Harry Clifton

Chile


If I go there, it will be in my own time –
And what will I find there? Things foresuffered

From childhood, dumped like baggage on a runway,
Such the hurry of Mother and Father to leave.

A language all conditionals, subjunctives
In a land of might-have-been, where the cloudscapes thicken

Like myth, on the hiddenness of the Andes,
And it rains but once a year, in the far, far north,

In the space before I was born, the oldest space on earth
Where you can see too far for your own good

And emptiness dogs you like a shadow, through the salt-flats
And the foothills, far into Bolivia,

And the sky is impossibly blue, or call it the void.
And the waves of Mejillones, self-destroyed,

Break endlessly off the Pacific… Ante-natal,
Father swims, and Mother, among prehistoric life-forms,

In the amniotic warmth. I have yet to be born,
To come into the knowledge of myself and go back home

To the locus of pure suffering, before history,
Picking up baggage along the runway,

Keeping the orphan in me loved, and the salt-mine worker fed,
Claiming as birthright, all that was left unsaid.


*


What a Boy Should Know


Spring was everywhere, Ireland on show
Not only to itself, but to the world.
There were books now ‘suitable for girls’
And for the likes of me What a Boy Should Know.

There were May Devotions, and the sacred word
Novena. Hunched forms, Mother and I,
The doomed protectress, under the Virgin’s eye
All-seeing…. When I think of it, now, the jailbirds

And the judges we became, my mind goes back
Two generations, to a corrugated shack
Beside the Pacific, and a woman who waits

In nothing but a medal and a myth
For salt-mine workers, lone expatriates
In from the cold, to get it over with.


*


A House Called Stormy Weather

      To paint from memory of gone self storm
                   John Keats

I heard enough of the sea
To remember it forever.
In the pause between the waves
The sound of a little river
Chattering seaward, over its stones –
I feel it now, in my bones….

There was time to draw breath
Before the next crash,
And hear, in the silent interval,
The chimney-drip in the ashes,
Safe as I was in the nights, the days,
The man-made space

Of children and begetters.
And when the wind rose,
In a rattle of green shutters
That would never properly close,
Sleep banged back on itself
But nothing fell off the shelf,

The little things, against the storm,
Stood firm, their essence
Inexhaustible, in the house
Of being, where nothing ever lessens
Either side of death –
A house called Stormy Weather

Named for a song, another age
Of smoke and jazz, so long ago
The moment of love
That made me I will never know,
Lying here, in the after-peace
Between two ancestries,

Sleeping in the ruins,
In an autumn of spring tides,
The ruins of reality
Where everyone has died
And everyone lives forever,
Sleeping open-eyed,

Hearing the little river
Chattering seaward, over its stones,
The chimney-drip on the ashen floor –
I feel it in my bones –
The moment’s silence, then the roar
Of pure becoming, gone self storm

That bends but never breaks
The non-existent glass,
The knick-knacks and the paperbacks,
The indestructible open house
Of dead and living, frozen time,
And I who call it home.


*


The Earliest Breakfast in Northern Ireland


It has to do with cold iron. Which, in turn,
Has to do with necessity. It has to do
With winters and long distances, and the juggernauts

Of haulage, already too late, no matter how early,
For the great day dawning, away in the east
Or call it Belfast, towards which they endlessly travel

On an Ulster fried breakfast, out of whatever night.
It has to do with ice and undercarriage,
Untouchable, lest the hand anneal forever

To that particular metal. It has to do
With biting on bullets, and the taste of the machine
In coffee and tea, and the Sperrins behind

And Belfast up ahead
Still getting out of bed. And the notional countryside
All around, shot through like darkness

With the light of limited understanding,
Peripheral vision, as Northern Ireland comes awake,
Gable by whitewashed gable

Writ with Scripture. Six-lane highways,
Narrowings into tunnels, huge hydraulic hiss,
The carriage of heavy goods, drawn level with each other

In bible time, as breakfast settles down
Between Randalstown and Glengormley, creation
And apocalypse, and everything converges.


 

PART ONE
i.m. Dorothy Francesca Brandon Clifton, 1928–2019
    11     A Ship Came from Valparaiso
    12     Chile
    13     To the Engineer Herbert Ashe
    15     Sin-eater
    16     Neruda
    17     Rapa Nui
    18     The Widow Transitito
    19     Stepmother
    21     Woman’s Home Companion
    22     The Zeal of the Convert
    24     What a Boy Should Know
    25     Atacama Clothes-dump
    26     Mother and Son
    27     Whatever It Is
    28     A Woman Drives Across Ireland
    30     A House Called Stormy Weather
    32     The Aching Void
    33     Goodnight Antofagasta
    35     White City

PART TWO
    39     Glasnevin Clay
    42     Gainor Crist
    43     The Has-beens
    45     Going Feral
    46     Alice
    48     Staten Island Ferry
    49     Harvard Yard
    50     The Fur Trade
    52     The Gig with the Golden Microphone
    54     On Ventry Strand
    55     Amergin
    57     Nafooey
    59     The Salmon Cages
    61     Radio Silence
    62     After the Barbarians
    64     Inscape

PART THREE
i.m. Mary Bridget McKavanagh Madden, 1925–2014
    69     The Felling
    72     In Brontë Country
    73     Spinsters
    74     Notes for a Townland
    75     Honesty
    76     The Decoys
    77     The Sweep
    78     Jericho
    80     The Place of the Stonings
    81     The Pure Source
    83     Diatomite
    84     The Ulster Cycle
    86     Toome
    88     Germinal
    90     Praeger
    91     The Earliest Breakfast in Northern Ireland
    92     At the Grave of Seamus Heaney