.
More and more this last look at the wet
Shine of the place is what means most to him—
And to repeat the phrase “My head is light,”
Because it often is as he reaches back
And switches off, a home-based man at home
In the end with little. Except this same
Night after nightness, redding up the work,
The song of a tubular steel gate in the dark
As he pulls it to and starts his uphill trek.
Dorothy young, jig-jigging her iron shovel,
Barracking a pile of lumpy coals
Carted up by one Thomas Ashburner,
Her toothache so ablaze the carter’s name
Goes unremarked as every jolt and jag
Backstabs her through her wrist-bone, neck-bone, jaw-bone.
Dorothy old, doting at the flicker
In a brass companion set, all the companions
Gone or let go, their footfalls on the road
Unlistened for, that sounded once as plump
As the dropping shut of the flap-board scuttle-lid
The minute she’d stacked the grate for their arrival.
The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same …
That carries weight and al
“THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES”
The mass and majesty of this world I bring you
In the small compass of a cast-iron stove lid.
I was the youngster in a Fair Isle jersey
Who loved a lifter made of stainless steel,
The way its stub claw found its clink-fast hold,
The fit and weight and danger as it bore
The red hot solidus to one side of the stove
For the fire-fanged maw of the fire-box to be stoked,
Then the gnashing bucket stowed.
Then the gnashing bucket
So one more time
I tote it, hell-mouth stopper, flat-earth disc,
And replace it safely. Wherefore rake and rattle,
Watch sparks die in the ashpan, poke again,
Think of dark matter in the starlit coalhouse.
At the back of a garden, in earshot of river water,
In a corner walled off like the baths or bake-house
Of an unroofed abbey or broken-floored Roman villa,
They have planted their birch grove. Planted it recently only,
But already each morning it puts forth in the sun
Like their own long grown-up selves, the white of the bark
As suffused and cool as the white of the satin nightdress
She bends and straightens up in, pouring tea,
Sitting across from where he dandles a sandal
On his big time-keeping foot, as bare as an abbot’s.
Red brick and slate, plum tree and apple retain
Their credibility, a CD of Bach is making the rounds
Of the common or garden air. Above them a jet trail
Tapers and waves like a willow wand or a taper.
“If art teaches us anything,” he says, trumping life
With a quote, “it’s that the human condition is private.”
“Yes,” said the proconsul, replacing the scroll,
“indeed the line is true. And beautiful.
Sophocles at his most philosophical.
We’ll talk about a whole lot more down there
and be happy to be seen for what we are.
Here we’re like sentries, watching anxiously,
guarding every locked-up hurt and secret,
but all we cover up here, day and night,
down there we’ll let out, frankly and completely.’
“That is,” said the sophist, with a slow half-smile,
“if down there they ever talk about such things,
if they can be bothered with the like at all.”
Spoken for in autumn, recovered speech
Having its way again, I gave a cry:
“Not beechen green, but these shin-deep coffers
Of copper-fired leaves, these beech boles grey.”
On the grass when I arrive,
Filling the stillness with life,
But ready to scare off
At the very first wrong move.
In the ivy when I leave.
It’s you, blackbird, I love.
I park, pause, take heed.
Breathe. Just breathe and sit
And lines I once translated
Come back: “I want away
To the house of death, to my father
Under the low clay roof.”
And I think of one gone to him,
A little stillness dancer—
Haunter-son, lost brother—
Cavorting through the yard,
So glad to see me home,
My homesick first term over.
And think of a neighbour’s words
Long after the accident:
“Yon bird on the shed roof,
Up on the ridge for weeks—
I said nothing at the time
But I never liked yon bird.”
The automatic lock
Clunks shut, the blackbird’s panic
Is shortlived, for a second
I’ve a bird’s eye view of myself,
A shadow on raked gravel
In front of my house of life.
Hedge-hop, I am absolute
For you, your ready talkback,
Your each stand-offish comeback,
Your picky, nervy goldbeak—
On the grass when I arrive,
In the ivy when I leave.
Seamus Heaney
’s first collection,
Death of a Naturalist
, appeared forty years ago. Since then he has published poetry, criticism, and translations that have established him as the leading poet of his generation. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux