I wish to tell about a time
That’s gone,
When I looked at the wheat and thought it was the sea.
I rode to town. The light was gold. I heard them
Speak of the future—around them the dogs dreamed.
It was Sunday, and in our town
The church bells then were so arranged
As to play “Amazing Grace” upon the drugged
Air and clenched hearts of August. And all the time
The wheat in its inlets of honey
Perished and replaced itself imperceptibly
And the horses swam slowly through the fields.
I breathed something thick and terrible
Riding home toward the falling sun, a wild
Musical heat of sorrow and youth that made
A great strength up and down me. I
Was desire—what lived in the sad, slow
Thighs of young girls the dull breeze
Pressed their aprons to embrace? The same
Pitchblende dying between mine? Whatever
It was, I believed it whirled the Earth,
In faith and troth, whatever it was—
Mingling of phosphor and lodestone
Drawn through our hearts—caught fire,
And didn’t it ride the horse and me, but we
Rode through it also? All
Were in town: I stood in the house of my birth,
In the silence of its sun-struck rooms,
The only house to have known my cries,
The only house to have witnessed these beginnings,
And thought, How far from home!
Whatever it was, I took to sea
The downslope of eighteen hundred forty-seven,
The dead-flowery twilight of my nineteenth summer—
And it set me adrift. The sea
Was not the sea. It was a gray, austere dumb land
Of messages without a word,
Tumbling its seed, holding out its hands
Around our senseless faiths, the faiths that placed us
In this chasm between the torn hopes
Behind us and the hopes, fragile as cobwebs, on the other shore.
Watch on and watch off, in the green illumination
Froth cast unreasonably out of dark water, I sighted
Our lesser selves ever attending our passage,
The demons, the criminals, the fools
We demonically, criminally, foolishly believed
Lay back of us: it wasn’t to ferry cargo but to create
Jetsam that we’d put ourselves in danger.
And when we’d arrived, whatever it was—
The time, it was the time—
Drove me to cheat my brothers, to search
The purses of my mates while the merchant
S.S. John Adams slept in St. George’s Channel,
To forge my name to the bill of lading,
To steal my captain’s skewbald quarter stallion
And strike across the Irish countryside.
Our fourth day in that country
Brought us to the thick of Kildare County,
A Yankee sailor on a stolen quarter horse,
The sailor in rags and waving a bill of lading
For a hold of goods, the horse consumed
And starved and marked such as no Irishman
Could remember—skewbald, he’d be named
In Boston, where our captain
Had traded for him before I stole him—
And the several tribes
Gathered for a festive day of races laughed
Inside their whiskers at this creature and scraped bare
Their birthrights to wager against him.
Their eyes like sapphires strewn in the sun,
Their purses sighing and crying along their bellies,
The spittle doing a jig along the strands
Of their old beards: the men
Of the large-boned clans had black hair
That came up out of the throats
Of their shirts and ate their faces,
While the little fellows like me were of a blonder
More shall we say humanified strain of farmer,
But all were truly horsemen—never having to touch
Their animals but always smelling just like them,
Telling a horse’s life and death in a hoof,
Everyone wagering with a loud word
On some half-extinguished, half-Highlands nag
Raised by the spoon-to-mouth from an ugly
Head parting her mother’s hindquarters.
And drunk! These people sweated
Into their saddles a stench of barley liquor
That felled the bugs of summer coming near,
And fed, as well, two quarts of thick brown beer
To their favored stallions in the morning trough.
Now they whacked their kegs, and yodeled around
Amongst themselves incomprehensibly,
Looking at me with mingled pity and greed,
Cracking also the tubs of white
Butter and slapping fistfuls onto bread for me,
For I was their bread and butter now, and entitled.
I’d judge their fervid offerings had made me heavy
By three pounds more by the time the charge
Of musket shot exploded into the still
Moment above our horses’ heads, and the last
Kildare County Cup broke from the gate.
Was there ever a race where any rider but had
One chance, no time, and everything to lose?
I see how our tears wash none of it away,
How our cries call back no one into our arms,
But I’ve learned that whenever at last the sobbing breaks
From my chest into the sound of weeping, my cross breaks;
The river of grief carries itself away,
Laying down its rude memento of ash—such stories
As I tell about that afternoon
In a strange country in a young time,
And such, no doubt, as others tell
Considerably otherwise, of an iron
Afternoon when a villain flogged a county
Of its heart’s savings, and the songs
That claim I raced him all over England and Spain,
The songs that give him a silver bridle,
A mane of gold, a saddle beyond worth,
And the songs sung of a gigantic wager
Regretted to the core of grief—
I bet on Griselda
I bet on the bay
If I’d bet on old Stewball
I’d be a free man today—
I know
Even the bravest of that village had to sleep
In the darkness that night, I know
How the fiddles went rotten in the sacks,
I know the revelry blackened and trickled away
Before any of the candles could be lit,
But I gained. I gained a great amount. I gained
The sums and worthy items they had placed
Against my ridiculous skewbald horse—an amount
Exactly measured to my daring and their greed,
And I say it though it takes from my modesty
And lends them sympathy, because it’s true.
Oh, I was a bold crossroader and they were all monkeys
The day I drove the fastest horse in Ireland,
Of a finger from the smear of their faces along the rail,
The flayed mounts bellowing toward the line,
The light in the atmospheric dust like light
Going down to the springs of the sea,
I saw, as if the world had ceased in front of them,
The blind eyes made of tears
In the face of a lad who’d wagered everything:
Things not belonging to him, things that could never be replaced,
That his mother cherished and his father
Had worked away his hands to keep—all
Just memories turning to stone as I clipped past
Like a razor through the dreams of an Irish village.
And I thought then
That if God made pain it so repented Him
He climbed the Cross and drank it to the last
Nail in the cup and ate the bloody dregs
In vain, for we go on hurting.
But why should he have wept to lose his wealth
Or I to have laughed, holding it in my hands?—when
It was nothing
Next to what held us, and lay before us,
What couldn’t be won or lost, but only spent;
More than a feeling, less than a thing: a fact,
A murky element, a medium, a sea
Of fadeless dew upon the leaf
Of the mind—
Time! Time that gives everything but itself,
Time that steals everything but the heart—
It caught in the throat
To see it light down all around us like a young girl’s dress,
And we were the mystery underneath it:
Oh, it was summer! But it was dusk.