Ritual of Departure

A man at the moment of departure, turning

To leave, treasures some stick of furniture

With slowly blazing eyes, or the very door

Broodingly with his hand as it falls shut.

*

Open the soft string that clasps in series

A dozen silver spoons, and spread them out,

Matched perfectly, one maker and to the year:

brilliance in use that fell

Open before the first inheritor.

A stag crest stares from the soft solid silver

And grimaces, with fat cud-lips but jaws

That could crack bones.

The stag heart stumbles.

He rears at bay, slavering silver; rattles

A trophied head among the gothic rocks.

*

Stones of a century and a half ago.

This same city distinct in the same air,

More open in an earlier evening light.

Dublin under the Georges... .

stripped of Parliament,

Lying powerless in sweet-breathing death-ease

after forced Union.

Under a theatre of swift-moving cloud

Domes, pillared, in the afterglow-

A portico, beggars moving on the steps-

A horserider locked in soundless greeting,

Bowed among dogs and dung; the panelled vista

Closing on pleasant smoke-blue far-off hills.

*

The ground opens. Pale wet potatoes

Break into light. The black soil falls from their flesh,

From the hands that tear them up and spread them out

In fresh disorder, perishable roots to eat.

The fields vanish in rain

Among white rock and red bog-saturated

High places traversed by spring sleet

Or thrust up in summer through the thin wind

Into pounding silence. Farther south: cattle,

Wheat, salmon glistening, the sea.

Landscape with ancestral figures . . . names

Settling and intermixing on the earth,

The seed in slow retreat, through time and blood,

Into bestial silence.

Faces sharpen and grow blank,

With eyes for nothing.

And their children's children

Venturing to disperse, some came to Dublin

To vanish in the city lanes.

I saw the light

Enter from the laneway, through the scullery

To the foot of the stairs, creep across grey floorboards,

Sink in plush in the staleness of an inner room.

I scoop at the earth, and sense famine, a first

Sourness in the clay. The roots tear softly.