And Some Time Make the Time: Looking Where You're Going, and Seamus Heaney's "Postscript"

Postscript by Seamus Heaney

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

***

I broke my toe the night before my wedding. I kicked the same furniture leg with the same foot twice running around our little wedding cottage in my underwear about to nurse the baby. We were late to our own dinner thing, and I had to go barefoot. I tried to drink enough wine to forget about the foot. 

The next morning, my pinky toe was throbbing. Broken toes really hurt, but they’re clownish and so get little sympathy. The toe was purple and stuck in position pointing sharp right. Squeezing it into my vintage Italian white go-go boot was out of the question. And those boots were not an optional part of my wedding outfit. 

the boots, with numb toe inside

I had to promise the ER doctor that I wouldn’t dance at my wedding before he agreed to give me a nerve block. I promised. When I threw up from the pain medicine he gave me, my mother held my hand and rubbed my back. It had been a long time since we’d been in the roles of soothing mother and sick kid. She was a nurse who worked nights. Always a consistent, no-nonsense nurturer. If you’re sick stay home, but I have to go to work/sleep. Flat coke and toast.

Sitting there on the exam table in the ER, I started to feel dizzy and airy. Something like homesick. Neither here nor there. I bent over and closed my eyes and thought about being a kid. Maybe about wanting to be. My mother said You’re okay, hon and patted my back the way my sister says I do to signal that I’m done hugging. Big day ahead. An anxious melancholy was stuck in my throat like a cough drop. It felt like wanting my mother, which sounds strange because there she was. So that couldn’t have been it.

While the doctor was getting his nerve block together, my breasts started leaking wet circles through my t-shirt. My mother looked at the milk circles and bent over and laughed, holding on to the table with her long arms. We both laughed, probably a bit too much. It seemed to annoy the doctor, and I can’t say I blame him. So much fuss for what he thought was just a broken toe.

Ready? He held his needle above my foot. This will hurt. The heaviness from a few minutes ago–the homesickness feeling–passed through my chest and throat and out. And then I realized something my body already knew: It was my baby I wanted. On the way back up the mountain, my mother and I listened to Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk. It’s a good one for driving a little too fast.

I danced at my wedding. We had a swing band, and people of all ages were flinging and dipping each other. I had to squeeze in all my dancing before the numb toe turned back into a hurting, living thing and I’d have to take off my wedding boots forever.

The next day, my husband and I drove slowly down the long driveway of the inn, with the baby in her carseat and a bag of ice on my foot. Our friends and family waved from the porch in their shorts and t-shirts and messed hair and raccoon eyes, eating the leftover fruit pies we’d had instead of cake. I felt a pressing, desperate love for this collective of people I knew would never converge again. It wasn’t a scene anyone would want to leave.

Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly.

I leaned all the way out the car window and yelled goodbye and waved like I was trying to flag down a rescue plane, until the porch and our people were out of sight. My husband eased the car to a stop. We did think about turning around. 

But the three of us—my new husband and our 8 month old—were headed to Acadia. We drove out and away, through mountains that sparkled from a morning rain. We headed across Maine, then all the way down to a little cottage at the island’s most downeasterly point. We set up pillows in a circle on the cottage’s living room floor and put the baby–8 months old, bald, beautiful, spry– in the middle, and got in there with her. And we took her outside into the sun-dappled woods all day, pointed out at the sea, and put our feet in the cold water. That was all we really had to do. It was more than enough.

***

I’ve banged into many things since then. I move too fast, and don’t look where I’m going—or rather, I only look where I’m going. I see the book I want from the bookshelf, but not the sharp, head-height edge of the bookshelf. Lately, I try to plot my movements more carefully, but it doesn’t come naturally. It feels like I’m sneaking up on someone.

Teaching was the only setting where I wasn’t too impatient. I wasn’t in a hurry, I wasn’t trying to get away from anything, or take shortcuts. I never once hit my head or stubbed my toe in the classroom. My own kids used to complain that my students got a much more patient and reasonable version of me than they did, and of course they were right. I wonder if the main reason was always some version of this: I didn’t argue with students about something stupid that was really about them growing up and leaving.  

***

It can take an extra, painful, or awe-inspiring thing to stop people in their haste and haze. Furniture legs, divorce, leaking breast milk, bad news, the natural world, grief, a migraine. Something to make us look closer and wider. Poetry is good at that.

Postscript invites us to pull over and look. The way I read it, it also reminds us about the limits of our seeing, our timing, our permanence, and our importance. We are “a hurry.” Neither here nor there. Solid and ephemeral, like everything. Busy like the swans, the wind and ocean, and the light. All busy.

In the world of the poem, it’s a lucky thing to be caught off guard. To hear Heaney tell it, that’s what the poem did to him: “Now and again a poem comes like that, like a ball kicked in from nowhere: in this case, I was completely absorbed in writing one of the last of the Oxford lectures when I had this quick sidelong glimpse of something flying past; before I knew where I was, I went after it.”  

We have hearts that can be blown open. And despite our homesickness and stumbling, we can show up and look. Some days it’s hard to get out of bed, the house, your head, the neighborhood, your habit. But sometime, if you can, make the time. Put yourself where the buffetings and the good poems and the good people can find you.

***

Here’s the poem again:

Postscript by Seamus Heaney

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

***

Things students said and wondered and wrote about Postscript:

Is it saying you can’t you possibly see everything? Mari 

The guy seems to have low expectations? Like, for us? Diego

He’s telling us what to do…then he’s descriptive in the middle I guess?  Scenes of bird, rocks,  water…Nora

Then just tells us how it is. Then tells us how we’ll be (and what could happen) Oona

Can we see a photo of where he’s talking about? Ari. (Let’s not yet. me)

There’s a tension between tone and content…like, “dude sometime check it out” and then like, “do it exactly this way, on this date and time and place” Devon

Very Irish. Rose

You know…keep your hopes in check. Don’t be earnest. The world’s too beautiful for us. Rose

Also useless to think you’ll capture it. Then why suggest going exactly there? Sam

Isn’t he trying to capture it? He’s talking to himself. Lee

Useless to think you’ll capture it more thoroughly. J.P.

More thoroughly than… what…?  Abby

And then things shift. You are neither here nor there. You’re a hurry. But you’re doing your part. Just don’t get ahead of yourself. I can’t tell if this is a comfort thing to say or an insult. Eli

Again, Irish. Rose

Love “soft buffetings”... It’s a gentle word for a whipping wind (if it can blow your heart open) Zohar

Same. Amir

Through which known and strange things pass. Is the speaker saying we’re all like ghosts? Also known and strange things. Expected and unexpected?  Isaac

Makes me wonder about past lives. May

The human parts seems so floaty. Oliver

Like when he’s talking about the natural world, it’s solid matter…but with people..we’re just like see-through. Oliver

How we talked the other day about giving props to awe. About grandeur Tara

And then the wind knocks you over. Blows you open. Sam

Blows your heart open. That’s a good thing. Think of the grinch. Lonni

I need to read it again. May

I’m not a fan. Let’s move on. Joe

What?? Celine.

Now can we see the pic? Ari

“Postscript” by Seamus Heaney, from The Spirit Level. © Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996.