Conceit

She spun a line. She knew he was listening to her.
She spun it and he took the fraying ends.
Whatever she was saying, it was cotton,

Then as he rolled the thread between 
Forefinger and thumb it turned to silk,
And as he took the needle up to thread it

The line she spun became thin finest gold.
He knew not to believe her but he took it
Because she kept on spinning like the truth

Was ravelling from her lips; he watched her lips.
Cotton, silk and gold, she wanted him
To take the line and sew the wound right up

Although she held the blade still in her hand
Behind her back, and it was dripping, steaming.
There under his left arm the gash lay open

Like a mouth in disbelief. And he believed her.



Pangur Bàn

i.

Jerome has his enormous dozy lion.
Myself, I have a cat, my Pangur Bàn.

What did Jerome feed up his lion with?
Always he’s fat and fleecy, always sleeping

As if after a meal. Perhaps a Christian?
Perhaps a lamb, or a fish, or a loaf of bread.

His lion’s always smiling, chin on paw,
What looks like purring rippling his face

And there on Jerome’s escritoire by the quill and ink pot
The long black thorn he drew from the lion’s paw.

Look, Pangur, at the picture of the lion –
Not a mouser like you, not lean, not ever

Chasing a quill as it flutters over parchment
Leaving its trail that is the word of God.

Pangur, you are so trim beside the lion. 
-- Unlike Jerome in the mouth of his desert cave

Wrapped in a wardrobe of robes despite the heat,
I in this Irish winter, Pangur Bàn,

Am cold, without so much as your pillow case
Of fur, white, with ginger tips on ears and tail.

	ii.

My name is neither here nor there, I am employed
By Colum Cille who will be a saint

Because of me and how I have set down
The word of God. He pays. He goes to heaven.

I stay on earth, in this cell with the high empty window,
The long light in summer, the winter stars.

I work with my quill and colours, bent and blinder
Each season, colder, but the pages fill.

Just when I started work the cat arrived
Sleek and sharp at my elbow, out of nowhere;

I dipped my pen. He settled in with me.
He listened and replied. He kept my counsel.

	iii.

Here in the margin, Pangur, I inscribe you.
Almost Amen. Prowl out of now and go down

Into time’s garden, wary with your tip-toe hearing.
You’ll live well enough on mice and shrews till you find

The next scriptorium, a bowl of milk. Some scribe
Will recognise you, Pangur Bàn, and feed you;

You’ll find your way to him as you did to me
From nowhere (but you sniffed out your Jerome).

Stay by him, too, until his Gospel’s done.
(I linger over John, the closing verses,

You’re restless, won’t be touched. I’m old. The solstice.)
Amen, dear Pangur Bàn. Amen. Be sly.


Iberian Clichés

	i. At home

A Spaniard painted the blue cow,
The dachshund and the Magdalen’s crotch;
The midget with the giant prick
Is who he wished himself to be
At times, a function not a man.
He painted to discover what
The time of day, the appetite,
What was his hunger and his thirst,
Each canvas effortless with pain,
A portrait of the ones he was
Just at that hour, night or day.
To hold the bird that was the brush
Light in his fingers with its song!
To feel the heartbeat in his wrist,
His wrist alive upon its bough!
The flapping wind that beats the tree
Blows from the heart; the viscera
Root him, he moves with all his roots
Painting the cow he sees as blue,
The dachshund yapping at his heels
Familiar but not yet his own,
A penis on its four short legs
Trotting beside, sniffing a trunk;
The Magdalen who has yet to meet
Christ in the long cold room of want
And whom he loves with all his flesh
Except the heart which will belong
Always to him and him alone,
Fluttering the hair upon his chest.


	ii. Corrida

He lifts the wine-skin in the sun
And runs the stream between his lips.
Meanwhile the Macarena plays,
The bull’s cavorting with a horse.
The sand like canvas takes the daubs
Of blood and excrement, the crowd
Cheers and the wine jet fills his throat
Until his heart is floating on
A bleary sea, the enormous sun
Touching the stream as if it’s blood.
He wipes his famous fist across
His famous lips and thinks it’s time.
He takes the woman at his side 
With her hot eyes and heavy hair
Back to his studio. 
Left behind,
The bull’s arrested in the red
Deep cape, for ever: memory,
Lost in its rage and pain, its head
Under the matador’s right arm.
The dancing testicles are still
In their long sack, the rump is firm;
The banderillas in his neck,
Blue, red and pink, a slime of blood
Like something intimate, obscene,
On the huge blackness of his chest
As if he was a shadow not
The substance of the Miura hills.
A black bull and its shadow grown
Together cannot be unpicked.
The artist’s eye has left the scene,
Floating on air, on wine and lust.
Here there is nothing but a crowd,
A dying bull, a ring of dust.


	iii. Los Gallos

The cocks are spurred. Their coral combs 
Stiff, and all rage their tacks of eyes,
A hush. The bell. They are released
And crash together as if in love
To claw the eye, the throat, the heart.

His money’s on the smaller bird
Because he liked the noise he made
Deep in his throat before the fight,
As if he had a purpose, love,
As if he called to her aloud,

As if his hen or hens could hear
His reassuring, husky voice
When, settling on their roost, they thought
Where is he? Has the moon come out?
They crash together as if in love.

He does not wait to see who wins
For fear his little bird might fare
Badly and have his gold neck wrung
In shame by the fat proprietor
With the cigar and bandaged hand.

He goes back to his studio
And leaves the two cocks in the air
Frozen forever on the point
Of death or victory. He makes
Out of their bluster an ideogram

Of violence which has found form
And finding form finds balance, too,
And in the balance figures live
Moving in stillness, still in their dance,
Deep in their chests a sound like love.

Deep in his throat the smaller cock	
(This is the lie that tells the truth)
Could feel the workings of his heart.
His trainer with a little twist
Unsheathed the spur and tried the blade.

He put the cock’s face to his lips
And blew on him as if a coal,
Then threw him at the unpainted sand
To seer it with his furious knife
And daub it here and there with blood.

Was there shouting in the stands?
Each man invents in a staged death
A prize, a victory, a kiss.
In the high studio the cocks suspend
Greed and arousal, elegy.

These are two cocks a Chinese sage
Might, with a brush and pot of ink,
Casually admit to sense
As if they were in fact the word
For such convergent energies,

A human crowd aroused by blood,
The striving birds, the piles of coin,
The smell of sand and leather, smoke,
The tinny music amplified, 
The crow of the surviving cock.

An alphabet cannot reveal
The gist, for sound is not enough
To render sense, the sense of love
Or violence, of what is there
And in its being does not mean.



The Resurrection of the Body 

…So will I melt into a bath to washe them in my bloode…
S. Robert Southwell S.J.			

The cellar floor is swept. Women are weeping
Like shadows in torchlight, around the straw pallet they hover, 
The soon-to-be-mourners, a dozen, discarding their shawls, 
Unpinning their hair. It’s so hot in the cellar of death. 
Professional, they know what ‘s to come: 
She will shrug, shiver, jaw drop open, let go.

Led out of blinding daylight the Healer comes down.
He raises his hand and stills the scrum of women.
He comes down like a lamp into a cavern, 
Gathering from sweltering noon light a cool glow.
He comes as if out of the desert sequinned with dew
And his gaze, austere, not unkind, goes through the women
Settling on the parched form stretched on the pallet, 
Human, almost beyond pain, but not a child.
The man did say child but she is almost a woman,
Her delicate feet, long legs, the down at her crotch,
Flat belly, firm, the handsome small domes of her breasts
Panting, panting, not a child, though her father, grieving,
Insists, believing, a child. So he says to her, child.

She focuses her dark gaze on his amazing pallor,
Her fever like a bruise against him. She closes her lips
Reaching for a sheet, the rolled winding sheet, for cover
But he makes her calm, she understands, her lips now parted
Rapt, she holds her breath (she has breath to hold now).
She watches him, he bends down to her, to lift her up,
His shirt falls open, she sees where the wounds will be.

What does he feel when he gathers her hot and shivering
Off the pallet, hardly a weight, so smooth, and all
The smells upon her, faeces and stale sweat, the scent
Of her scalp, and her breath quite sweet, a surprise;
That hot smooth flesh, that shit and flowers, urine
And something else; and the haze of down on her arms
Up to the elbows, then the quite smooth darkness,
Substance of shadow, her flesh, so smooth, and the breathing
Not weary or fretful now in that limp body;
What does he feel, seeing his own white arm beneath her dark hair,
When he knows what he holds, and what it does to his legs,
To his groin, his bowels, to his rapid heart? He holds her
And out of his chest where she is pressed against him
Flows that unusual grace which is rooted in muscle,
Which comes from the marrow and lymph, which is divine,
The grace of a man whom love has turned into God,
The love of incarnate God whose flesh knows the name of his creature.
He holds her the way his mother will soon cradle him,
Passion giving life, or love; and then compassion.

And what does she feel? Who can know what she feels?
What you would feel, or I, pressed close to his chest,
To his cool skin, his smell of the dust of the road,
Of hearth fires, of wine, the touch of his hair, of bread…
What does she feel? She feels love, she feels his desire
Confusing her, desire but not need, he holds her
Tenderly, his lips to her shoulder and hair.

Out of the cellar he bears her into the air
Shedding her pestilence and the sun dissolves it.
A crowd has assembled. He walks among the crowd
With his light burden, they watch and withdraw, afraid,
Conjuror, they see the girl gaze in his eyes.

At the well he sets her down, she can stand on her own.
At the well she stands straight as a reed and Jesus bathes her,
First her hair, he pours water from a hollowed gourd,
Then her ears and eyes and lips, her face, her neck,
Her heart and hands, her back, her belly, her long thighs,
He washes her feet as if she were a child. 
The fever has passed. She calls him father, father
Though the man who is her father stands beside him.
She calls him father. He wraps her in his own shirt.



Furniture for a Ballad

Mas, ¡ay Madre de piedad!, 
que sobre la cruz le tienden, 
para tomar la medida 
por donde los clavos entren. 
			Lope de Vega

The standing stone, the stricken tree,
The sheep among, who leave their wool,
Who crop and tup, and drop their lambs,
Into a storm, beneath a moon…

The rider on his foaming horse
At night, to ship, to tryst, to tomb,
Or to a battlefield to find
The long corpse of his broken lord…

And in Dunfermline, swilling wine
Another lord, who sneers and wipes
His signet hand across his jowl,
Calls for his whore, his harp, his hound…

The new moon rocks the old, old moon
In its bowed arms, as if a child;
The old moon fades into a bruise,
The new moon fattens on its pain.

And who is she there on the prow
Of castle, town, of manse or grange
Gazing in dread that it is death 
She sees, her lover on the heath

Coming to her to breathe his last
Into her mouth, a kiss, a cough;
She hungers for him and that breath
He feeds her at a stanza’s end,

So like a host upon the tongue
And in his side a gash, his feet
Holed, and his hands. Don’t call him Christ.
Leave him unnamed and cradle him.

The borders, marches deep in furze,
The dripping rocks, the swelling moor,
The stricken tree, all see him pass
On his high steed. Is he the Word?

He rides away and leaves deep cloud,
A fleece of grace, the woman still
High on the prow, her arms awake
To catch him living, hold him dead.

He travels south, where he will climb
A higher cross than any here.
Though he passed here and everywhere,
He took his blood and bread away

To Palestine, where prophets said
He’d live and die and rise again.
Within the ballad death is death.
It cannot pray, it can’t believe.

And yet it might go after him,
Bear him back to stretch him here
Because of love, because of love,
The night, the maid, the sheep among.

A ballad cannot raise the dead.
It grieves and kills, it grieves again.
Let her in the blown midnight wait
Like a new moon imbibing pain.

Thus he will live and she expect
His visit and her ravishment,
His lips, the thunder of his pulse,
Her handsome womb his citadel...

Leave metaphysics to the Jews.
The crofter minds his wretched sheep,
The lord is rusting in the rain,
The woman stifles a fat yawn,

Goes in, sits down, he has not come.
She drinks a potion, sleeps and dreams,
The standing stone, the stricken tree,
Into a storm, beneath a moon…

We lose her as the night resigns
And so it is, the ballad’s made
Out of such furniture as these,
The dripping fern, a daylight moon.



Not Yet

My father said he’d have to cut the tree down,
It was so high and broad at the top, and it leaned
In towards the house so that in wind it brushed
The roof slates, gables and the chimney stone
Leaving its marks there as if with intent.

We said, don’t cut it yet, because the tree was so full
Of big and little nests, of stippled fruit.
In spring and summer it spoke in a thousand voices,
The chicks upturned for love, the birds like fishes
Swimming among the boughs, and always talking.

And then a day came when the chicks woke up.
Love was all over, they tumbled from their nests
Into the air, ricocheted from a leaf, a branch,
Almost hit the ground, then found their wings
And soared up crying, brothers, sisters, crying.

Then the nests were vacant. Now we must cut the tree,
My father said. Again we begged, not yet,
Because with autumn the freckled fruit began
To turn to red, to gold, like glowing lamps
Fuelled with sweetness filtered from the soil

And scent that was musk and orange, peach and rose.
And when they dropped (they grew on the topmost branches,
Could not be picked, we took when it was offered)
We wiped them clean and sliced out the darkening bruise
Where they’d bounced on the yellow lawn, by then quite hard

With winter coming. The fruit were so much more than sweet,
Eve fell for such fruit and took Adam with her:
No serpent whispered, no god patrolled the garden.
Only my father. Again, not yet, we said, remembering
What winter had to do with our huge bent tree,

Once it had got the leaves off. We knew the hoar-frost
Tracery and the three-foot icicles
And how it simply was, the December moon
Lighted upon it and hung in its arms like a child.
Not yet, we said, not yet. And my father died,

And the tree swept the slates clean with its wings.
The birds were back and nesting, it was spring,
And nothing had altered much, not yet, not yet. 



'His father was a baker . . .’
for A.G.G			

His father was a baker, he the youngest son.
I understand they beat him, and they loved him.

His father was a baker in Oaxaca:
I understand his bakery was the best

And his three sons and all his daughters helped
As children with the baking and the pigs.

I can imagine chickens in their patio,
At Christmastime a wattled turkey-cock, a dog

Weathered like a wash-board, yellow-eyed,
That no one stroked, but ate the scraps of bread

And yapped to earn its keep. I understand
The family prospered though the father drank

And now the second brother follows suit.
I understand as well that love came

Early, bladed, and then went away
And came again in other forms, some foreign,

And took him by the heart away from home.
His father was a baker in Oaxaca

And here I smell the loaves that rose in ovens
Throughout a childhood not yet quite complete

And smell the fragrance of his jet-black hair,
Taste his sweet dialect that is mine too,

Until I understand I am to be a baker,
Up before dawn with trays and trays of dough

To feed him this day, next day and for ever --
Or for a time -- the honey-coloured loaves.