Monday Night Poetry Club

The Guttural Muse

Late summer, and at midnight

I smelt the heat of the day:

At my window over the hotel car park

I breathed the muddied night airs off the lake

And watched a young crowd leave the discotheque.

 

Their voices rose up thick and comforting

As oily bubbles the feeding tench sent up

That evening at dusk – the slimy tench

Once called the ‘doctor fish’ because his slime

Was said to heal the wounds of fish that touched it.

 

A girl in a white dress

Was being courted out among the cars:

As her voice swarmed and puddled into laughs

I felt like some old pike all badged with sores

Wanting to swim in touch with soft-mouthed life.

 

A couple of years ago, in class, we were discussing how “the guttural muse” is “an obvious reference to Ireland,” but also how, more importantly, Seamus Heaney is feeling his age whilst he is stuck alone in his hotel room.

His muse is lovely and pedestrian. Kissing her won’t bring back his youth, but he still wishes that it could.

A couple of lines from “Station Island” carry a similar sense of sweetness and regret, but this time it’s Tom Delaney who’s prodding Heaney with:

Ah poety, lucky poet, tell me why

what seemed deserved and promised passed me by?

That one is going to end up as an epigraph on one of those books that I may never publish, or so it feels that way.