As I Rode by Granard Moat (12 page)

That Sunday, on my oath, the rain was a heavy overcoat

On a poor poet, and when the rain began

In fleeces of water to buckleap like a goat

I was only a walking penance reaching Kiltartan;

And there, so suddenly that my cold spine

Broke out on the arch of my back like a rainbow,

This woman surged out of the day with so much sunlight

I was nailed there like a scarecrow,

But I found my tongue and the breath to balance it

And I said: ‘If I bow to you with this hump of rain

I’ll fall on my collarbone, but look, I’ll chance it,

And after falling, bow again.’

She laughed, ah, she was gracious, and softly she said to me,

‘For all your lovely talking I go marketing with an ass,

I’m no hill-queen, alas, or Ireland, that grass widow,

So hurry on, sweet Raftery, or you’ll keep me late for Mass!’

The parish priest has blamed me for missing second Mass

And the bell talking on the rope of the steeple,

But the tonsure of the poet is the bright crash

Of love that blinds the irons on his belfry,

Were I making an Aisling I’d tell the tale of her hair,

But now I’ve grown careful of my listeners

So I pass over one long day and the rainy air

Where we sheltered in whispers.

When we left the dark evening at last outside her door,

She lighted a lamp though a gaming company

Could have sighted each trump by the light of her unshawled poll,

And indeed she welcomed me

With a big quart bottle and I mooned there over glasses

Till she took that bird, the phoenix, from the spit;

And ‘Raftery,’ says she, ‘a feast is no bad dowry,

Sit down now and taste it!’

If I praised Ballylee before it was only for the mountains

Where I broke horses and ran wild,

And not for its seven crooked smoky houses

Where seven crones are tied

All day to the listening top of a half door,

And nothing to be heard or seen

But the drowsy dropping of water

And a gander on the green.

But, Boys! I was blind as a kitten till last Sunday.

This town is Earth’s very navel!

Seven palaces are thatched there of a Monday,

And O the seven queens whose pale

Proud faces with their seven glimmering sisters,

The Pleiads, light the evening where they stroll,

And one can find the well by their wet footprints,

And make one’s soul;

For Mary Hynes, rising, gathers up there

Her ripening body from all the love stories;

And, rinsing herself at morning, shakes her hair

And stirs the old gay books in libraries;

And what shall I do with sweet Boccaccio?

And shall I send Ovid back to school again

With a new headline for his copybook,

And a new pain?

Like a nun she will play you a sweet tune on a spinet,

And from such grasshopper music leap

Like Herod’s hussy who fancied a saint’s head

For grace after meat;

Yet she’ll peg out a line of clothes on a windy morning

And by noonday put them ironed in the chest,

And you’ll swear by her white fingers she does nothing

But take her fill of rest.

And I’ll wager now that my song is ended,

Loughrea, that old dead city where the weavers

Have pined at the mouldering looms since Helen broke the thread,

Will be piled again with silver fleeces:

O the new coats and big horses! The raving and the ribbons!

And Ballylee in hubbub and uproar!

And may Raftery be dead if he’s not there to ruffle it

On his own mare, Shank’s mare, that never needs a spur!

But ah, Sweet Light, though your face coins

My heart’s very metals, isn’t it folly without pardon

For Raftery to sing so that men, east and west, come

Spying on your vegetable garden?

We could be so quiet in your chimney corner –

Yet how could a poet hold you anymore than the sun,

Burning in the big bright hazy heart of harvest,

Could be tied in a henrun?

Bless your poet then and let him go!

He’ll never stack a haggard with his breath:

His thatch of words will not keep rain or snow

Out of the house, or keep back death.

But Raftery, rising, curses as he sees you

Stir the fire and wash delph,

That he was bred a poet whose selfish trade it is

To keep no beauty to himself.

Not a sinner in Dunquin

recollects John Synge –

‘that meditative man, John Synge’;

Cumeenole to Ballyferriter,

they’ve ‘never heard of him.’

I wonder, if I went enquiring

through the stone-piled Aran Islands,

round Glenmalure or Glenmacnass,

Kippure or Lough Nahanagan,

would there any remember him,

any have heard of him?

That meditative man, John Synge,

like the catgut and silken string

he brought out of France or Spain

and fingered for Maurice Keane,

is snapt, scrapped and unstrung,

is cast down in the dung;

the fiddle come-over from France

makes none in Beg-Innish dance;

the birdcatcher left no mark

on the sod of his lark.

That violent man, James Lynchehaun,

left sagas in Achill;

that mite of a man, O Crihan,

yarns Ireland to the Blaskets;

but Synge’s reverberant name –

like young men of Aran,

young girls of the Blaskets –

took ship from the Western World,

and has never returned.

The barrels of blue potato-spray

Stood on a headland of July

Beside an orchard wall where roses

Were young girls swinging from the sky.

The flocks of green potato-stalks

Were blossom-spread for sudden flight;

The Arran Banners wearing blue,

The Kerrs Pinks in a frivelled white.

And over that potato field

A lazy veil of woven sun;

Dandelions growing on headlands, showing

Their unpraised hearts to everyone.

And I was there with a knapsack sprayer

On the barrel’s edge poised. A wasp was floating

Dead on a withered briar-leaf

Over a copper-poisoned ocean.

The axle-roll of a rut-locked cart

Broke the burnt stick of noon in two.

An old man came through a cornfield

Remembering his youth and the Ruth he knew.

He turned my way. ‘God further the work.’

He echoed an ancient farming prayer.

I thanked him. He eyed the potato drills.

He said: ‘You’re bound to have good ones there.’

We talked, and our talk was a theme of kings,

A theme for strings. He hunkered down

In the shade of the orchard wall. O roses,

The old man dies in the young girl’s frown.

And poet lost to potato fields,

Remembering the lime and copper smell

Of the spraying mixture, he is not lost,

Or till blossomed stalks cannot weave a spell.

We have tested and tasted too much, lover –

Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder.

But here in this Advent-darkened room

Where the dry black bread and the sugarless tea

Of penance will charm back the luxury

Of a child’s soul we’ll return to Doom

The knowledge we stole but could not use.

And the newness that was in every stale thing

When we looked at it as children: the spirit-shocking

Wonder in a black slanting Ulster hill

Or the prophetic astonishment in the tedious talking

Of an old fool will awake for us and bring

You and me to the yard-gate to watch the whins

And the bog-holes, cart-tracks, old stables where Time begins.

O after Christmas we’ll have no need to go searching

For the difference that sets an old phrase burning –

We’ll hear it in the whispered argument of a churning

Or in the streets where the village boys are lurching

And we’ll hear it among simple decent men too

Who barrow dung in gardens under trees,

Wherever life pours ordinary plenty.

Won’t we be rich, my love and I, and please

God we shall not ask for Reason’s payment,

The why of heart-breaking strangeness in dreeping hedges

Nor analyse God’s breath in common statement.

We have thrown into the dust-bin the clay-minted wages

Of pleasure, knowledge and the conscious hour.

And Christ comes with a January flower.

Spring stops me suddenly like ground

Glass under a door, squeaking and gibbering.

I put my hand to my cheek and the tips

Of my fingers feel blood pulsing and quivering.

A bud on a branch brushes the back

Of my hand and I look, without moving, down.

Summer is there, screwed and fused, compressed,

Neat as a bomb, its casing a dull brown.

From the window of a farther tree I hear

A chirp and a twitter; I blink.

A tow-headed vamp of a finch on a branch

Cocks a roving eye, tips me the wink

And, instantly, the whole great hot-lipped ensemble

Of birds and birds, of clay and glass doors,

Reels in with its ragtime chorus, staggering

The theme of the time, a jam-session’s rattle and roar

With drums of summer jittering in the background

Dully and, deeper down and more human, the sobbing

Oboes of autumn falling across the track of the tune,

Winter’s furtive bassoon like a sea-lion snorting and bobbing.

There is something here I do not get,

Some menace that I do not comprehend,

Yet, so intoxicating is the song,

I cannot follow its thought right to the end.

So up the garden path I go with Spring

Promising sacks and robes to rig my years

And a young girl to gladden my heart in a tartan

Scarf and freedom from my facile fears.

I see her poised upon the four smooth hooves;

The hind legs stretch a little from the body

In one taut line that, like the line of a bow,

Curves to the feathered dart. As on wet rooves

Glistens the sunlight, on the silken skin

It flickers, as if half-hidden sinews throw

The strain up to the raised, expectant head.

I see her walk upon the summer grass

And the faint move of muscles under a coat

That turns from violent copper almost to mauve;

Then suddenly the head’s thrown up, the forelegs double

And the veiled speed is loosed

Into a bright shadow past our eyes,

Till, streaming neck outstretched, the hollow clap

Of flying hooves grows faint in the far distance.

And gazing after her I hear my heart

Beat as though stirred to quicker life again.