Back to a very well-known poet and a well-known poem this week. I’ve got most of Seamus Heaney’s work around, and back in 1999, I heard him give a terrrific reading at Cal Tech. This is one of my favorite of his poems.
I’ve driven across tightly-guarded frontiers more than once. Several years ago, I drove all over Heaney’s native Ireland on a family geneaology expedition. (Most of my roots on that island are from the North. Lots of Scots-Irish forebears in Ulster, in places like County Armagh and County Antrim. I spent lots of time looking for the graves of my Whiteside and O’Melveny ancestors.) I remember crossing the Northern Ireland-Irish Republic border several times on this expedition, and only once went through a really careful scrutiny. But the guns were pointed, and it was a lot like what Heaney describes here. (Still, it was nothing like getting pulled out of a car and roughly searched on a remote rural road in Colombia. That’s an adrenaline rush.)
I am no poet. I am no Seamus Heaney. But even in my own little musings here and elsewhere, I sense that sometimes, the best writing is about crossing borders in the face of sqawking radios, pointed rifles, suspicious faces. And sometimes, it’s really exhausting.
From the Frontier of Writing
The tightness and the nilness round that space
when the car stops in the road, the troops inspect
its make and number and, as one bends his face
towards your window, you catch sight of more
on a hill beyond, eyeing with intent
down cradled guns that hold you under cover
and everything is pure interrogation
until a rifle motions and you move
with guarded unconcerned acceleration–
a little emptier, a little spent
as always by that quiver in the self,
subjugated, yes, and obedient.
So you drive on to the frontier of writing
where it happens again. The guns on tripods;
the sergeant with his on-off mike repeating
data about you, waiting for the squawk
of clearance; the marksman training down
out of the sun upon you like a hawk.
And suddenly you’re through, arraigned yet freed,
as if you’d passed from behind a waterfall
on the black current of a tarmac road
past armor-plated vehicles, out between
the posted soldiers flowing and receding
like tree shadows into the polished windscreen.