New and Selected Poems by Seamus Heaney Page A

draped coffin would raft through.
Unquiet soul, they should have buried you
In the bog where you threw your first grenade,
Where only helicopters and curlews
Make their maimed music, and sphagnum moss
Could teach you its medicinal repose
Until, when the weasel whistles on its tail,
No other weasel will obey its call.
       
     
    I dreamt and drifted. All seemed to run to waste
As down a swirl of mucky, glittering flood
Strange polyp floated like a huge corrupt
Magnolia bloom, surreal as a shed breast,
My softly awash and blanching self-disgust.
And I cried among night waters, ‘I repent
My unweaned life that kept me competent
To sleepwalk with connivance and mistrust.’
Then, like a pistil growing from the polyp,
A lighted candle rose and steadied up
Until the whole bright-masted thing retrieved
A course and the currents it had gone with
Were what it rode and showed. No more adrift,
    My feet touched bottom and my heart revived.
       
     
    Then something round and clear
And mildly turbulent, like a bubbleskin
Or a moon in smoothly rippled lough water
Rose in a cobwebbed space: the molten
Inside-sheen of an instrument
Revolved its polished convexes full
Upon me, so close and brilliant
I seemed to pitch back in a headlong fall.
And then it was the clarity of waking
To sunlight and a bell and gushing taps
In the next cubicle. Still there for the taking!
The old brass trumpet with its valves and stops
I found once in loft thatch, a mystery
    I shied from then for I thought such trove beyond me.
       
     
    ‘I hate how quick I was to know my place.
I hate where I was born, hate everything
That made me biddable and unforthcoming,’

I mouthed at my half-composed face
In the shaving mirror, like somebody
Drunk in the bathroom during a party,
Lulled and repelled by his own reflection.
As if the cairnstone could defy the cairn.
As if the eddy could reform the pool.
As if a stone swirled under a cascade,
Eroded and eroding in its bed,
Could grind itself down to a different core.
Then I thought of the tribe whose dances never fail
For they keep dancing till they sight the deer.

X
     
    Morning stir in the hostel. A pot
hooked on forged links. Soot flakes. Plumping water.
The open door brilliant with sunlight.
    Hearthsmoke rambling and a thud of earthenware
       
     
    drumming me back until I saw the mug
beyond my reach on its high shelf, the one
patterned with blue cornflowers, sprig after sprig
    repeating round it, as quiet as a milestone …
       
     
    When had it not been there? There was one night
when fit-up actors used it for a prop
and I sat in the dark hall estranged from it
    as a couple vowed and called it their loving cup
       
     
    and held it in our gaze until the curtain
jerked shut with an ordinary noise.
Dipped and glamoured then by this translation,
    it was restored to its old haircracked doze
       
     
    on the mantelpiece, its parchment glazes fast –
as the otter surfaced once with Ronan’s psalter
miraculously unharmed, that had been lost
    a day and a night under lough water.
       
     
    And so the saint praised God on the lough shore
for that dazzle of impossibility
I credited again in the sun-filled door,
so absolutely light it could put out fire.

XI
     
    As if the prisms of the kaleidoscope
I plunged once in a butt of muddied water
    surfaced like a marvellous lightship
       
     
    and out of its silted crystals a monk’s face
that had spoken years ago from behind a grille
    spoke again about the need and chance
       
     
    to salvage everything, to re-envisage
the zenith and glimpsed jewels of any gift
    mistakenly abased …
       
     
    What came to nothing could always be replenished.
‘Read poems as prayers,’ he said, ‘and for your penance
    translate me something by Juan de la Cruz.’
       
     
    Returned from Spain to our chapped wilderness,
his consonants aspirate, his forehead shining,
    he had made me feel there was nothing to confess.
       
     
    Now his sandalled passage stirred