People here used to believe

that drowned souls lived in the seals.

At spring tides they might change shape.

They loved music and swam in for a singer

who might stand at the end of summer

in the mouth of a whitewashed turf-shed,

his shoulder to the jamb, his song

a rowboat far out in evening.

When I came here first you were always singing,

a hint of the clip of the pick

in your winnowing climb and attack.

Raise it again, man. We still believe what we hear.

Elegy

The way we are living,

timorous or bold,

will have been our life.

Robert Lowell,

the sill geranium is lit

by the lamp I write by,

a wind from the Irish Sea

is shaking it –

here where we all sat

ten days ago, with you,

the master elegist

and welder of English.

As you swayed the talk

and rode on the swaying tiller

of yourself, ribbing me

about my fear of water,

what was not within your empery?

You drank America

like the heart’s

iron vodka,

promulgating art’s

deliberate, peremptory

love and arrogance.

Your eyes saw what your hand did

as you Englished Russian,

as you bullied out

heart-hammering blank sonnets

of love for Harriet

and Lizzie, and the briny

water-breaking dolphin –

your dorsal nib

gifted at last

to inveigle and to plash,

helmsman, netsman, retiarius.

That hand. Warding and grooming

and amphibious.

Two a.m., seaboard weather.

Not the proud sail of your great verse …

No. You were our night ferry

thudding in a big sea,

the whole craft ringing

with an armourer’s music

the course set wilfully across

the ungovernable and dangerous.

And now a teem of rain

and the geranium tremens.

A father’s no shield

for his child –

you found the child in me

when you took farewells

under the full bay tree

by the gate in Glanmore,

opulent and restorative

as that lingering summertime,

the fish-dart of your eyes

risking, ‘I’ll pray for you.’

.

from Glanmore Sonnets

for Ann Saddlemyer

‘our heartiest welcomer’

II

Sensings, mountings from the hiding places,

Words entering almost the sense of touch,

Ferreting themselves out of their dark hutch –

‘These things are not secrets but mysteries,’

Oisin Kelly told me years ago

In Belfast, hankering after stone

That connived with the chisel, as if the grain

Remembered what the mallet tapped to know.

Then I landed in the hedge-school of Glanmore

And from the backs of ditches hoped to raise

A voice caught back off slug-horn and slow chanter

That might continue, hold, dispel, appease:

Vowels ploughed into other, opened ground,

Each verse returning like the plough turned round.