It took me years to discover that snow is the least loving form of sleep. I was slow to understand that there’s just more white behind its white, a steady hunger that no one has ever been able to draw, a furtive hand that thieves unsuspecting passers-by when no one’s watching. I received this snow like someone presented with the keys to an unbuilt house. And up above all this atheist white is that prideless sun, which cares for nobody. At least the tropical sun watches over the thirst that rasps our throats, gifts the metallic sweat that fades our names and presses at our foreheads with the weight of a promise. Here the word “sun” reminds me of nothing. It doesn’t have a dazzling eye inside it, a sky like a concave pupil. It trickles from my mouth, dries uncomfortably at the corners of my lips. It doesn’t drag itself along the sky, doesn’t wake me by banging its clear hammer against the bell of my brain. Pale roofs, streets stretching out to who knows where, the password of coats and gloves—I still haven’t mastered these ways. I walk carefully, like someone who half-hears voices and gets confused, believing they speak his language. It’s always with me, this cold like no one’s bread.
(Islandia) Me costó años descubrir que la nieve es la forma menos amorosa del sueño. Tardé en comprender que detrás de su blanco sólo hay más blanco, un hambre plana que nadie ha sabido dibujar, una mano furtiva que hurta transeúntes desprevenidos cuando nadie la ve. Recibí esta nieve como quien recibe las llaves de una casa que no ha sido construida. Y por encima de tanta blancura atea, ese sol sin orgullo, que no cuida de nadie. Al menos el sol del trópico vela por la sed que rasga la garganta, regala ese sudor metálico que nos destiñe el nombre, que presiona la frente con el peso de una promesa. Aquí la palabra sol no me recuerda nada. No lleva un ojo encandilado por dentro, un cielo pupila cóncava. Se me escurre de la boca, se seca incómoda en la comisura de los labios. No se arrastra por el cielo, no me despierta golpeando su martillo claro contra la campana de mi cráneo. Los techos pálidos, las calles que se extienden sin saber a dónde, el santo y seña de los guantes y los abrigos, sigo sin dominar estas maneras. Camino con cuidado, a la manera de quien oye voces a medias y se confunde, creyendo que hablan su idioma. Conmigo, siempre, este frío como un pan sin dueño.
In his review of Roy Foster's On Seamus Heaney, Seamus Perry offers a wide-ranging retrospective on Heaney's work. "When Heaney contemplated the photo of the majestic, gentle Tollund Man he saw a victim of ritual killing, a ‘bridegroom to the goddess’, who in some way mirrored or anticipated the sectarian killings going on in Belfast, Derry and Aldershot."
"The bus ride in the poem seems timeless in the way of an allegory or a parable, partly because travel is a metaphor we all recognize but also because the poem uses a perspective that is intermittently omniscient. The long opening sentence describes the bus from the outside as it travels toward the setting sun with its 'windshield flashing pink'—not as the passengers inside, or the lone traveler waiting some miles away, could have seen it."
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