Deep Ulster

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.