Essential Poems from the Staying Alive Trilogy (5 page)

I’ve visited the place

where thought begins:

pear trees suspended in sunlight, narrow shops,

alleys to nothing 

but nettles

and broken wars;

and though it might look different

to you: 

a seaside town, with steep roofs

the colour of oysters,

the corner of some junkyard with its glint

of coming rain, 

though someone else again would recognise

the warm barn, the smell of milk,

the wintered cattle

shifting in the dark, 

it’s always the same lit space,

the one good measure:

Sometimes you’ll wake in a chair

as the light is fading, 

or stop on the way to work

as a current of starlings

turns on itself

and settles above the green, 

and because what we learn in the dark

remains all our lives,

a noise like the sea, displacing the day’s

pale knowledge,

you’ll come to yourself

in a glimmer of rainfall or frost,

the burnt smell of autumn,

a meeting of parallel lines,

and know you were someone else

for the longest time,

pretending you knew where you were, like a diffident tourist,

lost on the one main square, and afraid to enquire.

One day life stands

gently smiling like a girl

suddenly on the far side of the stream

and asks

(in her annoying way),

But how did you end up there?

Lives ago, years past generations

perhaps nowhere I dreamed it:

the foggy ploughland of wind

and hoofprints, my father

off in the mist topping beets. 

Where I was eight, I knew nothing,

the world a cold winter light

on half a dozen fields, then

all the winking blether of stars. 

Before like a fool I began

explaining the key in its lost locked box

adding words to the words to the sum

that never works out. 

                                   Where I was

distracted again by the lapwing,

the damp morning air of my father’s

gregarious plainchant cursing

all that his masters deserved

and had paid for.

                               Sure I was

then for the world’s mere being

in the white rime on weeds

among the wet hawthorn berries

at the field’s edge darkened by frost,

and none of these damned words to say it. 

I began trailing out there in voices,

friends, women, my children,

my father’s tetherless anger, some

like him who are dead who are

part of the rain now. 

My father stands in the warm evening

on the porch of my first house.

I am four years old and growing tired.

I see his head among the stars,

the glow of his cigarette, redder

than the summer moon riding

low over the old neighborhood. We

are alone, and he asks me if I am happy.

‘Are you happy?’ I cannot answer.

I do not really understand the word,

and the voice, my father’s voice, is not

his voice, but somehow thick and choked,

a voice I have not heard before, but

heard often since. He bends and passes

a thumb beneath each of my eyes.

The cigarette is gone, but I can smell

the tiredness that hangs on his breath.

He has found nothing, and he smiles

and holds my head with both his hands.

Then he lifts me to his shoulder,

and now I too am there among the stars

as tall as he. Are you happy? I say.

He nods in answer, Yes! oh yes! oh yes!

And in that new voice he says nothing

holding my head tight against his head,

his eyes closed up against the starlight,

as though those tiny blinking eyes

of light might find a tall, gaunt child

holding his child against the promises

of autumn, until the boy slept

never to waken in that world again. 

When all the others were away at Mass

I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.

They broke the silence, let fall one by one

Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:

Cold comforts set between us, things to share

Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.

And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes

From each other’s work would bring us to our senses.

So while the parish priest at her bedside

Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying

And some were responding and some crying

I remembered her head bent towards my head,

Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives –

Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

‘I think I’m going to have it,’

I said, joking between pains.

The midwife rolled competent

sleeves over corpulent milky arms.

‘Dear, you never have it,

we deliver it.’

A judgement years proved true.

Certainly I’ve never had you 

as you still have me, Caroline.

Why does a mother need a daughter?

Heart’s needle, hostage to fortune,

freedom’s end. Yet nothing’s more perfect

than that bleating, razor-shaped cry

that delivers a mother to her baby.

The bloodcord snaps that held

their sphere together. The child,

tiny and alone, creates the mother. 

A woman’s life is her own

until it is taken away

by a first particular cry.

Then she is not alone

but part of the premises

of everything there is:

a time, a tribe, a war.

When we belong to the world

we become what we are. 

I hadn’t met his kind before.

His misericord face – really

like a joke on his father – blurred

as if from years of polish;

his hands like curled dry leaves;

the profligate heat he gave

out, gave out, his shallow,

careful breaths: I thought

his filaments would blow,

I thought he was an emperor,

dying on silk cushions.

I didn’t know how to keep

him wrapped, I didn’t know

how to give him suck, I had

no idea about him. At night

I tried to remember the feel

of his head on my neck, the skull

small as a cat’s, the soft spot

hot as a smelted coin,

and the hair, the down, fine

as the innermost, vellum layer

of some rare snowcreature’s

aureole of fur, if you could meet

such a beast, if you could

get so near. I started there.

I thought you were my victory

though you cut me like a knife

when I brought you out of my body

into your life.

Tiny antagonist, gory,

blue as a bruise. The stains

of your cloud of glory

bled from my veins. 

How can you dare, blind thing,

blank insect eyes?

You barb the air. You sting

with bladed cries. 

Snail. Scary knot of desires.

Hungry snarl. Small son.

Why do I have to love you?

How have you won? 

She betrays me, she leaves me.

She pushes me out of herself, and leaves me.

She offers herself to feed on, and leaves me.

She rocks me and she leaves me.

Wipes my bottom, combs my hair,

caresses the soles of my feet, but leaves me.

My nose drinks in her fragrance, how she hugs me:

she says, ‘I’ll never leave you!’ And she leaves me.

She tricks me: smiling, whispers ‘Don’t be scared!’

I
am
scared, and I’m cold, and yet she leaves me.

She lies down on the bed with me at evening,

but soon enough she slips away and leaves me.

She is so big, so warm, alive, a nest,

she kisses me, and hums to me, and leaves me.

She presses sweets into my open palms

and ‘There you are, eat now,’ she says, and leaves me.

I cry and howl and press her frame to mine;

I can hold her, hit her too; and yet she leaves me.

She shuts the door, does not look back at all,

I’m nothing when she leaves me.

I wait for her return, a cringing cur:

she then arrives and strokes me, and she leaves me.

I need her – it is death to live without her –

she picks me up to warm me, and she leaves me.

Her arms make up a cage, her lap’s a house;

I’d love to go back in there, but she leaves me.

I come to one conclusion: I’m not her:

a stranger, she’s a stranger, and she leaves me.

Out there’s the world, where someone will be waiting!

For you, there will be someone there to leave.

Don’t look back. Shut the door. You know

how easy it is to wait, how hard to go.

Some you’ll grieve, others will deceive you,

some will wait, others fear your lack,

and some there’ll always be who don’t come back:

they give you life, but then they die and leave you.

Your baby grows a tooth, then two,

and four, and five, then she wants some meat

directly from the bone. It’s all

over: she’ll learn some words, she’ll fall

in love with cretins, dolts, a sweet

talker on his way to jail. And you,

your wife, get old, flyblown, and rue

nothing. You did, you loved, your feet

are sore. It’s dusk. Your daughter’s tall.

For I can snore like a bullhorn

or play loud music

or sit up talking with any reasonably sober Irishman

and Fergus will only sink deeper

into his dreamless sleep, which goes by all in one flash,

but let there be that heavy breathing

or a stifled come-cry anywhere in the house

and he will wrench himself awake

and make for it on the run – as now, we lie together,

after making love, quiet, touching along the length of our bodies,

familiar touch of the long-married,

and he appears – in his baseball pajamas, it happens,

the neck opening so small he has to screw them on –

and flops down between us and hugs us and snuggles himself to sleep,

his face gleaming with satisfaction at being this very child.

In the half darkness we look at each other

and smile

and touch arms across this little, startlingly muscled body –

this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making,

sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake,

this blessing love gives again into our arms.

We were talking about the great things

that have happened in our lifetimes;

and I said, ‘Oh, I suppose the moon landing

was the greatest thing that has happened

in my time.’ But, of course, we were all lying.

The truth is the moon landing didn’t mean

one-tenth as much to me as one night in 1963

when we lived in a three-room flat in what once had been

the mansion of some Victorian merchant prince

(our kitchen had been a clothes closet, I’m sure),

on a street where by now nobody lived

who could afford to live anywhere else.

That night, the three of us, Claudine, Johnnie and me,

woke up at half-past four in the morning

and ate cinnamon toast together. 

‘Is that all?’ I hear somebody ask.

Oh, but we were silly with sleepiness

and, under our windows, the street-cleaners

were working their machines and conversing in Italian, and

everything was strange without being threatening,

even the tea-kettle whistled differently

than in the daytime: it was like the feeling

you get sometimes in a country you’ve never visited

before, when the bread doesn’t taste quite the same,

the butter is a small adventure, and they put

paprika on the table instead of pepper,

except that there was nobody in this country

except the three of us, half-tipsy with the wonder

of being alive, and wholly enveloped in love.