Harry Clifton

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.

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.

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.

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.