| Snow Falling on Chestnut Hill |
Here you will find, sequence after sequence, a book-length poem in progress. It will be
published by Carcanet in October of 2012, as "Snow Falling on Chestnut Hill": New and
Selected Poems. There will be one poem per month, on this page.
published by Carcanet in October of 2012, as "Snow Falling on Chestnut Hill": New and
Selected Poems. There will be one poem per month, on this page.
Overture
The Joseph lilies sway, in choir, like a silent chorus of snow-coifed nuns; you stand, distant from them, child of God, suffering God. On sodden fields a flock of chittering starlings shifts; the eye is never worn with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. Freude, the poet wrote, trinken alle Wesen an den Brüsten der Natur; all things nourish themselves on joy at the breasts of Nature. Here: the field, its wet-daub acres ragged as a famine-smitten family, only the rushes flourishing, their knot-rooted stubborn uselessness, the matted shivering of scutch grasses, persistent betrayal by the rains. Bitter as the ribs of hounds: and yet we hold in our hearts rich meadows of the mercy of God, all of us, forgiving and forgiven, riveted by the outstretched arms of the Christ-man; made light by sorrows, and by astonishment. By the gold-flush blossoming of furze-bushes round the edges of the field. Swallows were flying low over the wild meadow and already summer symphonies were giving way to organ-fugues of the fall; child of God, suffering God, I have moved so many years across uncertainties, listening for that slow basso profundo, source and sustenance of our grief, our joy. . . Freude! * I was remembering that old cantankerous composer, deaf as his podium, how he waved his hands about and heard his Ninth Symphony’s shout of joy; and marvelling how he stood gazing out across the blurred and many faces of death’s company (full orchestra, full chorus) who sang : Brüder, überm Sternenzelt Muss ein lieber Vater wohnen! Brothers, above the canopy of stars, a loving Father lives! * Father walked the kitchen floor evenings, hands clenched behind his back; mother held her head down, there had been disputes and the air was dense from withholding presences; she prayed Legion of Mary prayers, whispered militancy, the sibilances irritating. There sank within me, down to irretrievable depths, habits of pleading and the rusted anchor of guilt. When mother had whispered her way into her heaven, father sank into his depths, telling sins on the ambit of his rosary, bead after bead, a slow circuit. Now, I, child of the times, have been down to the shore again; I hold his old brown chaplet, crucifix dangling; each fine-wrought bead fingered to a dull smoothness, chain tarnished from handling but holding firm; I tell my own blithe and sorry histories, bead after bead, walk the length of the pier, hands clenched behind my back. Brüder, überm Sternenzelt Muss ein lieber Vater wohnen : © John F. Deane |
Traveller
One beautiful morning in May. . .” A pair of mallard circled down out of a dark sky and skidded-splashed onto the surface of the lake; peat-brown feathers of the she, her oboe-call, the iridescent emerald of the he, his self-importance; in the top corner of the wild meadow suddenly foxes: sun on the red-gold pelts, vixen-play wary with the fox-cubs’ swift tumble and paw-sweep on the grass, small piccolo-skreeks and high-barks; from the house the sound of mother’s old Dansette, a wobbling record, (His Master’s Voice), and Tauber’s off-white tenor, the reedy nasal crooning: “Roses are blooming in Picardy”; I was watching father, the beloved – turned suddenly hunter – lift down the sleek and hard-shod rifle, select a blunt-head gold-red cartridge and slick it into the breach; I knew the bullet-crack would shatter fur and flesh and bone and end the music. *
they were halted in the shadow of a hill, there as if birthed out of night; a caravan, green-drab, with a tarped dirt-black tent drawn in under the lifted shafts of a cart; mute and rangey dogs scavenged the borders of the camp, a horse and mule – crestfallen and watching towards unfathomable places – stood braced against the day; children in off-brown smocks were finger-in-mouth and big-eyed watchful; there were stones set to the wheels of the caravan, for keeping, lest it off suddenly, and bolt. When I passed home from school, a thick unsatisfactory smoke was rising; the children rooted with the dogs in the measling chaos of pots and scattered blankets. At home the adults prated of violence; they told of stolen hens and eggs, clothing missing off the lines, told of night-time forays, bodies slipping through the dark and making the darkness bleed; once the big man, dark-clothed, dark-fleshed, came obsequious, cajoling, to our back door; Tauber was singing, from the drawing-room When they begin the beguine, it brings back a night of tropical splendour. . . the big man eyed me, and I knew a small, inexpressible, guilt. * I had my own immaculate days of lake and sky and far-scented bog-sprung hillsides; I had a crafted tub, rake for mast and sack for sail; to bump its prow against the black turf bank in the sweetest influence of breeze was all of adventure I then required; I learned the fox-bark, how it told a story of fugitive survival, I had found – where the shore was dangerous in reed-isle and moss-lawn – a trodden place, an atrium before a dark lair and a story-book of hen-feathers, gristle-spit, and bone-claw. Though once * I saw him, big man, traveller, there along my landing-place against the lake, he was stooped over, and doing something; I was scared of his gruff consonants, his black eyes; I watched, as fox might watch from the archway of his lair, and when he left I found shore-stones darkened from a fire, burned-black sticks and up against the bank a midden of eel-heads, eyes open in slime-black skin, teeth bared and pin-sharp; the water, amber-beautiful by the shore, became a slaughter-place where long black eels emerged from the peat bottom like filaments of mud, whiplash-fast and slitherful and I heard, in dreams, the laughter of the travelling man, and his camp’s hubbub. * Muted trumpets, harp, the quivering strings: Lonely on a desert breeze, I may wander where I please, yet I keep on longing, just to rest a while; they left, as if a mist-filled daylight swallowed them; there were small and ash-grey patches clumped across the hill, with rags and timbers and fox-red flitches of things along the thorns; there were ash-smells and cooked-flesh fat-spills, grease-puddles, a fungus-stink of oozed mud; and I found it difficult to hold my place again in the uneasy light they had left behind that kept on glimmering along once-familiar lanes : |
Who have Business with the Sea
Rosary was an entering on a dusk-grey world; Nanna, distressed for her wayward son out on terrific seas, prayed that the Christ (asleep perhaps in the stern) might assuage the waters; you could hear waves crashing, breakers house-high and higher sounding down the chimney; the inner wall of the fireplace was black as the blackest Atlantic night, hung with the black snow of soot, turf-sparks like stars against a black sky. I watched the tears make small trailings down her talcumed cheeks and I prayed, too, that his craft be stalwart always on those awful seas. * He came towards us, staggering as if the platform heaved; Nanna clutched my arm and I sensed her ecstasy of dismay. ‘Well, donkey-boy’, he called at me and there was brandy-sickness on his breath; he jollied on with me, he could not speak with her. ‘All flesh is salt’, he said, and I loved him, traveller, moustachioed and gentle, seafarer, petrel, dove: There are those who go down to the sea in ships, who do business in great waters. I loved most his sadness and pale eyes lightly moist, the high hang of his head as he watched towards something out over the waves; When the storms come they reel to and fro they stagger like drunken men yet in the end he brings them to their desired haven. *
a rustling through the ferns and grasses of the drain: fox! slow-swaggering through the yellow flags, so close I could make out each russet hair sunburnished. I saw the long and breathfilled brush ending in a few dark hairs, king’s train, old guardianship; I saw the eye rounded and sorrowing, a moon-sliver shape of white gleaming; saw the long tongue lolling between sharp and yellow-white teeth as if he smiled, as if he had vanquished all old mankind’s traps to destroy him. I grew still as the roots of the escallonia, knew a shiver of fellowship and a pang of guilt, there where I made myself captain and helmsman, battling the wheel against a wild sou’-wester, how I leaned heroically on the wind. . . call me Ishmael. . . call me Ahab. . . call me Peter Grimes. * Wind, in from the North Sea, rips like teeth; Sizewell in the near distance, its dumb threat, its sheen; on the long and stony sea-front seagulls hold endless high-toned conversation; in the old-world spacious graveyard, Aldeburgh, Britten and Pears are whispering, out of the wind’s heave; Sunday morning, an early winter-grey, sibilant hush of leaves along the footpath, the parish church of the Apostles calls to worship, iterated clamour of the bells in a music ever-so-slightly off its key; they lie side by side now, Britten, Pears, storms ended, where they wish to be, in their simple graves; everything, save the bells, in harmony, the waves of grass, the meadowed ocean, Peter Grimes forever striding down the coast. * Traveller, I have come again to sit by the sea, its many-coloured inks writing over and over the names and origins and destinations of its heart-stuffs, its periwinkles, sea-wolves, squid; all of the dead and living out there ghost-floating in a world larger and more violent than our own, whole cities of them, Philadelphias with Amish country, wide ocean-Connemaras and pilgrim mountains where cold-blooded tourist-fish file by in staring congregations; so much blood spilt it salts the ocean and I see things crawl and reach, slimed creatures spittle-boned and fin-fleshed out of God’s boiling and creating waters, all of us longing for the pacific fields of the Son. * “All flesh is salt,” he said, and I loved him. There is a last photograph in the black-bleak family album; child of his times, wanderer, sea-farer, old man, stands before a white church in light-blue suit, white shirt, blue tie, beside him the quiet woman whom he found to hold him still in the last years; he smiles, self-consciously, across oceans towards Nanna who has long ago found her final stillness. O tide that waits for no man Spare our coasts : © John F. Deane |
Sicut cervus desiderat. . . Kilshane. The novitiate. A settled island. After the island. We slowed, up the long driveway, Nanna already sobbing with pride, and loss; this, too, part of the dream, priest in the family, an affirmation. Her plot, prayed for. A thaisce. . . My treasure: grandfather gone the way of flesh. I held a small brown suitcase emptied of childish things, and stood bemused, in a conservatory, exotic butterflies throbbing on exotic plants, orchids, African, Brazilian, and Brother Ambrose keeping the windows shut. I was to learn lessons in standing still, in moving slow to allow the day in all its motions be the same as it was in the beginning, and shall be. As the deer pants after the founts of water. . . * No photos of grandfather remain in the big album; we called him ‘sir’, he was stern and patriarchal, just like God. He led rosary at bed-time, bead after bead, circling. I knelt beside him once in chapel, proud to be on the men’s side, but he kept nudging me to kneel up straight, stop fidgeting. I looked up at the Virgin’s face where she stood niched, hands folded; I glanced to see if her eyes moved, or if she fidgeted out of her boredom. * Because, novice to the time, I was part of it, the harmony, the certitude, the uplift; I traipsed in, from sea-cliffs and sea-roar to the walled garden of the Song of Songs; I prayed, kindle in me the fires of holy love; I would go up in flames and leave a charred patch on the earth. * Now I lay me down to sleep. . . I folded my arms over my heart: prayed: Oh Lover crucified! and eased my soul to a blessed metaphysical darkness, entering original, essential loneliness. Exhausted after exercises of the soul I prayed nunc dimittis servum tuum, Domine. . . * Catch the foxes for us, the little foxes wreaking havoc in the vineyards because our vineyards are in flower. . . I left the Ireland of forge and country dance-hall, of braces, corsets, men-only bars, the mission, sin, and wandered down clerestories in a sacred daze; it was a question for me then of putting on the Christ as if he were soutane and stock and collar, new man, old man, overcoat. Relish the sweet and sensual softnesses of dusk, soothing darkness of trees at the world’s edge, the wood behind us going up in flames; uncertain where we were, and why, we sang our hearts out and the lift and sway of the chant clouded our minds. . . *
announcing angel-time, or festival High Mass. I have to swing my weight on the long rope, three draws without a muttering from the bell, building-up, like preparation for prayer, and then a surge and I’ m hoisted high, the bell calling, I in flight, like Icarus, three times three and nine, a music ever-so-slightly off its key, but it brings me back to Bunnacurry grove when I’d climb, grandchild, among the pine-trees towards the windy top and sit, part of it, and then the chapel bell would ring the Angelus and three minutes later the bell from the monastery would call and I’d see you, there in the yard, praying, you’d strike your breast and the Word was made flesh and you’d genuflect and hold yourself, head bowed, a long time in reflection. . . * Sicut cervus desiderat ad fontes aquarum ita desiderat anima mea ad te Dominum We stood, a male enclave, with our male antagonisms, particular friendships, the low-slung cincture, the musks, and sang Orlando Lassus, the motets, and Palestrina, as the deer pants after living water. . . male harmonies, the resonant and echoing Gregorian that lifted us out of time and swung us, gratefully, into the warm dark of the Middle Ages. * Jackie, thanks for your always welcome letter. It’s as ever good to hear from you, I know you can write only once a month. I take up my pen now to tell you all is well and quiet here, DG. Father Tiernan has complained off the altar about the dance-hall back the road. The monastery in Bunnacurry is being closed. Doesn’t that say something about the times that are in it? The foxes have been in the chicken-run again. I am lonesome, between times. I have not been feeling all that well, pains in my chest, tiredness. Pray for me. . . * She died; I stood over her plot in stole and surplice sprinkling water, holding myself detached in sacred ceremony, as if love could not have scope and human tears were failure; Nanna, treasure in heaven; childhood over and the dim ages, my eyes opening. * I sat by the ocean’s edge, Ogunquit, Maine; along the coast the Boston summer crowds, the cries, the urgencies towards the founts of salt water. I gazed eastwards; over there, thousands of miles, the island, the old beliefs. Child of that time, who was he? and the seminarian? do I know him? and those seasons of ritual, great silences, withdrawal; that cabin-fever; that fox-stink; the cell, comforting, and comfortless : © John F. Deane |
