from Squarings: Lightenings
i
Shifting brilliancies. Then winter light
In a doorway, and on the stone doorstep
A beggar shivering in silhouette.
So the particular judgement might be set:
Bare wallstead and a cold hearth rained into—
Bright puddle where the soul-free cloud-life roams.
And after the commanded journey, what?
Nothing magnificent, nothing unknown.
A gazing out from far away, alone.
And it is not particular at all,
Just old truth dawning: there is no next-time-round.
Unroofed scope. Knowledge-freshening wind.
ii
Roof it again. Batten down. Dig in.
Drink out of tin. Know the scullery cold,
A latch, a door-bar, forged tongs and a grate.
Touch the crossbeam, drive iron in a wall,
Hang a line to verify the plumb
From lintel, coping-stone and chimney-breast.
Relocate the bedrock in the threshold.
Take squarings from the recessed gable pane.
Make your study the unregarded floor.
Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure
The bastion of sensation. Do not waver
Into language. Do not waver in it.
iii
Squarings? In the game of marbles, squarings
Were all those anglings, aimings, feints and squints
You were allowed before you'd shoot, all those
Hunkerings, tensings, pressures of the thumb,
Test-outs and pull-backs, re-envisagings,
All the ways your arms kept hoping towards
Blind certainties that were going to prevail
Beyond the one-off moment of the pitch.
A million million accuracies passed
Between your muscles' outreach and that space
Marked with three round holes and a drawn line.
You squinted out from a skylight of the world.
v
Three marble holes thumbed in the concrete road
Before the concrete hardened still remained
Three decades after the marble-player vanished
Into Australia. Three stops to play
The music of the arbitrary on.
Blow on them now and hear an undersong
Your levelled breath made once going over
The empty bottle. Improvise. Make free
Like old hay in its flimsy afterlife
High on a windblown hedge. Ocarina earth.
Three listening posts up on some hard-baked tier
Above the resonating amphorae.
vi
Once, as a child, out in a field of sheep,
Thomas Hardy pretended to be dead
And lay down flat among their dainty shins.
In that sniffed-at, bleated-into, grassy space
He experimented with infinity.
His small cool brow was like an anvil waiting
For sky to make it sing the perfect pitch
Of his dumb being, and that stir he caused
In the fleece-hustle was the original
Of a ripple that would travel eighty years
Outward from there, to be the same ripple
Inside him at its last circumference.
vii
(I misremembered. He went down on all fours,
Florence Emily says, crossing a ewe-leaze.
Hardy sought the creatures face to face,
Their witless eyes and liability
To panic made him feel less alone,
Made proleptic sorrow stand a moment
Over him, perfectly known and sure.
And then the flock's dismay went swimming on
Into the blinks and murmurs and deflections
He'd know at parties in renowned old age
When sometimes he imagined himself a ghost
And circulated with that new perspective.)
viii
The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise
Were all at prayers inside the oratory
A ship appeared above them in the air.
The anchor dragged along behind so deep
It hooked itself into the altar rails
And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,
A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope
And struggled to release it. But in vain.
'This man can't bear our life here and will drown,'
The abbot said, 'unless we help him.' So
They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back
Out of the marvellous as he had known it.
ix
A boat that did not rock or wobble once
Sat in long grass one Sunday afternoon
In nineteen forty-one or -two. The heat
Out on Lough Neagh and in where cattle stood
Jostling and skittering near the hedge
Grew redolent of the tweed skirt and tweed sleeve
I nursed on. I remember little treble
Timber-notes their smart heels struck from planks,
Me cradled in an elbow like a secret
Open now as the eye of heaven was then
Above three sisters talking, talking steady
In a boat the ground still falls and falls from under.
x
Overhang of grass and seedling birch
On the quarry face. Rock-hob where you watched
All that cargoed brightness travelling
Above and beyond and sumptuously across
The water in its clear deep dangerous holes
On the quarry floor. Ultimate
Fathomableness, ultimate
Stony up-againstness: could you reconcile
What was diaphanous there with what was massive?
Were you equal to or were you opposite
To build-ups so promiscuous and weightless?
Shield your eyes, look up and face the music.
xii
And lightening? One meaning of that
Beyond the usual sense of alleviation,
Illumination, and so on, is this:
A phenomenal instant when the spirit flares
With pure exhilaration before death—
The good thief in us harking to the promise!
So paint him on Christ's right hand, on a promontory
Scanning empty space, so body-racked he seems
Untranslatable into the bliss
Ached for at the moon-rim of his forehead,
By nail-craters on the dark side of his brain:
This day thou shall be with Me in Paradise.
Copyright Credit: Seamus Heaney, "Lightenings" from Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996. Copyright © 1998 by Seamus Heaney. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, www.fsgbooks.com. All rights reserved.
Caution: Users are warned that this work is protected under copyright laws and downloading is strictly prohibited. The right to reproduce or transfer the work via any medium must be secured with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
Caution: Users are warned that this work is protected under copyright laws and downloading is strictly prohibited. The right to reproduce or transfer the work via any medium must be secured with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
Source: Opened Ground: Selected poems 1966-1996 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998)