Beautiful Words
Know this: the gorse that scratched a ragged rune
in your sleeve, can’t read, the Jackdaw coughing
loudly overhead, will not speak to you, the bees
skirling the crisp air in arabesques have no songs
for you, the white plum stamping the brambles
with the seal of its petals has nothing to say,
if you have come to find some inspiration
clamber down from here, go back to your car,
tourist, you do not know the names the plants
mumble to the soil, the lily recites to the sun,
shy lines a mouse leaves for a long-eared owl,
the rondo the chaffinch jitters in the bluebells
and they would not answer to them if you did
and when you reach the promised summit,
the dolmen windblown under parchment sky
and find a neolithic rock, toothed at the crest,
its burled, blunt face scaled and spidered over
with moss and lichen, unwriting the knurls
and graven knots there, once sharp lines and
emblems of forgotten ancestors, weathering
back to smooth, you will not find the shapes
the trail sign promised, itself near obscured
by graffiti, but look up, clouds are scrubbing
themselves over the dark slate of the sky,
the wind is a poem and its words are beautiful.
Speaking as the Third Person
with a line from Bobby Sands
We took a walking tour in the streets below the Butcher’s arch,
to see the Peace Museum, the murals, where the Troubles marched.
Our guide spoke only in the third person, looking away
as if he’d not been present in the Bogside on Bloody Sunday:
that’s where the fighting would have been. The sniper would have shot from there.
The kids would have thrown rocks, wore masks for tear gas wet with vinegar.
It occurred to us he’d been there too, banged the rubbish bin lids
to let his neighbours know the troops were coming, like the other kids
and now he’s doomed himself to circle around the backyards of his past,
a journey three streets wide, until his ghosts can be exorcised at last:
the third person out of that alley, around that house, up that hill.
His friend, his neighbour, first and second. To him, they lie there still.
Behind the museum of Free Derry, painted defiance and a preserved wall
under glass – the holes of sniper bullets, like testimonials, like spalls
in a barricade, removed years ago for forensics and partisan commissions,
disbelieving fingers pressed into a wound. Important omissions.
He was called before one enquiry, asked his name, saw what justice means:
was he a Young Catholic Hoodlum? What could he say? He would have been.
For thirty years, but at some point, hate must drain from hate, like lead
and lessons prised from a wall, hauntings hunted from the dead.
At the end of our tour, he spoke of how he’d tired now of war, shook hands,
quoted: our revenge will be the laughter of our children. He understands
the Apprentice Boys a little now. Remembered the poet’s lesson
listening to his grandchildren in the playground. Spoke in the first person.
Calm
Piercing the horizon’s vaporous indecision
on the Dublin to Holyhead ferry, lone
seabird skimming just above the sea, a creel
of kittiwakes making craquelure of water off
to port and here and there an oystercatcher
breaking the mummery of whitecaps with
its head, we pass near the broken headlands
where small lighthouses like wine tuns peer
out into that same grey haze we’re making
through, unmanned now, strung with whining
generators and lights but once the hermitage
of the foolhardy or brave, or mad forced
into exile – the unredeemed – the ones
that keel at an angle to planes the rest of us
glide over. So they stayed for months or years
practising being clear-eyed, visionary,
mackintoshed anchorites, watching the liners
and the ferries brooding past. What would
it cost them to coop upon these rocks?
What knots tighten and what cords loose?
How would the rain sound on the salt-cut
glass? Waves grunting and cursing in their
green footings. What would it take to turn
on the light every night, though the silent
thankless ships roll heedlessly by? I could
not do it. Sometimes, though the crinkled
ocean wrinkles white, at random a flat
section appears, laminar and still. Seabirds
make for these spots, sailboats tack away.
Our ferry carves easily through the rough
and smooth, leaving the lighthouses to stare
blankly at the west, the rumpling waves
tickling at their chins and on their east side
the waves’ shadows flatten out to calm.
The Cork in the Bottle is Wet With Wine
I thought I caught myself in Cork last night,
stumbling and striding with the fine young things
all frowsy in a cloud of vapes and vim, specious
argument or Guinessed up and grinning at me there.
I thought I was that drunk in Cork who grabbed
my arm and breathed a line or two of some dead
saint or poet – an alcoholic breeze of hops or Yeats –
who said, Look up! The moon’s a poet’s eye,
she’ll watch you all night long and through the day,
she’ll turn your life to antic lines and anguish words.
Or perhaps he said the moon’s a poet’s bum
and what that does I did not care to know
I was lost in Gaelic beneath the fumes and accent,
and when I looked up, the up was clouds and rain
and what a poet makes of that are endless words.
I thought I was that barman in Donnelly’s Place
who rousted us out at 11.30 to save his licence,
all tankered up and looking for another glass,
or drape of a homeless man on the church’s steps
who drew the sleeping bag around his shoulders
like a king might sweep his cloak around his neck,
though no kings are welcome hereabouts, unless
the head no longer sports a neck to carry it,
while all around me like that King’s man, Kipling,
might have said, the shot glass shooters were
losing theirs into the gutter of the River Lee.
Oh, why couldn’t I be born in County Cork?
They know how to tip a glass to poets there,
or buy him one anyhow, a thousand open mikes
are shouting over the hubbub in steamy bars
and they’re clapping every second coherent word.
Whatever sickness waits in prose they have the cure.
I thought I was one of the students weaving up
the Gaol Walk while old wise men walked down
Oliver Plunkett Street instead and when I saw
the taxi going down Union Quay the wrong way,
I thought I caught my pale face staring out,
or anyhow, some apparition of petals on a wet
black bough, though they won’t serve that stuff
in the Mutton Lane Inn - they take their poetry
neat in Cork and pour their verses slowly so that
the head settles on the top. I thought I found
myself in Cork last night – the River Lee was wide
and deep and fast and mostly brown and if the rats
rode bottles down its eddied lanes, they did so
for metaphor and not for fame, as poets have been
doing all my life – in Cork - where I was lost
and found and drunk and sober, both.
Lines Composed in the Wordsworth Café, Windemere
Down off the bleak hills, the mist descends,
drearing the dark lake there, making Grasmere white.
Its stonemason chips roof tiles, removes the mossy ends.
I sit in the Wordsworth café in my own fog, try to write.
Yesterday in the little chapel, while the scaffolders swore,
we wandered among gravestones, weathered blank.
A squall pursed our lips blue, then, wind chafed and raw
we rushed back to our car, while the sour sun sank.
Displayed in the castle prison, is a treadmill, now still,
which the prisoners shouldered all day for punishment.
Empty movement, endlessly – its job was to break the will.
If I think what my words are worth, how my time is spent
in turning the mind’s crank handle, in smudging my slate,
I wonder what punishment has measured my fate.
Statement
These poems were written during a trip to Ireland funded with the support of the University of Melbourne Faculty of Arts and the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize, as well as a short digression to the United Kingdom. They form the beginning of a series of poems inspired by my time there, the places I saw, the people I spoke to and the history that is apparent in every street name, every song and every town.
