I sit under Rand McNally’s

‘Official Map of the Moon’ –

The colour of frogskin,

Its enlarged pores held

Open and one called

‘Pitiscus’ at eye level –

Recalling the last night

In Donegal, my shadow

Neat upon the whitewash

From her bony shine,

The cobbles of the yard

Lit pale as eggs.

Summer had been a free fall

Ending there,

The empty amphitheatre

Of the west. Good Friday

We had started out

Past shopblinds drawn on the afternoon,

Cars stilled outside still churches,

Bikes tilting to a wall;

We drove by,

A dwindling interruption,

As clappers smacked

On a bare altar

And congregations bent

To the studded crucifix.

What nails dropped out that hour?

Roads unreeled, unreeled

Falling light as casts

Laid down

On shining waters.

Under the moon’s stigmata

Six thousand miles away,

I imagine untroubled dust,

A loosening gravity,

Christ weighing by his hands.

Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication

for Mary Heaney

1 Sunlight

There was a sunlit absence.

The helmeted pump in the yard

heated its iron,

water honeyed

in the slung bucket

and the sun stood

like a griddle cooling

against the wall

of each long afternoon.

So, her hands scuffled

over the bakeboard,

the reddening stove

sent its plaque of heat

against her where she stood

in a floury apron

by the window.

Now she dusts the board

with a goose’s wing,

now sits, broad-lapped,

with whitened nails

and measling shins:

here is a space

again, the scone rising

to the tick of two clocks.

And here is love

like a tinsmith’s scoop

sunk past its gleam

in the meal-bin.

2. The Seed Cutters

2 The Seed Cutters

They seem hundreds of years away. Brueghel,

You’ll know them if I can get them true.

They kneel under the hedge in a half-circle

Behind a windbreak wind is breaking through.

They are the seed cutters. The tuck and frill

Of leaf-sprout is on the seed potatoes

Buried under that straw. With time to kill,

They are taking their time. Each sharp knife goes

Lazily halving each root that falls apart

In the palm of the hand: a milky gleam,

And, at the centre, a dark watermark.

Oh, calendar customs! Under the broom

Yellowing over them, compose the frieze

With all of us there, our anonymities.

Funeral Rites

I

I shouldered a kind of manhood

stepping in to lift the coffins

of dead relations.

They had been laid out

in tainted rooms,

their eyelids glistening,

their dough-white hands

shackled in rosary beads.

Their puffed knuckles

had unwrinkled, the nails

were darkened, the wrists

obediently sloped.

The dulse-brown shroud,

the quilted satin cribs:

I knelt courteously

admiring it all

as wax melted down

and veined the candles,

the flames hovering

to the women hovering

behind me.

And always, in a corner,

the coffin lid,

its nail-heads dressed

with little gleaming crosses.

Dear soapstone masks,

kissing their igloo brows

had to suffice

before the nails were sunk

and the black glacier

of each funeral

pushed away.