Faulkner's Pants

Box of William Faulkner's pants, Oxford, Mississippi, Spring, 2010.

Photo: Jim O'Brien

Poem by Desmond O'Grady

This is one of those poems, like R.S. Thomas' "Song at the Year's Turning," that I can't really figure out but love very much anyway. I love "fisted flex of heart." Also how "staring staring silence" is revisited later with the "Unwinking eyes of saints" and "I felt the Churcheyed, fidget fear." I love the structure of the three long sentences that make up the three stanzas, and the tone of frustration, perhaps tinged with surrender. Perhaps not tinged with surrender. I'm not really sure. I like the outraged shock in the question of the title. Is it outraged shock? Is it a sort of mocking of teenage petulance? There's some kind of returning going on, but is it to an emotion? Or a place? And if it's to a place, is it a physical place or a spiritual one? Maybe it's all of these things. Or none of them. I can't really figure it out. But still I love this poem by the Irishman, Desmond O'Grady, which I found in his 1967 collection called The Dark Edge of Europe.

Was I Supposed to Know?

When,

In a blue-sharp, fallow sky,

With wind in hair

And grey of rock, angled by ages, sharpening the eye,

I

Stamped down that cut stone stair

Towards sand and sea

And clawed, nails scratching, down from the deaf-mute cliffs to where

Were track and trees below --

Was I supposed to know?

When,

With senses quick as compass

And tightened skin,

In breaking clearing, fell on Church and Churchyard moss

I,

Helpless, toeheeled in

To Christ and Cross

And staring staring silence, felt small as a pin,

Felt schoolboy years ago --

Was I supposed to know?

Was I supposed to know

That each fisted flex of heart

And wide of eye,

Each pitch of thought in bone-sprung skull; each stutter start

Of unravelled blood in my

Knit flesh and bone;

And every studied part I cast me as a boy;

That all my rebel scorn

And mock at prayer,

My every bedded bitch and spilled out kids unborn,

Were

All marked mine with care --

By some high Law

Or some high guiding Plan -- to lead me back to where,

Again,

With coffin smell of pew

And chris of Cross,

Unwinking eyes of saints and hushed confession queue --

For one loud nervous boot

Of frightened heart,

I felt the Churcheyed, fidget fear of schooltied youth?