II

You also loved lines pegged out in the garden,

The spade nicking the first straight edge along

The tight white string. Or string stretched perfectly

To make the outline of a house foundation,

Pale timber battens set at right angles

For every corner, each freshly sawn new board

Spick and span in the oddly passive grass.

Or the imaginary line straight down

A field of grazing, to be ploughed open

From the rod stuck in one headrig to the rod

Stuck in the other.

III

All these things entered you

As if they were both the door and what came through it.

They marked the spot, marked time and held it open.

A mower parted the bronze sea of corn.

A windlass hauled the centre out of water.

Two men with a cross-cut kept it swimming

Into a felled beech backwards and forwards

So that they seemed to row the steady earth.

Seeing Things

I

Inishbofin on a Sunday morning.

Sunlight, turfsmoke, seagulls, boatslip, diesel.

One by one we were being handed down

Into a boat that dipped and shilly-shallied

Scaresomely every time. We sat tight

On short cross-benches, in nervous twos and threes,

Obedient, newly close, nobody speaking

Except the boatmen, as the gunwales sank

And seemed they might ship water any minute.

The sea was very calm but even so,

When the engine kicked and our ferryman

Swayed for balance, reaching for the tiller,

I panicked at the shiftiness and heft

Of the craft itself. What guaranteed us –

That quick response and buoyancy and swim –

Kept me in agony. All the time

As we went sailing evenly across

The deep, still, seeable-down-into water,

It was as if I looked from another boat

Sailing through air, far up, and could see

How riskily we fared into the morning,

And loved in vain our bare, bowed, numbered heads.

II

Claritas. The dry-eyed Latin word

Is perfect for the carved stone of the water

Where Jesus stands up to his unwet knees

And John the Baptist pours out more water

Over his head: all this in bright sunlight

On the façade of a cathedral. Lines

Hard and thin and sinuous represent

The flowing river. Down between the lines

Little antic fish are all go. Nothing else.

And yet in that utter visibility

The stone’s alive with what’s invisible:

Waterweed, stirred sand-grains hurrying off,

The shadowy, unshadowed stream itself.

All afternoon, heat wavered on the steps

And the air we stood up to our eyes in wavered

Like the zig-zag hieroglyph for life itself.