Heaney - The haw lantern

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the authors copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy. Contents For Bernard and Jane McCabe The riverbed, dried-up, half-full of leaves. Us, listening to a river in the trees.

Alphabets I A shadow his father makes with joined hands And thumbs and fingers nibbles on the wall Like a rabbits head. He understands He will understand more when he goes to school. There he draws smoke with chalk the whole first week, Then draws the forked stick that they call a Y. This is writing. A swans neck and swans back Make the 2 he can see now as well as say. Two rafters and a cross-tie on the slate Are the letter some call ah, some call ay.

There are charts, there are headlines, there is a right Way to hold the pen and a wrong way. First it is copying out, and then English Marked correct with a little leaning hoe. Smells of inkwells rise in the classroom hush. A globe in the window tilts like a coloured O. II Declensions sang on air like a hosanna As, column after stratified column, Book One of Elementa Latina, Marbled and minatory, rose up in him. For he was fostered next in a stricter school Named for the patron saint of the oak wood Where classes switched to the pealing of a bell And he left the Latin forum for the shade Of new calligraphy that felt like home.

The letters of this alphabet were trees. The capitals were orchards in full bloom, The lines of script like briars coiled in ditches. Here in her snooded garment and bare feet, All ringleted in assonance and woodnotes, The poets dream stole over him like sunlight And passed into the tenebrous thickets. He learns this other writing. He is the scribe Who drove a team of quills on his white field. Round his cell door the blackbirds dart and dab.

Then self-denial, fasting, the pure cold. By rules that hardened the farther they reached north He bends to his desk and begins again. Christs sickle has been in the undergrowth. The script grows bare and Merovingian. III The globe has spun. He stands in a wooden O.

He alludes to Shakespeare. He alludes to Graves. Time has bulldozed the school and school window. Balers drop bales like printouts where stooked sheaves Made lambdas on the stubble once at harvest And the delta face of each potato pit Was patted straight and moulded against frost. All gone, with the omega that kept Watch above each door, the good luck horse-shoe. Yet shape-note language, absolute on air As Constantines sky-lettered IN HOC SIGNO Can still command him; or the necromancer Who would hang from the domed ceiling of his house A figure of the world with colours in it So that the figure of the universe And not just single things would meet his sight When he walked abroad.

As from his small window The astronaut sees all he has sprung from, The risen, aqueous, singular, lucent O Like a magnified and buoyant ovum Or like my own wide pre-reflective stare All agog at the plasterer on his ladder Skimming our gable and writing our name there With his trowel point, letter by strange letter. Terminus I When I hoked there, I would find An acorn and a rusted bolt. If I lifted my eyes, a factory chimney And a dormant mountain. If I listened, an engine shunting And a trotting horse. Is it any wonder when I thought I would have second thoughts? II When they spoke of the prudent squirrels hoard It shone like gifts at a nativity. When they spoke of the mammon of iniquity The coins in my pockets reddened like stove-lids.

I was the march drain and the march drains banks Suffering the limit of each claim. III Two buckets were easier carried than one. I grew up in between. My left hand placed the standard iron weight. My right tilted a last grain in the balance. Baronies, parishes met where I was born.

When I stood on the central stepping stone I was the last earl on horseback in midstream Still parleying, in earshot of his peers. From the Frontier of Writing The tightness and the nilness round that space when the car stops in the road, the troops inspect its make and number and, as one bends his face towards your window, you catch sight of more on a hill beyond, eyeing with intent down cradled guns that hold you under cover and everything is pure interrogation until a rifle motions and you move with guarded unconcerned acceleration a little emptier, a little spent as always by that quiver in the self, subjugated, yes, and obedient. So you drive on to the frontier of writing where it happens again. The guns on tripods; the sergeant with his on-off mike repeating data about you, waiting for the squawk of clearance; the marksman training down out of the sun upon you like a hawk. And suddenly youre through, arraigned yet freed, as if youd passed from behind a waterfall on the black current of a tarmac road past armour-plated vehicles, out between the posted soldiers flowing and receding like tree shadows into the polished windscreen. The Haw Lantern The wintry haw is burning out of season, crab of the thorn, a small light for small people, wanting no more from them but that they keep the wick of self-respect from dying out, not having to blind them with illumination.

But sometimes when your breath plumes in the frost it takes the roaming shape of Diogenes with his lantern, seeking one just man; so you end up scrutinized from behind the haw he holds up at eye-level on its twig, and you flinch before its bonded pith and stone, its blood-prick that you wish would test and clear you, its pecked-at ripeness that scans you, then moves on. The Stone Grinder Penelope worked with some guarantee of a plot. Whatever she unweaved at night might advance it all by a day. Me, I ground the same stones for fifty years and what I undid was never the thing I had done. I was unrewarded as darkness at a mirror. I prepared my surface to survive what came over it cartographers, printmakers, all that lining and inking.

I ordained opacities and they haruspicated. For them it was a new start and a clean slate every time. For me, it was coming full circle like the ripple perfected in stillness. So. To commemorate me. Imagine the faces stripped off the face of a quarry.

Practise coitus interruptus on a pile of old lithographs. A Daylight Art for Norman MacCaig On the day he was to take the poison Socrates told his friends he had been writing: putting Aesops fables into verse. And this was not because Socrates loved wisdom and advocated the examined life. The reason was that he had had a dream. Caesar, now, or Herod or Constantine or any number of Shakespearean kings bursting at the end like dams where original panoramas lie submerged which have to rise again before the death scenes you can believe in their believing dreams. But hardly Socrates.

Until, that is, he tells his friends the dream had kept recurring all his life, repeating one instruction: Practise the art, which art until that moment he always took to mean philosophy. Happy the man, therefore, with a natural gift for practising the right one from the start poetry, say, or fishing; whose nights are dreamless; whose deep-sunk panoramas rise and pass like daylight through the rods eye or the nibs eye. Parable Island I Although they are an occupied nation and their only border is an inland one they yield to nobody in their belief that the country is an island. Somewhere in the far north, in a region every native thinks of as the coast, there lies the mountain of the shifting names. The occupiers call it Cape Basalt. The Suns Headstone, say farmers in the east.