Harry Clifton

A childless, futureless road
And then nothing. . . Is that it?
Or start believing in a God
Beyond the temporal limit

Of westering skies, wide, melancholy,
Uncut fields and paced-out walls
As we drive towards it slowly,
The house that has us both in thrall.

They are gone, now, the hours of light
It took to get here. Might-have-beens,
Lost wanderyears. But that's alright—
We are trading it in, the seen

For the experienced, the car keys
For the end of the journey,
When distances have lost their power
And the heart beats slower

In tomorrow's cold, a coming weather
One degree north of yesterday.
High latitudes—as they say,
There is nothing up here

But wind and silence, passing clouds,
Light diminished half a tone,
A dish left out all night for the gods
By morning turned to stone.

So take a right, go down two gears
And stay in second, where the church is
And the pig farm. Only the approaches
Are terrible, only the years,

The getting here, which takes forever.
A boy in tears, a barren crone
On a bicycle, a man alone—
They're waving. . . It's now or never

For the final self, I assume—
For the shape of the house
On the skyline, the release
Into childhood, and the coming home.
...

It was there, the elemental center,
All the time. Eternally present, repeating itself
Like seasons, where the times and dates
For swallows and household fires are written down,

The grouse are counted, the quotas of stocked rainbows.
All that love of order, for its own sake.
Only the hill-farms, and the high sheep country
Above politics—the enormous relief

Up there, as the dialect names of skies
Return, along with their clouds, and the old knowledge
Opens the mind again. To dream, to just potter
In the yard, to fiddle with local stations

In the kitchen, where news that is no news
Finally, at last, fills up the years
With pure existence. Lit from beneath
The fields are evenings long, the tree by the house

Where Vladimir and Estragon kept vigil
With the stillness of commando and insurgent
Frightens no one. Slow through the air
A heron, shouldering aside the weight of the world,

Is making for its colonies, coevals
In a state plantation . . .
Nowhere but here
In the high right hand of Ireland, do the weather fronts
Give way so slowly, to such ambivalent light.
...

Because anyone sitting still attracts desire,
Even this will not be given you, the park
In June, the silence of a bench at eleven o'clock

On a Monday morning, or four on a Thursday afternoon.
Someone will drift toward you, unattached
And lonely. The spell will be broken, the wrong word said.

It is cool, but there is no death in the few token leaves
That must have come down last night, in the rain that freshened,
The tree-smell that remains. For this season there is no name,

Not summer, and none of the months of the year—
A something inside you. Search your mind
For the green arboriferous Word the boys and girls swing out of

Like a tree, and the lovers
On the grass in tantric mode, in an ecstasy
Of untouching, and the human buddhas, legs infolded, reading.

Branches, sheer translucent leaves—
You would die to get under them forever, if it were given you,
The park, on this, a day like any other day,

And not the knowledge of everyone ever met
Who will come upon you, sooner or later,
If only you stay here. No, not people, or the walkways

Made in another century, or the murmur of the great city
Everywhere in the distance, but this breathing-space
Where the void no longer terrible

But to be relaxed in, the depressions
Which anyway here are mild, incoming from the west,
Slow-acting, chronic, lifelong not acute

Are there to be sat through, waited out
On a damp bench, as a man sweeps up around you
And the sun comes out in real time, stealing over the ground.
...

Would you believe it, I got lost again
And all roads led to Rakestreet. Which was which,
The short road or the long? A girl of ten
Behind her counter, drew me a thumbnail sketch

Of space in time. The Big House was, she said,
Five minutes away, or seven hundred years.
Nephin, nebulous in its hat of cloud,
A reference point. I would never get out of here

Unless I fell in love with my condition—
Rakestreet, with its boy behind the bar,
Its sweatshop, and its permanent television
In the background, rumbling from afar

Of war and worldly sex, greed and ambition,
While the dead slept under lichened stone
Behind Kilmurry chapel. Older than religion,
Older than history, this quiet need to atone

By staying local, once at the very least,
For an hour, a day, a lifetime. Marry the girl,
Buy up the stock, become one with the deceased—
Let Crossmolina and the Big House world

Be damned to its own eternity, Lough Conn
Forever signaled, never come upon,
Lose itself, like the reason I came
In the first place, and my aboriginal name.
...

A clear light, at all hours,
A girl at reception. And the evangelised
Stepping heavenward, up the wooden stairs,
Each with his version of Christ,

Showing the world a clean pair of heels
For Bible, drying out and three square meals -
And you, who sank your lance in Moby Dick,
Blissed-out, by the Skaggerak.

Nyhavn, Christianshavn
Mingling, splitting their cabin-lights -
Oil on water . . . Rustbuckets
In from Greenland, off the north Atlantic route,

Stinking tubs from Rekyavik, the Faroes.
Was it only yesterday
She Saved you, by a warehouse
Of flensed whales - the unadulterated joy

Of the first woman in years
On your skin, an Ishmael giving thanks
For a few words of English, the lingua franca
Of the homeless everywhere,

Knowing Bethel, ‘heavenly place',
Brought back to yourself, in the after-trance,
By women in lights along the quays,
A laying on of hands?
...

Insistently, a foreign tongue
I can only interpret as Song
Comes over the air, as the train roars on.

Even as it speaks
Ice breaks, and fast-flowing rivers
Take over, the dazzle of lakes,

The shutter-speed of sun through trees
As the mind clicks into gear
And the eyes unfreeze.

A windfarm's slow propeller
Threshes cloudy skies -
I wonder who lives out there, who dies,

And see my own reflection
Rushing past, to the greater world
Of Stockholm Central, Gothenburg,

As the changes are announced
In that Scandinavian, singsong tone
I recognise now as my own.

It wants to be helpful, to be kind.
Abroad in the north country
Of my own mind,

I hear it - any tongue will do -
Interpreting the hinterland,
Seeing me through.
...

I hunker down, and see the daffodils
At eye-level, with the light coming through them.

It has happened once before.
I am being born. There is yellow light,

Indefinable, but absolutely pure,
Irradiating everything - maybe a vein or two,

My mother's or my own, the yolk of an egg
Or a streak of red in a bloodshot eyeball -

Either way, the world in its primary state
Being given. Ever afterwards

Yellow is my colour. And it multiplies
Endlessly. But nothing is the same.

The Spring comes in. Again it is making windows
Of itself, to be seen but not seen through.
...

Open that book on any page.
Out it spills, like one dead leaf -
Yourself in middle age
On a blind date. Her disbelief,

Suspicion, as you speak
Of Harry and Hermine,
The lonely man in the boarding-house,
The hostess on the scene

In a world of smoke and mirrors
Calling time, last orders please,
Between the crush of a Dublin bar
And the bottomless sleaze

Of Weimar . . . She would like,
She says, to be Haller's daemon.
Nevertheless, there is always the clock
And how it ticks for women.

As you watch, her hair unbraids,
A snake at her back
Uncoiling, to the long white shock
Of a toothless old maid

In a fairytale. ‘Be not afraid
Of foxtrots, jazz and good-time girls.
The real world is the underworld.
There, mein lieb, we all get laid,

Intensity, ecstatic truth
Are everyone's, at little risk
But childlessness, slow death -
And anyway, the Ball is Masked

As I am now . . .'
It was that night
You saw her, for the first and last time,
Vanishing, like second sight,
Through Irish rain and German autumn,

Promising she could always find you,
Harry Haller, in the book
From which, just yesterday, there shook
A dead leaf, to remind you.
...

for Belinda McKeon
They're all strung out, our alcoholic brethren,
On an infinite chain of early-morning drinks
In joints like this one. Little grey people
Unlike you, though - people without a future,

Dapper folk, with nothing to say for themselves,
The daily chemical hit, not ecstasy,
What they are after. Not exactly one of them
Myself, but the degree of separation

Less by the year, I can barely stay awake
As Smithfield market dawns, on a last blind date
Between night and morning, early and late -
The forklift whiz and rumble on the ramps,

The Chinese hauliers, their tailboards down
For the weight of the world. Little Britain Street,
North King Street - haunts of the underdog
Who lives off scraps, returns to his age-old vomit . . .

One last glance, before we break away
Into past and future . . . Drizzle, dark before dawn,
The lights kept low, in deference to the wishes
Of the damned, in this strobe-lit gin-palace

Afternoon whites out, when the children come
To fling themselves at ecstasy, as I did myself,
And the binges start. For your company, much thanks,
In the underworld. Slán, and don't look back.
...