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Clearances

In Memoriam M.K.H., 1911-1984


She taught me what her uncle once taught her:

How easily the biggest coal block split

If you got the grain and hammer angled right.


The sound of that relaxed alluring blow,

Its co-opted and obliterated echo,

Taught me to hit, taught me to loosen,


Taught me between the hammer and the block

To face the music. Teach me now to listen,

To strike it rich behind the linear black.


                                             1

A cobble thrown a hundred years ago

Keeps coming at me, the first stone

Aimed at a great-grandmother's turncoat brow.

The pony jerks and the riot's on.

She's crouched low in the trap

Running the gauntlet that first Sunday

Down the brae to Mass at a panicked gallop.

He whips on through the town to cries of 'Lundy!'


Call her 'The Convert'. 'The Exogamous Bride'.

Anyhow, it is a genre piece

Inherited on my mother's side

And mine to dispose with now she's gone.

Instead of silver and Victorian lace,

The exonerating, exonerated stone.


                                             2

Polished linoleum shone there. Brass taps shone.

The china cups were very white and big—

An unchipped set with sugar bowl and jug.

The kettle whistled. Sandwich and tea scone

Were present and correct. In case it run,

The butter must be kept out of the sun.

And don't be dropping crumbs. Don't tilt your chair.

Don't reach. Don't point. Don't make noise when you stir.


It is Number 5, New Row, Land of the Dead,

Where grandfather is rising from his place

With spectacles pushed back on a clean bald head

To welcome a bewildered homing daughter

Before she even knocks. 'What's this? What's this?'

And they sit down in the shining room together.


                                              3

When all the others were away at Mass

I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.

They broke the silence, let fall one by one

Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:

Cold comforts set between us, things to share

Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.

And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes

From each other's work would bring us to our senses.


So while the parish priest at her bedside

Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying

And some were responding and some crying

I remembered her head bent towards my head,

Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives—

Never closer the whole rest of our lives.


                                               4

Fear of affectation made her affect

Inadequacy whenever it came to

Pronouncing words 'beyond her'. Bertold Brek.

She'd manage something hampered and askew

Every time, as if she might betray

The hampered and inadequate by too

Well-adjusted a vocabulary.

With more challenge than pride, she'd tell me, 'You

Know all them things.' So I governed my tongue

In front of her, a genuinely well-

Adjusted adequate betrayal

Of what I knew better. I'd naw and aye

And decently relapse into the wrong

Grammar which kept us allied and at bay.


                                                5

The cool that came off sheets just off the line

Made me think the damp must still be in them

But when I took my corners of the linen

And pulled against her, first straight down the hem

And then diagonally, then flapped and shook

The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind,

They made a dried-out undulating thwack.

So we'd stretch and fold and end up hand to hand

For a split second as if nothing had happened

For nothing had that had not always happened

Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go,

Coming close again by holding back

In moves where I was x and she was o

Inscribed in sheets she'd sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.


                                               6

In the first flush of the Easter holidays

The ceremonies during Holy Week

Were highpoints of our Sons and Lovers phase.

The midnight fire. The paschal candlestick.

Elbow to elbow, glad to be kneeling next

To each other up there near the front

Of the packed church, we would follow the text

And rubrics for the blessing of the font.

As the hind longs for the streams, so my soul. . .

Dippings. Towellings. The water breathed on.

The water mixed with chrism and with oil.

Cruet tinkle. Formal incensation

And the psalmist's outcry taken up with pride:

Day and night my tears have been my bread.


                                                7

In the last minutes he said more to her

Almost than in all their life together.

'You'll be in New Row on Monday night

And I'll come up for you and you'll be glad

When I walk in the door . . . Isn't that right?'

His head was bent down to her propped-up head.

She could not hear but we were overjoyed.

He called her good and girl. Then she was dead,

The searching for a pulsebeat was abandoned

And we all knew one thing by being there.

The space we stood around had been emptied

Into us to keep, it penetrated

Clearances that suddenly stood open.

High cries were felled and a pure change happened.


                                                8

I thought of walking round and round a space

Utterly empty, utterly a source

Where the decked chestnut tree had lost its place

In our front hedge above the wallflowers.

The white chips jumped and jumped and skited high.

I heard the hatchet's differentiated

Accurate cut, the crack, the sigh

And collapse of what luxuriated

Through the shocked tips and wreckage of it all.

Deep-planted and long gone, my coeval

Chestnut from a jam jar in a hole,

Its heft and hush become a bright nowhere,

A soul ramifying and forever

Silent, beyond silence listened for.


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Seamus Heaney

Seamus Justin Heaney MRIA (/ˈʃeɪməs ˈhiːni/; 13 April 1939 – 30 August 2013) was an Irish poet, playwright and translator. He received the 1995 …

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