Station Island by Seamus Heaney

Author:Seamus Heaney [Heaney, Seamus]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2015-04-28T16:00:00+00:00

V

An old man’s hands, like soft paws rowing forward,

groped for and warded off the air ahead.

Barney Murphy shuffled on the concrete.

Master Murphy. I heard the weakened voice

bulling in sudden rage all over again

and fell in behind, my eyes fixed on his heels

like a man lifting swathes at a mower’s heels.

His sockless feet were like the dried broad bean

that split its stitches in the display jar

high on a window in the old classroom,

white as shy faces in the classroom door.

‘Master,’ those elders whispered, ‘I wonder, master…’

rustling envelopes, proffering them, withdrawing,

and ‘Master’ I repeated to myself

so that he stopped but did not turn or move,

his shoulders gone quiet and small, his head

vigilant in the cold gusts off the lough.

I moved ahead and faced him, shook his hand.

Above the winged collar, his mottled face

went distant in a smile as the voice

readied itself and husked and scraped, ‘Good man.

good man yourself,’ before it lapsed again

in the limbo and dry urn of the larynx.

The Adam’s apple in its weathered sac

worked like the plunger of a pump in drought

but yielded nothing to help the helpless smile.

Morning field smells came past on the wind,

the sex-cut of sweetbriar after rain,

new-mown meadow hay, bird’s nests filled with leaves.

‘You’d have thought that Anahorish School

was purgatory enough for any man,’

I said. ‘You’ve done your station.’

Then a little trembling happened and his breath

rushed the air softly as scythes in his lost meadows.

‘Birch trees have overgrown Leitrim Moss,

dairy herds are grazing where the school was

and the school garden’s loose black mould is grass.’

He was gone with that and I was faced wrong way

into more pilgrims absorbed in this exercise.

As I stood among their whispers and bare feet

the mists of all the mornings I set out

for Latin classes with him, face to face,

refreshed me. Mensa, mensa, mensam

sang in the air like a busy whetstone.

‘We’ll go some day to my uncle’s farm at Toome –’

Another master spoke. ‘For what is the great

moving power and spring of verse? Feeling, and

in particular, love. When I went last year

I drank three cups of water from the well.

It was very cold. It stung me in the ears.

You should have met him –’ Coming in as usual

with the rubbed quotation and his cocked bird’s eye

dabbing for detail. When you’re on the road

give lifts to people, you’ll always learn something.

There he went, in his belted gaberdine,

and after him, a third fosterer,

slack-shouldered and clear-eyed: ‘Sure I might have known

once I had made the pad, you’d be after me

sooner or later. Forty-two years on

and you’ve got no farther! But after that again,

where else would you go? Iceland, maybe? Maybe the Dordogne?’

And then the parting shot. ‘In my own day

the odd one came here on the hunt for women.’

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