Free New and Selected Poems by Seamus Heaney Page B

will break at last to say, ‘Here
His spirit lingers,’ and will have said too much.

The Spoonbait
     
     
    So a new similitude is given us
    And we say: The soul may be compared
       
     
    Unto a spoonbait that a child discovers
    Beneath the sliding lid of a pencil case,
       
     
    Glimpsed once and imagined for a lifetime
    Risen and free and spooling out of nowhere –
       
     
    A shooting star going back up the darkness.
    It flees him and it burns him all at once
       
     
    Like the single drop that Dives implored
    Falling and falling into a great gulf.
       
     
    Then exit, the polished helmet of a hero
    Laid out amidships above scudding water.
       
     
    Exit, alternatively, a toy of light
Reeled through him upstream, snagging on nothing.

Clearances
     
    In memoriam M.K.H., 1911–1984
 
     
 
    She taught me what her uncle once taught her:
How easily the biggest coal block split
If you got the grain and hammer angled right.
       
     
    The sound of that relaxed alluring blow,
Its co-opted and obliterated echo,
Taught me to hit, taught me to loosen,
       
     
Taught me between the hammer and the block
To face the music. Teach me now to listen,
To strike it rich behind the linear black.

1
     
    A cobble thrown a hundred years ago
Keeps coming at me, the first stone
Aimed at a great-grandmother’s turncoat brow.
The pony jerks and the riot’s on.
She’s crouched low in the trap
Running the gauntlet that first Sunday
Down the brae to Mass at a panicked gallop.
    He whips on through the town to cries of ‘Lundy!’
       
     
    Call her ‘The Convert’. ‘The Exogamous Bride’.
Anyhow, it is a genre piece
Inherited on my mother’s side
And mine to dispose with now she’s gone.
Instead of silver and Victorian lace,
The exonerating, exonerated stone.

2
     
    Polished linoleum shone there. Brass taps shone.
The china cups were very white and big –
An unchipped set with sugar bowl and jug.
The kettle whistled. Sandwich and teascone
Were present and correct. In case it run,
The butter must be kept out of the sun.
And don’t be dropping crumbs. Don’t tilt your chair.
    Don’t reach. Don’t point. Don’t make noise when you stir.
       
     
    It is Number 5, New Row, Land of the Dead,
Where grandfather is rising from his place
With spectacles pushed back on a clean bald head
To welcome a bewildered homing daughter
Before she even knocks. ‘What’s this? What’s this?’
And they sit down in the shining room together.

3
     
    When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes
    From each other’s work would bring us to our senses.
       
     
    So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying
I remembered her head bent towards my head,
Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives –
Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

4
     
    Fear of affectation made her affect
Inadequacy whenever it came to
Pronouncing words ‘beyond her’. Bertold Brek .
She’d manage something hampered and askew
Every time, as if she might betray
The hampered and inadequate by too
Well-adjusted a vocabulary.
With more challenge than pride, she’d tell me, ‘You
Know all them things.’ So I governed my tongue
In front of her, a genuinely well-
adjusted adequate betrayal
Of what I knew better. I’d naw and aye
And decently relapse into the wrong
Grammar which kept us allied and at bay.

5
     
    The cool that came off sheets just off the line
Made me think the damp must still be in them
But when I took my corners of the linen
And pulled against her, first straight down the hem
And then diagonally, then flapped and shook
The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind,
They made a dried-out undulating