A Gentle Art

                          For my mother

I've been learning how to light a fire 
Again, after thirty years. Begin (she'd say) 
With a bed of yesterday's newspapers-
Disasters, weddings, births and deaths, 
All that everyday black and white of 
History is first to go up in smoke. The sticks 
Crosswise, holding in their dry heads 
Memories of detonating blossom, leaf Saved 
From the ashes of last night's fire, 
Arrange the cinders among the sticks. 
Crown them with coal nuggets, handling
Such antiquity as behooves it, 
For out of this darkness, light. Look 
It's a cold but comely thing 
I've put together as my mother showed me 
Down to sweeping the fireplace clean. Lit 
You must cover from view, let it concentrate-
Some things being better done in secret. 
Pretend another interest, but never 
Let it slip your mind: know its breathing, 
Its gulps and little gasps, its silence 
And satisfied whispers, its lapping air 
At a certain moment you may be sure (she'd say) 
It's caught. Then simply leave it be: 
It's on its own now, leading its mysterious 
Hungry life, becoming more itself by the minute, 
Like a child grown up, growing strange.
 
 

In the National Gallery, London

                   For Derek Mahon

These Dutchmen are in certain touch 
With the world we walk on. Velvet 
And solid as summer, their chestnut cows 
Repeat cloud contours, lie of the land.

Everything gathers the light in its fashion: 
That boat's ribbed bulging, the ripple 
Of red tweed at the oarsman's shoulder, 
The way wood displaces water, how water 
Sheens still, the colour of pale irises

See how your eye enters this avenue
Of tall, green-tufted, spinal trees:
You tense to the knuckled ruts, nod
To the blunted huntsman and his dog,
A farmer tying vines, that discreet couple
Caught in conversation at a barn's brown angle.
You enter the fellowship of laundered light.

From the ritual conducted around this table 
These men in black stare coolly back at you, 
Their business, a wine contract, done with. 
And on brightly polished ice, these villagers

Are bound to one another by the bleak
Intimacies of winter light – a surface
Laid open like a book, where they flock
Festive and desperate as birds of passage
Between seasons, knowing that enclosing sky
Like the back of their hands, at home
In the cold, making no bones of it.
 

End of Winter
 

I spent the morning my father died 
Catching flies. They’d buzz and hum
Against the warm illuminated pane
Of the living-room window. Breathless,
My hand would butterfly behind them
And cup their fear in my fist, 
Their filament wings tickling
The soft center of my palm. With my
Left hand I unlatched the window
And opened my right wide in the sunshine.
They’d spin for a second like stunned
Ballerinas, then off with them, tiny
Hearts rattling like dice, recovered
From the freight of their lives. I watch
Each one spiral the astonishing
Green world of grass, and drift
Between the gray branches of the ash.
I see each quick dark shadow
Smudge the rinsed and springing earth
That shone beyond belief all morning.
These must have been at least a dozen
I saved like that with my own hands
Through the morning, when they shook off sleep
In every corner of the living room. 
 

House
 

Near the junction of two small roads
from where there’s a wide, eye-dazzling
panorama of the bay and the islands that
shoulder out of it, I come across the site
where someone’s sister’s second cousin
has been putting up a place
for himself and his family, and I can tell
from this half-built rectangled shell
of bricks and mortar, from those
square vacancies where the windows 
will be glassed in, and from the blind holes
made for the doors, just what a flimsy thing
a house is. Still, this one will be
soon finished, roofed and weatherproofed
against the storms that’ll rattle at
its fast hinges, strain to separate stone
from stone, fling cracked roofslates
to the Atlantic, and roar and roar and roar
to dislodge into raw air
the family that would make its home
here, their lives hopefully opening
in this shelter, learning how to live
with one another and on this windy height –
a wired-in field of furze in front
and, at its back, the broad amazement
of the bay, the floating islands, the almost hourly
tilt and shift of stony light, or those 
raving firelights when the sun goes under.
 

At Work 
 

On slow wings the marsh hawk is patrolling
possibility — soaring, sliding down almost to ground level,
twisting suddenly at something in the marsh hay or dune grass,
their autumnal colours snagging his eye
where he finds the slightest aberration, any stir
that isn't the wind's, and abruptly plunges on it.
Then, if he's lucky — and that scuttling minutiae of skin and innards, 
its hot pulse hammering, isn't — he will settle there 
and take in what's happened: severing the head first, 
then ripping the bright red strings that keep the blood in check, 
then eyes, gizzard, heart, and so to the bones, cracking 
and snapping each one — that moved so swift and silent 
and sure of itself, only a minute ago, in the sheltering grass.