[Page 235 ]

7  Makers of widows, makers of orphans, they
8  Pass to their burial business, alert and gay.

9  But down in the field, where sun has the furrow dried,
10  Is a man who walks in the furrow with even stride.
11  At every step, with elbow jerked across,
12  He scatters seed in a quick, deliberate toss,
13  The immemorial gesture of Man confiding
14  To Earth, that restores tenfold in a season’s gliding.
15  He is grave and patient, sowing his children’s bread:
16  He treads the kindly furrow, nor turns his head.

[Page 183 ]

32        Nothing too highbrow, time enough for that;
33        you’re better off with a flute or a cricket bat.
34        You’re only (only!) in your middle teens,
35        too young to be thinking about seerious things
36        like the dream plays and ghost sonatas your
37        lost father hears and watches everywhere,
38        especially when he glimpses happy families
39        a-picnicking among the squirrel trees.
40        I try to imagine you asleep, at work,
41        or walking with your mother in Hyde Park
42        where once we walked each Sunday, hand in hand,
43        to feed the daffy ducks on the Round Pond,
44        chucking crumbs to the ones we liked the best,
45        comical, tufted yellow-eyes, ignoring all the rest.
46        Remember birthday parties, rockets at Hallowe’en,
47        bus-rides to Covent Garden to see Eugene?
48        The day we drove to Brighton? Maybe not.
49        Summer and winter I would rise and trot
50        my fingers up your backs like a mad mouse
51        to wake you chuckling. Now I wake in a silent house
52        in a dark wood. Once, ‘Is it morning time?’,
53        asked Katie waking. Now it is mourning time
54        in a black heart; but I will not forget
55        the nooks and corners of our crazy flat,
56        its dormer windows and its winding stair,
57        gulls on the roof, its views of everywhere!
58        When Mummy and I split up and I lived in Co. Cork
59        among the yacht crowd and bohemian folk
60        I’d wander round the hills above Kinsale
61        where English forces clobbered Hugh O’Neill
62        in Tudor times, wrecking the Gaelic order
63        (result, plantations and the present Border),
64        or dander down along the Bandon River
65        wondering when next we’d be together;
66        then home to a stable loft where I could hear
67        mysterious night sounds whispering in my ear—

[Page 184 ]

68        wood-pigeons, foxes, silence, my own brain,
69        my lamp a lighthouse in the drizzling rain.
70        After a month of fog a day would dawn
71        when the rain ceased, cloud cleared and the sun shone;
72        then magical white wisps of smoke would rise
73        and I’d think of our own magical London years.
74        ‘One always loses with a desperate throw.’
75        What I lost was a wife, a life, and you.
76        As for love, a treasure when first it’s new,
77        it all too often fades away, for both, like the morning dew;
78        yet it remains the one sure thing to cling to
79        as I cling like grim death to the thought of you,
80        sitting alone here in upstate New York
81        half-way to Montreal, trying to work,
82        lit by Tiffany lamps, Sinéad O’Connor on the stereo.
83        This above all, to thine own selves be true,
84        remembering seaside games in stormy Ulster parts
85        and Sunday lunches at the Chelsea Arts
86        with lemonade for you in paper cups,
87        snooker and candlelight for the ‘grown-ups’.
88        Your father (yawn!) has seen enough mischance
89        trying to figure out the dancers from the dance.
90        Like Mummy, some can dance; I never could,
91        no more than I could ever see the birches for the wood.
92        We are all children; and when either of you
93        feels scared or miserable, as you must sometimes do,
94        look to us, but remember we do too.
95        I hear the big trucks flashing through the night
96        like Christmas road-houses ablaze with light,
97        symbols of modern movement and romance;
98        but the important thing is permanence—
99        for you, a continuity with the past
100      enabling you to prosper, and a fast
101      forward to where the paradoxes grow
102      like crocuses in our residual snow;
103      for me, a long devotion to the art
104      in which you play such an important part,

[Page 185 ]

105      a long devotion to the difficult Muse
106      your mother was, despite our difficulties.
107      Everything thrives in contrariety—no
108      thesis without antithesis (and synthesis?); no black
109      without its white, like a hot sun on the ice of a Yaddo lake.
110      Children of light, may your researches be
111      reflections on this old anomaly;
112      may you remember, as the years go by
113      and you grow slowly towards maturity,
114      that life consists in the receipt of life,
115      its fun and games, its boredom and its grief;
116      that no one, sons or daughters, fathers, wives,
117      escapes the rough stuff that makes up our lives.
118      Equip yourselves in every way you can
119      to take it like a woman or a man,
120      respecting values you’ve long understood
121      pertaining to the true, the beautiful and the good.
122      Sorry to sound so tedious and trite.
123      I’d hoped to be more fun and try to write
124      you something entertaining as I often try to do;
125      but this time round I wanted to be seerious and true
126      to felt experience. My love 2U.
127      Nothing I say you don’t already know.
128      Football and flute, you’ll join us soon enough
129      in the mad ‘grown-up’ world of Henry James’s ‘stupid life’.
130      Write soon and tell me all about your work.
131      It’s time now for your father to be heading for New York,
132      a city worse than London, rife with confrontation,
133      much like the one you see on television.
134      Maybe I’ll read this letter at the ‘Y’
135      and tell you all about it by and by.
136      I hope I haven’t bored you stiff already.
137      Write to me soon in Dublin.
138                                               My love, as ever,

—Daddy.

Inside the shrouded closet, shame
Exposes cloudy inhibitions:
One the baby we can’t name;
Another pride-filled exhibitions;
The last a fiercely stubborn will
To pound an anxious heart now still.

But where’s her thought that greets each morning
With joy?  He searches through the dark
Spaces around her eyes.  Suborning
The witnesses of her absent spark
He burrows in the whorls of an ear,
Finding only the shadow of a fear.

Trapped by time they drift downstream and bear
their cramps, erections, nerves, stigmata, scars,
ever in search of a mothering womb
and tremulous with fear of a second birth.
Before I left time’s overcrowded banks,
I said goodbye to all the ghosts I met.

To step with an adieu out of the tower
and fix the fatal accident of birth?
Wingless, to fly for one ecstatic moment,
and then rejoin an indifferent earth?
Were that no wiser than to watch all night
the far bright sparks of a blind world machine
trace the same eternal formulas
across the mute blackboard of space and time?

My eyes are glazed by the cold glittering riddle
of the heavens, the zodiac, the galaxies,
and our little moon—pale schizophrenic guide
to millions of habitable stars—
high signs from a lost fortune-teller’s book
whose meaning no one knows and none may learn.

Next morning came a dragon sun,
the eyes within its fury yours,
blue peace within that burning’s rage,
and I gave myself there, like a white bird riding.

In a Funky Motel

the stifled pain of the woman weeping,
trying not to be heard through this thinness
of wall as morning aspires toward light
near Greenville, in a funky motel.