New and Selected Poems Read Online Free PDF Page B

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It rang on like the burden of his freedom
       
     
    To try for the right tone – not tract, not thesis –
And walk away from floggings. He who thought to squeeze
His slave’s blood out and waken the free man
Shadowed a convict guide through Sakhalin.

Sandstone Keepsake
     
     
    It is a kind of chalky russet
solidified gourd, sedimentary
and so reliably dense and bricky
    I often clasp it and throw it from hand to hand.
       
     
    It was ruddier, with an underwater
hint of contusion, when I lifted it,
wading a shingle beach on Inishowen.
    Across the estuary light after light
       
     
    came on silently round the perimeter
of the camp. A stone from Phlegethon,
bloodied on the bed of hell’s hot river?
    Evening frost and the salt water
       
     
    made my hand smoke, as if I’d plucked the heart
that damned Guy de Montfort to the boiling flood –
but not really, though I remembered
    his victim’s heart in its casket, long venerated.
       
     
    Anyhow, there I was with the wet red stone
in my hand, staring across at the watch-towers
from my free state of image and allusion,
    swooped on, then dropped by trained binoculars:
       
     
    a silhouette not worth bothering about,
out for the evening in scarf and waders
and not about to set times wrong or right,
stooping along, one of the venerators.

from
Shelf Life
     
     

Granite Chip
     
    Houndstooth stone. Aberdeen of the mind.
       
     
Saying An union in the cup I’ll throw
I have hurt my hand, pressing it hard around
this bit hammered off Joyce’s Martello
    Tower, this flecked insoluble brilliant
       
     
    I keep but feel little in common with –
a kind of stone age circumcising knife,
a Calvin edge in my complaisant pith.
    Granite is jaggy, salty, punitive
       
     
    and exacting. Come to me , it says
all you who labour and are burdened, I
will not refresh you . And it adds, Seize
the day . And, You can take me or leave me .

Old Smoothing Iron
     
    Often I watched her lift it
from where its compact wedge
rode the back of the stove
    like a tug at anchor.
       
     
    To test its heat she’d stare
and spit in its iron face
or hold it up next her cheek
    to divine the stored danger.
       
     
    Soft thumps on the ironing board.
Her dimpled angled elbow
and intent stoop
    as she aimed the smoothing iron
       
     
    like a plane into linen,
like the resentment of women.
To work, her dumb lunge says,
    is to move a certain mass
       
     
    through a certain distance,
is to pull your weight and feel
exact and equal to it.
Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.

Stone from Delphi
     
    To be carried back to the shrine some dawn
when the sea spreads its far sun-crops to the south
and I make a morning offering again:
that I may escape the miasma of spilled blood ,
govern the tongue, fear hybris, fear the god
until he speaks in my untrammelled mouth .

Making Strange
     
     
    I stood between them,
the one with his travelled intelligence
and tawny containment,
    his speech like the twang of a bowstring,
       
     
    and another, unshorn and bewildered
in the tubs of his Wellingtons,
smiling at me for help,
    faced with this stranger I’d brought him.
       
     
    Then a cunning middle voice
came out of the field across the road
saying, ‘Be adept and be dialect,
    tell of this wind coming past the zinc hut,
       
     
    call me sweetbriar after the rain
or snowberries cooled in the fog.
But love the cut of this travelled one
    and call me also the cornfield of Boaz.
       
     
    Go beyond what’s reliable
in all that keeps pleading and pleading,
these eyes and puddles and stones,
    and recollect how bold you were
       
     
    when I visited you first
with departures you cannot go back on.’
A chaffinch flicked from an ash and next thing
I found myself driving the stranger
       
     
    through my own country, adept
at dialect, reciting my pride
in all that I knew, that began to make strange
at that same recitation.

A Hazel Stick for Catherine Ann
     
     
    The