Oysters

    Our shells clacked on the plates.
    My tongue was a filling estuary,
    My palate hung with starlight:
    As I tasted the salty Pleiades
    Orion dipped his foot into the water.

    Alive and violated
    They lay on their beds of ice:
    Bivalves: the split bulb
    And philandering sigh of ocean.
    Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered.

    We had driven to that coast
    Through flowers and limestone
    And there we were, toasting friendship,
    Laying down a perfect memory
    In the cool of thatch and crockery.

    Over the Alps, packed deep in hay and snow,
    The Romans hauled their oysters south to Rome:
    I saw damp panniers disgorge
    The frond-lipped, brine-stung
    Glut of privilege

    And was angry that my trust could not repose
    In the clear light, like poetry or freedom
    Leaning in from sea. I ate the day
    Deliberately, that its tang
    Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.


    Triptych


    I

    After a Killing

    There they were, as if our memory hatched them,
    As if the unquiet founders walked again:
    Two young men with rifles on the hill,
    Profane and bracing as their instruments.

    Who's sorry for our trouble?
    Who dreamt that we might dwell among ourselves
    In rain and scoured light and wind-dried stones?
    Basalt, blood, water, headstones, leeches.

    In that neuter original loneliness
    From Brandon to Dunseverick
    I think of small-eyed survivor flowers,
    The pined-for, unmolested orchid.

    I see a stone house by a pier.
    Elbow room. Broad window light.
    The heart lifts. You walk twenty yards
    To the boats and buy mackerel.

    And to-day a girl walks in home to us
    Carrying a basket full of new potatoes,
    Three tight green cabbages, and carrots
    With the tops and mould still fresh on them.

    II

    Sibyl

    My tongue moved, a swung relaxing hinge.
    I said to her, 'What will become of us?'
    And as forgotten water in a well might shake
    At an explosion under morning

    Or a crack run up a gable,
    She began to speak.
    'I think our very form is bound to change.
    Dogs in a siege. Saurian relapses. Pismires.

    Unless forgiveness finds its nerve and voice,
    Unless the helmeted and bleeding tree
    Can green and open buds like infants' fists
    And the fouled magma incubate

    Bright nymphs. ... My people think money
    And talk weather. Oil-rigs lull their future
    On single acquisitive stems. Silence
    Has shoaled into the trawlers' echo-sounders.

    The ground we kept our ear to for so long
    Is flayed or calloused, and its entrails
    Tented by an impious augury.
    Our island is full of comfortless noises.'

    III

    At the Water's Edge

    On Devenish I heard a snipe
    And the keeper's recital of elegies
    Under the tower. Carved monastic heads
    Were crumbling like bread on water.

    On Boa the god-eyed, sex-mouthed stone
    Socketed between graves, two-faced, trepanned
    Answered my silence with silence.
    A stoup for rain water. Anathema.

    From a cold hearthstone on Horse Island
    I watched the sky beyond the open chimney
    And listened to the thick rotations
    Of an army helicopter patrolling.

    A hammer and a cracked jug full of cobwebs
    Lay on the windowsill. Everything in me
    Wanted to bow down, to offer up,
    To go barefoot, foetal and penitential,

    And pray at the water's edge.
    How we crept before we walked! I remembered
    The helicopter shadowing our march at Newry
    The scared, irrevocable steps.


    The Toome Road

    One morning early I met armoured cars
    In convoy, warbling along on powerful tyres,
    All camouflaged with broken alder branches,
    And headphoned soldiers standing up in turrets.
    How long were they approaching down my roads
    As if they owned them? The whole country was sleeping.
    I had rights-of-way, fields, cattle in my keeping,
    Tractors hitched to buckrakes in open sheds,
    Silos, chill gates, wet slates, the greens and reds
    Of outhouse roofs. Whom should I run to tell
...