Lives

(for Seamus Heaney)

First time out

I was a torc of gold

And wept tears of the sun.

That was fun

But they buried me

In the earth two thousand years

Till a labourer

Turned me up with a pick

In eighteen fifty-four.

Once I was an oar

But stuck in the shore

To mark the place of a grave

When the lost ship

Sailed away. I thought

Of Ithaca, but soon decayed.

The time that I liked

Best was when

I was a bump of clay

In a Navaho rug,

Put there to mitigate

The too god-like

Perfection of that

Merely human artifact.

I served my maker well —

He lived long

To be struck down in

Denver by an electric shock

The night the lights

Went out in Europe

Never to shine again.

So many lives,

So many things to remember!

I was a stone in Tibet,

A tongue of bark

At the heart of Africa

Growing darker and darker . . .

It all seems

A little unreal now,

Now that I am

An anthropologist

With my own

Credit card, dictaphone,

Army-surplus boots

And a whole boatload

Of photographic equipment.

I know too much

To be anything any more;

And if in the distant

Future someone

Thinks he has once been me

As I am today,

Let him revise

His insolent ontology

Or teach himself to pray.

Copyright Credit: Derek Mahon, "Lives" from New Collected Poems . Copyright © 2011 by Derek Mahon. Reprinted by permission of The Gallery Press.

Source: New Collected Poems (The Gallery Press, 2011)