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Field Work

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

    Oysters

    Our shells clacked on the plates.
    My tongue was a filling estuary,
    My palate hung with starlight:
    As I tasted the salty Pleiades
    Orion dipped his foot into the water.

    Alive and violated
    They lay on their beds of ice:
    Bivalves: the split bulb
    And philandering sigh of ocean.
    Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered.

    We had driven to that coast
    Through flowers and limestone
    And there we were, toasting friendship,
    Laying down a perfect memory
    In the cool of thatch and crockery.

    Over the Alps, packed deep in hay and snow,
    The Romans hauled their oysters south to Rome:
    I saw damp panniers disgorge
    The frond-lipped, brine-stung
    Glut of privilege

    And was angry that my trust could not repose
    In the clear light, like poetry or freedom
    Leaning in from sea. I ate the day
    Deliberately, that its tang
    Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.


    Triptych


    I

    After a Killing

    There they were, as if our memory hatched them,
    As if the unquiet founders walked again:
    Two young men with rifles on the hill,
    Profane and bracing as their instruments.

    Who's sorry for our trouble?
    Who dreamt that we might dwell among ourselves
    In rain and scoured light and wind-dried stones?
    Basalt, blood, water, headstones, leeches.

    In that neuter original loneliness
    From Brandon to Dunseverick
    I think of small-eyed survivor flowers,
    The pined-for, unmolested orchid.

    I see a stone house by a pier.
    Elbow room. Broad window light.
    The heart lifts. You walk twenty yards
    To the boats and buy mackerel.

    And to-day a girl walks in home to us
    Carrying a basket full of new potatoes,
    Three tight green cabbages, and carrots
    With the tops and mould still fresh on them.

    II

    Sibyl

    My tongue moved, a swung relaxing hinge.
    I said to her, 'What will become of us?'
    And as forgotten water in a well might shake
    At an explosion under morning

    Or a crack run up a gable,
    She began to speak.
    'I think our very form is bound to change.
    Dogs in a siege. Saurian relapses. Pismires.

    Unless forgiveness finds its nerve and voice,
    Unless the helmeted and bleeding tree
    Can green and open buds like infants' fists
    And the fouled magma incubate

    Bright nymphs. ... My people think money
    And talk weather. Oil-rigs lull their future
    On single acquisitive stems. Silence
    Has shoaled into the trawlers' echo-sounders.

    The ground we kept our ear to for so long
    Is flayed or calloused, and its entrails
    Tented by an impious augury.
    Our island is full of comfortless noises.'

    III

    At the Water's Edge

    On Devenish I heard a snipe
    And the keeper's recital of elegies
    Under the tower. Carved monastic heads
    Were crumbling like bread on water.

    On Boa the god-eyed, sex-mouthed stone
    Socketed between graves, two-faced, trepanned
    Answered my silence with silence.
    A stoup for rain water. Anathema.

    From a cold hearthstone on Horse Island
    I watched the sky beyond the open chimney
    And listened to the thick rotations
    Of an army helicopter patrolling.

    A hammer and a cracked jug full of cobwebs
    Lay on the windowsill. Everything in me
    Wanted to bow down, to offer up,
    To go barefoot, foetal and penitential,

    And pray at the water's edge.
    How we crept before we walked! I remembered
    The helicopter shadowing our march at Newry
    The scared, irrevocable steps.


    The Toome Road

    One morning early I met armoured cars
    In convoy, warbling along on powerful tyres,
    All camouflaged with broken alder branches,
    And headphoned soldiers standing up in turrets.
    How long were they approaching down my roads
    As if they owned them? The whole country was sleeping.
    I had rights-of-way, fields, cattle in my keeping,
    Tractors hitched to buckrakes in open sheds,
    Silos, chill gates, wet slates, the greens and reds
    Of outhouse roofs. Whom should I run to tell
    Among all of those with their back doors on the latch
    For the bringer of bad news, that small-hours visitant
    Who, by being expected, might be kept distant?
    Sowers of seed, erectors of headstones ...
    O charioteers, above your dormant guns,
    It stands here still, stands vibrant as you pass,
    The invisible, untoppled omphalos.


    A Drink of Water

    She came every morning to draw water
    Like an old bat staggering up the field:
    The pump's whooping cough, the bucket's clatter
    And slow diminuendo as it filled,
    Announced her. I recall
    Her grey apron, the pocked white enamel
    Of the brimming bucket, and the treble
    Creak of her voice like the pump's handle.
    Nights when a full moon lifted past her gable
    It fell back through her window and would lie
    Into the water set out on the table.
    Where I have dipped to drink again, to be
    Faithful to the admonishment on her cup,
    Remember the Giver fading off the lip.


    The Strand at Lough Beg


    IN MEMORY OF COLUM MCCARTNEY

    All round this little island, on the strand
    Far down below there, where the breakers strive,
    Grow the tall rushes from the oozy sand.

    Dante, Purgatorio, I, 100–103

    Leaving the white glow of filling stations
    And a few lonely streetlamps among fields
    You climbed the hills towards Newtownhamilton
    Past the Fews Forest, out beneath the stars —
    Along that road, a high, bare pilgrim's track
    Where Sweeney fled before the bloodied heads,
    Goat-beards and dogs' eyes in a demon pack
    Blazing out of the ground, snapping and squealing.
    What blazed ahead of you? A faked road block?
    The red lamp swung, the sudden brakes and stalling
    Engine, voices, heads hooded and the cold-nosed gun?
    Or in your driving mirror, tailing headlights
    That pulled out suddenly and flagged you down
    Where you weren't known and far from what you knew:
    The lowland clays and waters of Lough Beg,
    Church Island's spire, its soft treeline of yew.

    There you used hear guns fired behind the house
    Long before rising time, when duck shooters
    Haunted the marigolds and bulrushes,
    But still were scared to find spent cartridges,
    Acrid, brassy, genital, ejected,
    On your way across the strand to fetch the cows.
    For you and yours and yours and mine fought shy,
    Spoke an old language of conspirators
    And could not crack the whip or seize the day:
    Big-voiced scullions, herders, feelers round
    Haycocks and hindquarters, talkers in byres,
    Slow arbitrators of the burial ground.

    Across that strand of yours the cattle graze
    Up to their bellies in an early mist
    And now they turn their unbewildered gaze
    To where we work our way through squeaking sedge
    Drowning in dew. Like a dull blade with its edge
    Honed bright, Lough Beg half shines under the haze.
    I turn because the sweeping of your feet
    Has stopped behind me, to find you on your knees
    With blood and roadside muck in your hair and eyes,
    Then kneel in front of you in brimming grass
    And gather up cold handfuls of the dew
    To wash you, cousin. I dab you clean with moss
    Fine as the drizzle out of a low cloud.
    I lift you under the arms and lay you flat.
    With rushes that shoot green again, I plait
    Green scapulars to wear over your shroud.


    A Postcard from North Antrim


    IN MEMORY OF SEAN ARMSTRONG

    A lone figure is waving
    From the thin line of a bridge
    Of ropes and slats, slung
    Dangerously out between
    The cliff-top and the pillar rock.
    A nineteenth-century wind.
    Dulse-pickers. Sea campions.

    A postcard for you, Sean,
    And that's you, swinging alone,
    Antic, half-afraid,
    In your gallowglass's beard
    And swallow-tail of serge:
    The Carrick-a-Rede Rope Bridge
    Ghost-written on sepia.

    Or should it be your houseboat
    Ethnically furnished,
    Redolent of grass?
    Should we discover you
    Beside those warm-planked, democratic wharves
    Among the twilights and guitars
    Of Sausalito?

    Drop-out on a come-back,
    Prince of no-man's land
    With your head in clouds or sand,
    You were the clown
    Social worker of the town
    Until your candid forehead stopped
    A pointblank teatime bullet.

    Get up from your blood on the floor.
    Here's another boat
    In grass by the lough shore,
    Turf smoke, a wired hen-run —
    Your local, hoped for, unfound commune.
    Now recite me William Bloat,
    Sing of the Calabar

    Or of Henry Joy McCracken
    Who kissed his Mary Ann
    On the gallows at Cornmarket.
    Or Ballycastle Fair.
    'Give us the raw bar!'
    'Sing it by brute force
    If you forget the air.'

    Yet something in your voice
    Stayed nearly shut.
    Your voice was a harassed pulpit
    Leading the melody
    It kept at bay,
    It was independent, rattling, non-transcendent
    Ulster — old decency

    And Old Bushmills,
    Soda farls, strong tea,
    New rope, rock salt, kale plants,
    Potato-bread and Woodbine.
    Wind through the concrete vents
    Of a border check-point.
    Cold zinc nailed for a peace line.

    Fifteen years ago, come this October,
    Crowded on your floor,
    I got my arm round Marie's shoulder
    For the first time.
    'Oh, Sir Jasper, do not touch me!'
    You roared across at me,
    Chorus-leading, splashing out the wine.


    Casualty

    I

    He would drink by himself
    And raise a weathered thumb
    Towards the high shelf,
    Calling another rum
    And blackcurrant, without
    Having to raise his voice,
    Or order a quick stout
    By a lifting of the eyes
    And a discreet dumb-show
    Of pulling off the top;
    At closing time would go
    In waders and peaked cap
    Into the showery dark,
    A dole-kept breadwinner
    But a natural for work.
    I loved his whole manner,
    Sure-footed but too sly,
    His deadpan sidling tact,
    His fisherman's quick eye
    And turned observant back.

    Incomprehensible
    To him, my other life.
    Sometimes, on his high stool,
    Too busy with his knife
    At a tobacco plug
    And not meeting my eye,
    In the pause after a slug
    He mentioned poetry.
    We would be on our own
    And, always politic
    And shy of condescension,
    I would manage by some trick
    To switch the talk to eels
    Or lore of the horse and cart
    Or the Provisionals.

    But my tentative art
    His turned back watches too:
    He was blown to bits
    Out drinking in a curfew
    Others obeyed, three nights
    After they shot dead
    The thirteen men in Derry.
    PARAS THIRTEEN, the walls said,
    BOGSIDE NIL. That Wednesday
    Everybody held
    His breath and trembled.

    II

    It was a day of cold
    Raw silence, wind-blown
    Surplice and soutane:
    Rained-on, flower-laden
    Coffin after coffin
    Seemed to float from the door
    Of the packed cathedral
    Like blossoms on slow water.
    The common funeral
    Unrolled its swaddling band,
    Lapping, tightening
    Till we were braced and bound
    Like brothers in a ring.

    But he would not be held
    At home by his own crowd
    Whatever threats were phoned,
    Whatever black flags waved.
    I see him as he turned
    In that bombed offending place,
    Remorse fused with terror
    In his still knowable face,
    His cornered outfaced stare
    Blinding in the flash.

    He had gone miles away
    For he drank like a fish
    Nightly, naturally
    Swimming towards the lure
    Of warm lit-up places,
    The blurred mesh and murmur
    Drifting among glasses
    In the gregarious smoke.
    How culpable was he
    That last night when he broke
    Our tribe's complicity?
    'Now you're supposed to be
    An educated man,'
    I hear him say. 'Puzzle me
    The right answer to that one.'

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Excerpted from Field Work by Seamus Heaney. Copyright © 1979 Seamus Heaney. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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