Seamus Heaney’s ‘Field Work’ is the perfect travel companion

When Heaney writes of spreading a white tablecloth in a dappled woodland, “like a book of manners in the wilderness,” I’m not there with him. I’m here, where I am now, at a cafe table beside the Douro River, looking down the riverside promenade suffused by sunshine. But the shadows of that woodland pull me toward a memory, and suddenly I’m looking through a smudged bus window, my reflection mixing with the dark hole of an alley the bus is trundling past. Then, unexpectedly, I am back on the white tablecloth, only it is the sheeting of a stranger’s bed, and my eyes are following the line of her exposed collarbone, the curve of which is the same as the handle of a oxen-driven plow. Against that plow, without changing my line of sight, I see my father standing in a field of black loam, lifting and throwing down the speckled head of a shovel, digging to alter the world around him, and my world along with it.