Seamus Heaney "The Sharpening Stone"

The Sharpening Stone


In an apothecary's chest of drawers,
Sweet cedar that we'd purchased second hand,
In one of its weighty deep-sliding recesses
I found the sharpening stone that was to be
Our gift to him. Still in its wrapping paper.
Like a baton of black light I'd failed to pass.

*

Airless cinder-depths. But all the same,
The way it lay there, it wakened something too...
I thought of us that evening on the logs,
Flat on our backs, the pair of us, parallel,
Supported head to heel, arms straight, eyes front,
Listening to the rain drip off the trees
And saying nothing, braced to the damp bark.
What possessed us? The bare, lopped loveliness
Of thowse two winter trunks, the way they seemed
A causeway of short fence-posts set like rollers.
Neither of us spoke. The puddles waited.
The workers had gone home, saws fallen silent.
And next thing down we lay, babes in the wood,
Gazing up at the flood-face of the sky
Until it seemed a flood was carrying us
Out of the forest park, feet first, eyes front,
Out of November, out of middle age,
Together, out, across the Sea of Moyle.

*

Sarcophage des epoux. In terra cotta.
Etruscan couple shown side by side,
Recumbent on left elbows, husband pointing
With his right arm and watching where he points,
Wife in front, her earrings in, her braids
Down to her waist, taking her sexual ease.
He is all eyes, she is all brow and dream,
Her right forearm and hand held out as if
Some bird she sees in her deep inward gaze
Might be about to roost there. Domestic
Love, the artist thought, warm tones and property,
The frangibility of terra cotta...
Which is how they figured on the colour postcard
(Louvre, Departement des Antiquites)
That'd we'd sent him once, then found among his things.

*

He loved inspired mistakes: his Spanish grandson's
English transliteration, thanking him
For a boat trip: 'That was a marvellous
Walk on the water, granddad.' And indeed
He walked on air himself, never more so
Than when he had been widowed and the youth
In him, the athlete who had wooed her-
Breasting tapes and clearing the high bars-
Grew lightsome once again. Going at eighty
On the bendiest roads, going for broke
At every point-to-point and poker-school,
'He commenced his wild career' a second time
And not a bother on him. Smoked like a train
And took the power mower in his stride.
Flirted and vaunted. Set fire to his bed.
Fell from a ladder. Learned to microwave.

*

So set the drawer on freshets of thaw water
And place the unused sharping stone inside it:
To be found next summer on a riverbank
Where scythes once hung all night in alder trees
And mowers played dawn scherzos on the blades,
Their arms like harpists' arms, one drawing towards,
One sweeping the bright rim of the extreme.

Seamus Heaney