Michael Longley

for Seamus

What’s the Greek for boat,

You ask, old friend,

Fellow voyager

Approaching Ithaca –

Oh, flatulent sails,

Wave-winnowing oars,

Shingle-scrunching keel –

But, so close to home,

There’s a danger always

Of amnesiac storms,

Waterlogged words.

19 July 2011

for Bel Mooney

Imagine a shallow glass box

About nine inches by seven,

She writes, a bundle of papers

Inside, tied with brown ribbon,

Photos of our battlefield trip

Interleaved with war poems

She has copied out in longhand.

A shrapnel ball (in cellophane

For protection) nestles there

And rusty shrapnel casing

And the chestnuts and acorns

We examine in one photo.

In another, under a cross,

What can we be looking at?

Embroidered postcards evoke

Men who fought and loved and died,

She says. I who wrote the poems

Imagine a shallow glass box.

An engineer, you would appreciate

The technique for yoking the mule-cart —

When they fasten a wicker basket on top

And take down from its peg a boxwood yoke

With knob and guide-hooks for holding the reins

And bring out the lashing-rope – fourteen feet long –

And settle the yoke on the well-polished pole

And slip the eye of the rope over a peg

And tie the rope three times around the knob

And secure it all the way down the pole

And twist if under a hook and thus yoke

Strong-footed draught-mules to the mule-cart.

(What’s the function of the peg exactly?)

For the present there is just one moon,
though every level pond gives back another.

But the bright disk shining in the black lagoon,
perceived by astrophysicist and lover,

is milliseconds old. And even that light’s
seven minutes older than its source.

And the stars we think we see on moonless nights
are long extinguished. And, of course,

this very moment, as you read this line,
is literally gone before you know it.

Forget the here-and-now. We have no time
but this device of wantonness and wit.

Make me this present then: your hand in mine,
and we’ll live out our lives in it.

For Lucy McDiarmid

I have been thinking about the music for my funeral –

Liszt’s transcription of that Schumann song, for instance,

‘Dedication’ – inwardness meets the poetry of excess –

When you lead me out of your apartment to demonstrate

In the Halloween-decorated lobby the perfect acoustic

Of the stairwell, and stand among pumpkins, cobwebby

Skulls, dancing skeletons, and blow kisses at the ceiling,

Whistling Great War numbers – ‘Over There’, ‘It’s a Long,

Long Way’, ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ (the refrain) –

As though for my father who could also whistle them,

Trench memories, your eyes closed, your head tilted back,

Your cheeks filling up with air and melody and laughter.

I hold the banister. I touch your arm. Listen, Lucy,

There are songbirds circling high up in the stairwell.

Pushing you in your wheelchair to the sea

I look down at your yellowy bald patch

And recall your double-crown’s tufty hair.

You were the naughtier twin, were you not?

It was I who wept when you were chastised.

where am I pushing you, dear brother, where?