Read an Excerpt
Snow Falling on Chestnut Hill
New and Selected Poems
By John F. Deane Carcanet Press Ltd
Copyright © 2013 John F. Deane
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84777-714-0
CHAPTER 1
from Toccata and Fugue (2000)
In Dedication
Under the trees the fireflies
zip and go out, like galaxies;
our best poems, reaching in from the periphery,
are love poems, achieving calm.
On the road, the cries of a broken rabbit
were pitched high in their unknowing;
our vehicles grind the creatures down
till the child's tears are for all of us,
dearly beloved, ageing into pain,
and for herself, for what she has discovered
early, beyond this world's loveliness. Always
after the agitated moments, the search for calm.
Curlews scatter now on a winter field, their calls
small alleluias of survival; I offer you
poems, here where there is suffering and joy,
evening, and morning, the first day.
Penance
They leave their shoes, like signatures, below;
above, their God is waiting. Slowly they rise
along the mountainside where rains and winds go
hissing, slithering across. They are hauling up
the bits and pieces of their lives, infractions
of the petty laws, the little trespasses and
sad transgressions. But this bulked mountain
is not disturbed by their passing, by this mere
trafficking of shale, shifting of its smaller stones.
When they come down, feet blistered, and sins
fretted away, their guilt remains and that black
mountain stands against darkness above them.
Winter in Meath
To Tomas Tranströmer
Again we have been surprised,
deprived, as if suddenly,
of the earth's familiarity;
it is like the snatching away of love
making you aware at last you loved;
sorrows force their way in, and pain,
like memories half contained;
the small birds, testing boldness,
leave delicate tracks closer
to the back door
while the cherry flaunts blossoms of frost
and stands in desperate isolation.
* * *
The base of the hedgerow is a cliff of snow,
the field is a still of a choppy sea,
white waves capped in a green spray;
a grave was dug into that hard soil
and overnight the mound of earth
grew stiff and white as stones flung onto a beach.
Our midday ceremony was hurried,
forced hyacinths and holly wreathes dream birds
appearing on our horizonless ocean;
the body sank slowly,
the sea closed over,
things on the seabed
stirred again in expectation.
* * *
This is a terrible desolation –
the word 'forever' stilling all the air
to glass.
* * *
Night tosses and seethes;
mind and body chafed all day
as a mussel-boat restlessly
irritates the mooring;
on estuary water a fisherman
drags a long rake against the tide;
one snap of a rope and boat and this
solitary man
sweep off together into night;
perhaps the light from my window
will register a moment with some god
riding by on infrangible glory.
* * *
At dawn
names of the dead
appear on the pane
beautiful
in undecipherable frost;
breath
hurts them
and they fade.
* * *
The sea has gone grey as the sky
and as violent;
pier and jetty go under
again and again
as a people suffering losses;
a flock of teal from the world's edge
moves low over the water
finding grip for their wings along the wind;
already, among stones, a man, like a priest,
stooping in black clothes, has begun beachcombing;
the dead, gone silent in their graves,
have learned the truth about resurrection.
* * *
You can almost look into the sun
silver in its silver-blue monstrance
cold over the barren white cloth of the world;
for nothing happens;
each day is an endless waiting
for the freezing endlessness of the dark;
once – as if you had come across
a photograph, or a scarf maybe –
a silver monoplane like a knife-blade cut
across the still and haughty sky
but the sky healed up again after the passing
that left only a faint, pink thread,
like a scar.
Ghost
I sat where she had sat
in the fireside chair
expecting her to come down the stairs
into the kitchen;
the door was open, welcoming;
coals shifted in the Rayburn,
a kettle hummed,
she heard the susurrations of the fridge;
she had surrounded herself with photographs,
old calendars, hand-coloured picture-postcards;
sometimes a robin looked in at her from the world
or a dog barked vacantly from the hill;
widowed she sat, in the fireside chair,
leaning into a populated past;
she sat so quietly, expecting ghosts,
that a grey mouse moved by, uncurious
till she stomped her foot against the floor;
and did she sense, I wondered, the ghost
who would come after her death to sit
where she had sat, in the fireside chair?
Artist
This was the given image –
a moulded man-body
elongated into pain, the head
sunk in abandonment: the cross;
I see it now
as the ultimate in ecstasy,
attention focused, the final words
rehearsed, there are black
nail-heads and contrasting
plashes of blood
like painter's oils: self-portrait
with grief and darkening sky;
something like Hopkins,
our intent, depressive scholar
who gnawed on the knuckle-bones of words
for sustenance – because God
scorched his bones with nearness
so that he cried with a loud voice
out of the entangling, thorny
underbrush of language.
Christ, with Urban Fox
I
He was always there for our obeisance,
simple, ridiculous,
not sly, not fox, up-front – whatever
man-God, God-man, Christ – but there.
Dreadlocks almost, and girlish, a beard
trim in fashion, his feminine
fingers pointing to a perfect
heart chained round with thorns;
his closed and slim-fine lips
inveigling us towards pain.
II
Did he know his future? while his blood
slicked hotly down the timbers did he know
the great hasped rock of the tomb
would open easily as a book of poems
breathing the words out? If he knew
then his affliction is charade, as is our hope;
if he was ignorant – his mind, like ours,
vibrating with upset – then his embrace of pain
is foolishness beyond thought, and there –
where we follow, clutching to the texts –
rests our trust, silent, wide-eyed, appalled.
III
I heard my child scream out
in pain on her hospital bed,
her eyes towards me where I stood
clenched in my distress;
starched sheets, night-lights, night-fevers,
soft wistful cries of pain,
long tunnel corridors down which flesh
lies livid against the bone.
IV
Look at him now, this king of beasts, grown
secretive before our bully-boy modernity,
master-shadow among night-shadows,
skulking through our wastes. I watched a fox
being tossed under car wheels, thrown like dust
and rising out of dust, howling in its agony;
this is not praise, it is obedience,
the way the moon suffers its existence,
the sky its seasons. Man-God, God-man, Christ,
suburban scavenger – he has danced
the awful dance, the blood-jig, has been strung
up as warning to us all, his snout
nudging still at the roots of intellect.
The Fox-God
Across the fields and ditches, across the unbridgeable
mean width of darkness, a fox barked out its agony;
all night it fretted, whimpering like a famished child,
and the rain fell without pity; it chewed at its flesh,
gnawed on its bared bone, until, near dawn, it died.
The fox, they will say, is vermin, and its god
a vermin god; it will not know, poor creature,
how it is suffering – it is yourself you grieve for.
While I, being still a lover of angels, demanding
a Jacob's ladder beyond our fields, breathed
may El Shaddai console you into that darkness.
I know there was no consolation. No fox-god came.
But at dawn, man the enemy came stalking fields,
snares in his bag, a shotgun cocked. Poor
creatures. The gap out of life, we have learned,
is fenced over with affliction. We, too, some dusk,
will take a stone for pillow, we will lie down, snared,
on the uncaring earth. Poor creatures. Poor creatures.
The Taking of the Lambs
The ewes were shifting in the darkness,
exhaling sorrow in wooden
dunts of incomprehension; lightning
skittered on the horizon,
the milky way
was a vast meandering sheep-track;
the gate was barred again
and the hard hooves of the ewes
slithered in the glaur,
their legs too thin tonight to sustain
the awful weight of their bodies;
the sheep-dogs stretched, contented,
soon to be swore at again,
curmudgeoned and cringing
and the dung-stained truck
loomed in the yard; night
seemed the shadow of a maker God
laid down over the world,
and even the stars in their obedience
stepped out their side-shuffle dance
of destruction, the thunder
eventually rolling down.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Snow Falling on Chestnut Hill by John F. Deane. Copyright © 2013 John F. Deane. Excerpted by permission of Carcanet Press Ltd.
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