New and Selected Poems by Seamus Heaney Read Free Book Online Page B

‘it’s only me. You’ve seen men as raw
after a football match … What time it was
    when I was wakened up I still don’t know
       
     
    but I heard this knocking, knocking, and it
scared me, like the phone in the small hours,
    so I had the sense not to put on the light
       
     
    but looked out from behind the curtain.
I saw two customers on the doorstep
    and an old landrover with the doors open
       
     
    parked on the street so I let the curtain drop;
but they must have been waiting for it to move
for they shouted to come down into the shop.
       
     
    She started to cry then and roll round the bed,
lamenting and lamenting to herself,
    not even asking who it was. “Is your head
       
     
    astray, or what’s come over you?” I roared, more
to bring myself to my senses
    than out of any real anger at her
       
     
    for the knocking shook me, the way they kept it up,
and her whingeing and half-screeching made it worse.
    All the time they were shouting, “Shop!
       
     
    Shop!” so I pulled on my shoes and a sportscoat
and went back to the window and called out,
“What do you want? Could you quieten the racket
       
     
    or I’ll not come down at all.” “There’s a child not well.
Open up and see what you have got – pills
    or a powder or something in a bottle,”
       
     
    one of them said. He stepped back off the footpath
so I could see his face in the street lamp
    and when the other moved I knew them both.
       
     
    But bad and all as the knocking was, the quiet
hit me worse. She was quiet herself now,
    lying dead still, whispering to watch out.
       
     
    At the bedroom door I switched on the light.
“It’s odd they didn’t look for a chemist.
Who are they anyway at this time of the night?”
       
     
    she asked me, with the eyes standing in her head.
“I know them to see,” I said, but something
    made me reach and squeeze her hand across the bed
       
     
    before I went downstairs into the aisle
of the shop. I stood there, going weak
    in the legs. I remember the stale smell
       
     
    of cooked meat or something coming through
as I went to open up. From then on
    you know as much about it as I do.’
       
     
    ‘Did they say nothing?’ ‘Nothing. What would they say?’
‘Were they in uniform? Not masked in any way?’
    ‘They were barefaced as they would be in the day,
       
     
    shites thinking they were the be-all and the end-all.’
‘Not that it is any consolation
    but they were caught,’ I told him, ‘and got jail.’
       
     
    Big-limbed, decent, open-faced, he stood
forgetful of everything now except
    whatever was welling up in his spoiled head,
       
     
    beginning to smile. ‘You’ve put on weight
since you did your courting in that big Austin
    you got the loan of on a Sunday night.’
       
     
    Through life and death he had hardly aged.
There always was an athlete’s cleanliness
shining off him and except for the ravaged
       
     
    forehead and the blood, he was still that same
rangy midfielder in a blue jersey
    and starched pants, the one stylist on the team,
       
     
    the perfect, clean, unthinkable victim.
‘Forgive the way I have lived indifferent –
    forgive my timid circumspect involvement,’
       
     
    I surprised myself by saying. ‘Forgive
my eye,’ he said, ‘all that’s above my head.’
    And then a stun of pain seemed to go through him
       
     
    and he trembled like a heatwave and faded.

VIII
     
    Black water. White waves. Furrows snowcapped.
A magpie flew from the basilica
and staggered in the granite airy space
I was staring into, on my knees
at the hard mouth of St Brigid’s Bed.
I came to and there at the bed’s stone hub
was my archaeologist, very like himself,
with his scribe’s face smiling its straight-lipped smile,
starting at the sight of me with the same old
pretence of amazement, so that the wing
of woodkerne’s hair fanned down over his brow.
And then as if a shower were blackening
already