Translations from the Wordless

Illuminating Sermons (9.viii.87)

2012-04-11T07:20:00.000-07:00

Deliberate self-exposure is rare,
but all forms of public speaking
involve unconscious self-exposure.

Take sermons. I hear one every Sunday.

No matter what a preacher talks about,
if you hear him talk, week in, week out,
then the inner man appears.
You eventually get to know
what he really thinks about himself,
how important he thinks he is, and why,
how clever, how holy, how wise
he thinks he is, and is,
and how happy he is.

For instance, one devoted many sermons
to trying to convince himself (via us)
that his job was very important.
He plainly didn't believe it,
and was very miserable.

The serene certainty and charity of another
shone through the extreme seriousness and simplicity
of what he had to say.

One seemed an exception to the rule.
The sermons were exceedingly polished,
but nothing consistent of the man appeared.
Eventually, I figured it out.
The sermons came ready-made from various worthy books,
and the priest was acting simply as a conduit.
If his object was to reveal nothing,
then he had found the way.
It wasn't even possible to determine whether
he he was too humble to compose his own sermons,
or too lazy.

Class Prejudice (13.viii.87)

2012-04-09T04:09:00.000-07:00

East of Suez, my friend,
always go first class.
Either that, or mind you
dress appropriately.

I remember, on the Lady Esmé,
the ferry from Mahé to Praslin,
all seating was on deck,
and first was aft, under an awning.

The South-east Monsoon was blowing,
shaping a decent swell.
The little steamer dug and
slapped the waves, in turn.

The spray would fly up twenty feet,
then curl across the bridge
and crash down where the second class
sat, huddled, sick and wet.

Some kids, of course, got wet
and thought no more of it,
and went out to the plunging prow
to laugh at flying fish.

Home (13.viii.87)

2012-04-09T03:54:00.000-07:00

When we married and went to live together,
where we lived was not home.
We were just playing house,
and our separate homes were elsewhere.

Now home is here. When did it happen?
I don't remember. The other houses
and our parents are still there,
but somewhere along the line
they stopped being home.

What makes this home?
What is home?

Home is refuge.
The place where I unstrap my armour
and relax, and know that
even thought there are a ridiculous number
of things to be fixed,
yet nothing can go wrong.

Will Someone Please Shoot the Guitarist? (13.viii.87)

2012-04-06T05:14:00.000-07:00

A folk-mass is a Mass that is frequently interrupted
by bright folk with guitars and tambourines, etcetera,
who urge us to be cheerful, and who smile a lot.
I hate them, with a passion.

We are under no obligation to be cheerful.
No doubt, it is good to be alive,
drenched in the love of Christ,
but it doesn't always feel that way.

Life is full of wickedness, betrayal,
suffering, death, and putrefaction.
The lad who wrote Ecclesiastes
knew what he was about.

Of course, there are people sitting in church
who feel cheerful. But the odds are that
some of the congregation are more in the humour
for the De Profundis than this hand-clapping.

The Mass should be grave and level,
and presume no particular mood.
Religion has nothing to do with moods,
and we are entitled to feel miserable
if we want to.

Stability (13 viii 87)

2012-03-25T15:05:00.002-07:00

St. Benedict's Rule included a key novelty,
in addition to the usual vows of
Poverty, Chastity and Obedience.
It was the vow to stay put.
Not a bad idea, at all.

We've lived here for eleven years,
longer than I've lived anywhere else,
and my roots now stretch for miles around.
When I travel, it's as though I was
attached to a spring, with the other end fixed here.
Hooke's Law pulls me home.

I'm comfortable here. Each square inch of the house
bears the work of our hands. We know it,
and the garden, and the fields about us,
and the neighbours, and their dogs
and cats and chickens and cattle and sheep.

We have no pets of our own, officially,
but we feed a few, unofficially,
and turn a blind eye to various convenient carnivores.
For instance, we look kindly on centipedes,
ever since one made a deep impression on me,
by making an even deeper impression on a marauding slug.

Across the barley-field, on the main road,
I can see throngs heading West for the weekend,
inexplicably abandoning the presumed
comforts of their homes, for what?

It's not as though we are hemmed in, at home.
From here, I can search
the labyrinth of my heart,
climb unexplored crags of mathematics,
and ride upon mad Sweeney's back.
From my attic window, last night,
I could see
twelve million, million, million miles,
to the great galaxy floating
by fair Andromeda's knee.

Little Sister 12.viii.1987

2012-03-04T09:29:00.001-08:00

My home lies in The Maws,
an anglicised Má, a flat place,
where, once, two sparkling little rivers
and three great kingdoms met.

It was a while ago.
The kingdoms are gone,
their only trace the three bishoprics
that meet here.

The rivers no longer meet.
The smaller was cut off
by the Royal Canal, two centuries ago,
and few remark the faint remaining signs
of her primeval course.

The place lies between Maynooth and Kilcock.
Centuries before those vanished kingdoms formed,
for folk round here,
Nuadu was God the Father,
and Cóca God the Mother.
Now both are safely buried,
and Cóca has been sanctified,
made tributary to a greater God.
The shining sacred salmon-stream
that joined their holy places
has been humbled to the colonists' Rye-water,
a dredged, channelled, civilized ditch,
that now rarely raises a smile,
and misses the infusion
of its lost and nameless sister.

As I seem to be her sole afficionado,
I suppose I'm allowed to give her a new name.
I'll call her Little Sister, Deirfiuir Beag.

Never quite dry, in any weather,
her water clear and drinkable,
here and there she laughs and gurgles over stones,
and here and there she slides along,
until at last she's gobbled by
the Duke of Leinster's drain.

Hagar 13.viii.1987

2012-03-04T09:12:00.000-08:00

I live in spirit like a viking,
spending the long and blasting winters
brooding in the warmth of home,
nuzzling my family,
talking to my friends,
poking at my acquisitions,
sometimes carving an imitation
of some civilized prize,
and then,
when the weather seems favourable, sallying out
to pillage the known world of its baubles,
but taking care not to linger too long
among the fair frankish virgins,
or the sun-drenched islands of the middle-sea.

Strap me to the Mast, boys. 4.viii.1987

2012-03-04T08:54:00.001-08:00

Sometimes I contemplate an end of such perfection
that I wonder how it's possible.
Yesterday, inching in traffic towards Glasnevin,
en route to the Botanic Gardens,
we were passed and re-passed repeatedly
by a woman possessed of just such
a startling and wonderful shape,
who flowed perundulating in the
fleeting Summer sunshine,
stirring my thickening blood,
rousing my unregenerate brain-stem,
and giving me a choice:

I could simply thank God
for having lived to see it,
or park the car,
kiss the wife and kids goodbye,
draw a ragged line across my life,
and step out.

This time, I stayed in the car,
thank God,
and went on to contemplate the equally perfect,
but less disturbing, Echeveria elegans.

It's a curious thought that one E. elegans
is as elegant as the next,
whereas ends vary so much;
age might well wither, but custom certainly cannot stale
their infinite variety.

My beloved's passions mirror mine,
in both innocence and character,
but where, on this occasion, mine's resisted,
her's is not. She soon succumbs
to taking slips, at the peril
of her soul, her liberty, and my peace.

Queer Idea

2011-03-27T14:46:00.000-07:00

The characteristic of mathematical work is elegance,
by which we mean economy.
You determine what's true, then
you say it once, succinctly,
and move on.

For instance, Ken preskenis and I
put eleven years into C[z,f],
and then we wrote
a six-page paper.

You work on the assumption that your readers are
bright, prepared to work, and patient.

If you can't determine the truth of the matter,
you keep quiet.
After a year or two, you probably hate the problem,
but you don't give up.
It is merely amusing when someone comes along
and implies that words alone can make
a problem go away.
The editors of Inventiones Mathematicae
would, rightly, give short shrift
to the suggestion that proving Fermat's Last Theorem
is, after all, less important, than
stating the problem in less jaded language.

This trick of stepping over problems
smacks of Alexander of Macedon,
by common consent a distressing young man.
When he ran out of strangers to pick on,
he picked on his friends.
But at least his response to the Gordian Knot
was better than the cop-out:

This knot's not unknottable,
but who wants to rule the world?

Verb Sap (1.viii.87)

2011-03-27T14:32:00.000-07:00

We are told, by some who ought to know better,
that the purpose of poetry is to explore the
possibilities of language.

I disagree, and not just because I quibble that
purpose means end, and exploration is not an
end, but a means.

Language is what tongues produce. It's made of words.
Words are made to fit together
in sentences.

Sentences state facts, tell lies, ask questions,
give orders, and beg.
That's it.

Words are not designed to paint pictures,
describe (as opposed to naming) emotions,
or sound musical.

You might occasionally succeed in getting them to do
one or another of these, but it is like using
a fiddle to drive nails.

I could walk outside right now, and find ten things
that no-one ever has or ever will describe,
apart from naming them.

I look in myself, and I know
that how I feel is not
reducible to words.

Nor is there much percentage in slavishly
dodging clichés. As Sam said, Hamlet is
full of them.

The greatest potential in language is to express things
that are true. More could be made
of this potential,

were we not so afraid of it.

Lines written in the Cafeteria at Luton Airport (1-viii-87)

2011-03-27T14:14:00.000-07:00

By Luton's tracks a sewage farm
has purple sludge, supporting
scattered islands of bright green
something -- it's too far to see what
hardy flora feast upon
that turgid English shite.

The raking arm that very slowly
stirs the tank and speeds the
cleansing process of corruption
must have stuck. Perhaps
whoever sticks such things arranged
an allegory of politics.

But probably not. As a general rule,
words stand for ideas, but
greenery stands for sunlight,
machinery can always be trusted
to break down, and shite is just
shite. The world simply is.

Yet, in fact, the bursting green
of greed and get and gimme
rides atop this festering state,
and something's badly stuck.
At least this wretched English food
suits green stuff, if not me.

Mute (31.vii.87)

2011-03-12T09:22:00.000-08:00

Jesus, I said, Lord,
PLEASE don't let him die! Still, he
died. Why was that, Lord?

What good did it do,
that he lived at all, and died,
with only "Papa" said?

What is the point of
inarticulate lives? No
truth, no praise, no song?

I had no answer, then,
but now I think that all life
is an endless song.

It is not, though, a
song composed primarily
for our amusement,

or even for our admiration.

Half Serious (30.vii.87)

2011-03-06T13:54:00.000-08:00

Do you think it peculiar to put
funny things and desperately-serious things
side-by-side?
I did, when young,
and I remember being shocked
when people laughed, and told funny stories about her,
at my grandmother's wake.
But life is no respecter of proprieties,
and freely mixes farce into tragedy.
There are, sometimes, wholly black days,
and there are, however rarely, days of purest bliss,
but on most days we meet
fun and sickness, jokes and death,
crowding on each other,
and we cope, somehow, with this variety,
smiling and suffering, turn by turn.
We are almost endlessly adaptable,
and a good thing, too.
Besides, there is nothing as funny
as someone who takes himself too seriously,
and no-one as solemn
as the editors of humorous magazines.

Picnic (30.vii.87)

2011-02-13T15:40:00.000-08:00

We had a picnic in a graveyard once,
in Kildalkey, County Meath,
a small place.

A graveyard is mighty busy
on a fine Summer Sunday.
You would be amazed.

The clay was visited by sons and daughters,
wives and mothers, husbands, sisters,
and a lover.

The lover was the saddest. Why?
Unlinked, I suppose. Incomplete.
Frustrated of union.

At least, if someone is bone of your bone
and flesh of your flesh,
then death cannot change that.

Forever, they will be related only
in her mind, and she can't be
buried with his people.

Liberty (30.vii.1987)

2011-02-06T13:54:00.000-08:00

Solzhenitsyn's Gulag book
has over seventeen hundred pages,
and I would not have him remove one,
but what the man is saying
boils down to something simple, and old:

You can lock men up, and maltreat them,
but there is no way to imprison the spirit.
Unless I imprison myself, I am free.

The Gulag and the Hermitage lie in the same country.
The Hermitage is a Gulag for venal money-grubbers.
The Gulag is an Hermitage for innocent and quiet minds.

Forgotten you? Well... (30 vii 87)

2010-11-14T06:53:00.000-08:00

There is a power in silly songs to resurrect the past,
quite out of proportion to their quality as songs.
For instance, when I'm overseas
and hear the BBC World Service
dropping Lilliburlero into the static,
I think of King Billy, his left-footers,
Wexford in the sixties,
and a particularly pretty girl who used to sing it.
I also wonder whether the BBC is being
deliberately provocative,
or just plain insensitive,
but I digress.

Take wars:
Green grow the lilacs equals the Texas revolt.
Dixie equals the War between the States.
Dolly grey equals the Boer War.
Tipperary equals the First Great War.
Lilli Marlene equals the Second,
and the Marseillaise,
whatever it may mean to the French,
means the Retreat from Moscow to the rest of us.

Take peace:
Bunclody takes me back to hot days cycling,
sleeping rough under the stars,
the raw feel of the pre-dawn mist
and the ease of catching the first trout
with the first cast of the day.
A hundred other ballads call up
places, singers, lovers, friends.

I remember coming down the cliff-path at Rosslare,
one Summer evening,
and coming on two men singing on a bench,
to no-one in particular,
and I can still remember the pleasure they took
in the drop:

What's it to any man, whether or no,
whether I'm easy or whether I'm true?
I lifted her petticoat, easy and slow,
and I rolled up my sleeves,
for to buckle her shoe.

Heart-sick though I was for sweet Mary Wickham,
it cheered me up.

Heap it up, press it down, watch it flow over. (30.vii.87)

2010-03-27T07:17:00.000-07:00

You can tell what a man is worth
by the way he treats people who can do nothing for him.
But I also like the older, slightly different, idea
that a man's worth is measured by the quality of his hospitality,
by his readiness to share his salt.

A thousand years ago, we had a name for the profession
of living at a crossroads and feeding all and sundry
from a big, steaming stew-pot. It ranked
somewhere near a bishop. We still have bishops.
God be with the days!

You might be a long time walking the roads, nowadays,
before you met the like, but, thank Christ,
there are a few houses left, and I know where they are,
where you wouldn't be left standing
with one arm as long as the other.

I haven't the slightest objection in the world
to singing for my supper. Would you like a song?
I'll sing you one. I'll sing you ten.
I'll sing until you beg me to stop,
or the sun comes up again.

Would you rather hear a story, or just talk
of old or new things, light or deep things,
sad, or brave, or gay, or silly things?
Give me half a hint, or the glint of an eye,
and I'll pull up a chair and we'll start.

Before the Council (29.vii.87)

2010-03-22T14:49:00.000-07:00

Any day of the week, at half-past ten,
you could stand outside any church in town
and watch the faithful trickling out,
with the calm and inward look of those
who knew in their hearts, without any doubt,
that they had, once again, added to their store
yet another infinity of merit.

The arithmetic of infinity
was not like the other,
that we learned at school,
but it had a logic all its own,
and was easy to work with,
once you knew the rules.

The small print, however, could catch you out.
Did you know that, without the proper disposition
-- a complete aversion from all sin --
a Hail Mary might only get you
nine or ten thousand years years off purgatory,
instead of a full remission?

Do you know what complete aversion means?
Complete aversion is pretty rare.
In all of history, there were only two cases,
and there is no prize for guessing who they were.

Between this, and other little snags I won't mention,
you might have done better, on the whole,
hoping for time off for good behavious,
or a chance of making heaven on parole.

Grave Matter and No Consent (27.vii.87)

2010-03-13T03:59:00.000-08:00

Little things have a way of becoming serious.
I know a house, full of children, with no bicycles.
It's not completely full. One of the children is buried
not too far from one of mine.

We still have bicyles. We simply gave away his.
Our madness took another form. We're short a gate.
We cut it off, and threw it away,
and trained a climbing rose across the gap.

We planted him a beech tree, too, that grows
smooth and cold, and beautiful, like him,
but will, perhaps, grow tall and strong,
as he did not.

Then we cried and made another baby, not the same,
another baby, and he too grows smooth and beautiful,
with legs like pillars, but warm,
a solid, happy, fragile joy.

What do I think? I think that we have all
to die, sooner or later, and can't choose when.
We have no right. That's how it is.
Our lives are cut and rounded for us.

But, God, I think about him every day,
and wish he hadn't died.
A man should die after his father, and before his sons,
however rarely it works out that way.

Lord, I don't agree with your way of doing things.
I don't agree, and I won't agree.
We are just going to have to agree
to differ on this one.

Hard Words (29.vii.87)

2010-03-06T03:56:00.000-08:00

The bereaved are treated gently,
perhaps too gently.

Every day, when I went to grieve,
I saw the grave-digger, cutting weeds,
and keeping the place tidy,
but we never spoke, beyond a nod.

Then, one day, he came and said:
"This place is full of dead children,
and nobody weeps for them,
but their own."

What do I make of this?
It burned in my mind.
He is right.
The whole world is full of dead children,
and always was.
An ocean of uncontainable sadness,
washing round the feet of all our joys.
All life would end, buried away down deep
beneath the crushing load of sorrow,
were we not immune to most of that distress.
Our own is almost too much, as it is.
Many simply sit, pining, paralysed,
and waiting for uniting death.

I am ready to die, for my child is dead.
But though I am wounded, there are things worth doing,
and though I bleed, I still can stand
and force the gates of the resisting world.
Grief is a drug. For a while, it heals,
but in the end it kills.
The illusion of loyalty produces worse betrayal.
Life is to live. Our dead don't need our grief.

Daniel (1982. rev. 29.vii.87)

2010-02-26T05:26:00.000-08:00

Death is too simple to be believed.
A brief block to your air-supply,
and there you were: still warm,
unmarked, so beautiful, so dead.

Later, so cold, so calm, a placid
smile upon your pale, pale face,
and when I hugged you, such a deadly
sigh that whistled from your useless lungs.

The crumbled clay uncrumbles now,
and settles on the small white box
that holds a part of you, and all of me.
Oh, Daniel, Daniel, Daniel!

If love could make you live,
you'd live forever.

Gilt by Association (28.vii.87)

2010-02-22T09:45:00.000-08:00

Some people have trouble with the Song of Solomon
because of all the jewel-like thighs.
Their toes curl up and their juices thalamine
surge right up to the backs of their eyes.

But my objection to this brief little book
is not the lithe black keeper of the king's vineyard,
nor even disappointment about mandrake-root,
but the boost to the price of spikenard.

Not to mention pomegranates. Two pounds each!
The trouble is that, since Solomon praised it,
every little dog thinks that his little bitch
will adopt the position as soon as she tastes it.

The First of July (28.vii.87)

2010-02-16T02:09:00.000-08:00

The undulating plain of Picardy has a district called Santerre,
variously interpreted as sana terra, sancta terra,
but most convincingly as sang-terre,
for its hedgeless fields are sodden with the blood of centuries.
Great cavalry country.

The worst Irish disaster since the famine happened there,
at the hot, sunny start of July, nineteen-sixteen.
The Ulsters perished for The Crucifix, north of Thiepval,
yelling "Up the Boyne" as they went down.
The Twelfth was the First, old style.

In all, that Anglo-German war took
forty-nine thousand, four hundred Irish lives,
and maimed in proportion.
My history book said little or nothing about that.
It was the wrong war.

I found that out, when I went to investigate
a crumbling, rubbish-strewn, weedy, overgrown
memorial in Islandbridge, which brotherly hate
and bitterness had consigned to neglect
and dishonour.

There is a tribe of seagulls on Lambay Island
that scream for every Irish death.
They've been at it for nine thousand years,
since the first landed Irishman drew breath.
Banshees to us all.

The birds cry out for the lot of us,
and they don't wait to ask:
Was he a Teague? Was he a Prod?
If he was a man, it's enough.
If he was a man, it's a lot.

The Good Food Guys (28.vii.87)

2010-02-11T08:24:00.000-08:00

The wandering Jew must needs subsist
on vegetables and scaly fish,
and soon you hear him sadly wish
for a knife-slit, white-bled kosher kid
and the fleshpots of Israel.

It used to be that, once a week,
On Fridays, we could have no meat,
and so we thought it hard to eat
the harvest of the Dunmore fleet,
except, of course, for Salmon.

Saint Peter, on a Jaffan roof,
was shown a sheet of living things
that crept and slid and plopped and slithered,
and sported every kind of hoof,
cavorting in the gloom.

In Ramadan, the muslims fast
from dawn to dusk, and feast at night
on sweetmeats, that sharpened appetite
sweeten all the more. This last
scheme seems a better way to mortify the flesh.

On warm spring evenings, round the town,
the muslims sit in doorways munching,
chatting, laughing, singing, loving
life and company, and smiling at the frowning
faces of their betters.

You may not like their politics
or the small print in the Koran,
but as faiths go, it's not the worst,
and it has the virtue catholic,
that anyone can join.

Still, there's not much use hankering after
that kind of thing, when I'm stuck believing
the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost,
and wouldn't be easy with a monopersonal
mighty indifferent God.

Not to mention His prophet.

Never (27.vii.87)

2010-01-30T15:16:00.000-08:00

The wedded boy came back to work,
with his usual lunch-box.
When he opened it, he found his sandwiches,
lovingly wrapped,
and tied with a blue ribbon.

Oh, the shame of it!
He ran away from his mocking mates,
and it never happened again.
Never is a long time,
but it never happened again.

When I first loved her, my love, with out care,
would kiss me and cuddle me anywhere.
Then Mom declared that 'public displays of affection
are always inappropriate',
and that was that.

Now, when she meets me from trips abroad,
and I long to take her, squeeze her and kiss her,
and rumple my fingers through her darling hair,
she pecks me chastely, quickly hugs, and
nags the kids to kiss their father.

It can't be Queen Victoria's fault.
By all accounts, she was as demonstrative as the best of them.
So who organized this poisonous restraint,
this awkward, chilling, stiff resistance to kind,
this nurtured, propagating, unyielding bony-ness?