Opened Ground Read online

And the immortelles of perfect pitch

  And that moment when the bird sings very close

  To the music of what happens.

  Leavings

  A soft whoosh, the sunset blaze

  of straw on blackened stubble,

  a thatch-deep, freshening

  barbarous crimson burn –

  I rode down England

  as they fired the crop

  that was the leavings of a crop,

  the smashed tow-coloured barley,

  down from Ely’s Lady Chapel,

  the sweet tenor Latin

  forever banished,

  the sumptuous windows

  threshed clear by Thomas Cromwell.

  Which circle does he tread,

  scalding on cobbles,

  each one a broken statue’s head?

  After midnight, after summer,

  to walk in a sparking field,

  to smell dew and ashes

  and start Will Brangwen’s ghost

  from the hot soot –

  a breaking sheaf of light,

  abroad in the hiss

  and clash of stooking.

  The Harvest Bow

  As you plaited the harvest bow

  You implicated the mellowed silence in you

  In wheat that does not rust

  But brightens as it tightens twist by twist

  Into a knowable corona,

  A throwaway love-knot of straw.

  Hands that aged round ashplants and cane sticks

  And lapped the spurs on a lifetime of gamecocks

  Harked to their gift and worked with fine intent

  Until your fingers moved somnambulant:

  I tell and finger it like braille,

  Gleaning the unsaid off the palpable,

  And if I spy into its golden loops

  I see us walk between the railway slopes

  Into an evening of long grass and midges,

  Blue smoke straight up, old beds and ploughs in hedges,

  An auction notice on an outhouse wall –

  You with a harvest bow in your lapel,

  Me with the fishing rod, already homesick

  For the big lift of these evenings, as your stick

  Whacking the tips off weeds and bushes

  Beats out of time, and beats, but flushes

  Nothing: that original townland

  Still tongue-tied in the straw tied by your hand.

  The end of art is peace

  Could be the motto of this frail device

  That I have pinned up on our deal dresser –

  Like a drawn snare

  Slipped lately by the spirit of the corn

  Yet burnished by its passage, and still warm.

  In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge

  killed in France 31 July 1917

  The bronze soldier hitches a bronze cape

  That crumples stiffly in imagined wind

  No matter how the real winds buff and sweep

  His sudden hunkering run, forever craned

  Over Flanders. Helmet and haversack,

  The gun’s firm slope from butt to bayonet,

  The loyal, fallen names on the embossed plaque –

  It all meant little to the worried pet

  I was in nineteen forty-six or seven,

  Gripping my Aunt Mary by the hand

  Along the Portstewart prom, then round the crescent

  To thread the Castle Walk out to the strand.

  The pilot from Coleraine sailed to the coal-boat.

  Courting couples rose out of the scooped dunes.

  A farmer stripped to his studs and shiny waistcoat

  Rolled the trousers down on his timid shins.

  Francis Ledwidge, you courted at the seaside

  Beyond Drogheda one Sunday afternoon.

  Literary, sweet-talking, countrified,

  You pedalled out the leafy road from Slane

  Where you belonged, among the dolorous

  And lovely: the May altar of wild flowers,

  Easter water sprinkled in outhouses,

  Mass-rocks and hill-top raths and raftered byres.

  I think of you in your Tommy’s uniform,

  A haunted Catholic face, pallid and brave,

  Ghosting the trenches like a bloom of hawthorn

  Or silence cored from a Boyne passage-grave.

  It’s summer, nineteen-fifteen. I see the girl

  My aunt was then, herding on the long acre.

  Behind a low bush in the Dardanelles

  You suck stones to make your dry mouth water.

  It’s nineteen-seventeen. She still herds cows

  But a big strafe puts the candles out in Y pres:

  ‘My soul is by the Boyne, cutting new meadows …

  My country wears her confirmation dress.’

  ‘To be called a British soldier while my country

  Has no place among nations …’ You were rent

  By shrapnel six weeks later. ‘I am sorry

  That party politics should divide our tents.’

  In you, our dead enigma, all the strains

  Criss-cross in useless equilibrium

  And as the wind tunes through this vigilant bronze

  I hear again the sure confusing drum

  You followed from Boyne water to the Balkans

  But miss the twilit note your flute should sound.

  You were not keyed or pitched like these true-blue ones

  Though all of you consort now underground.

  Ugolino

  (from Dante, Inferno, xxxii, xxxiii)

  We had already left him. I walked the ice

  And saw two soldered in a frozen hole

  On top of other, one’s skull capping the other’s,

  Gnawing at him where the neck and head

  Are grafted to the sweet fruit of the brain,

  Like a famine victim at a loaf of bread.

  So the berserk Tydeus gnashed and fed

  Upon the severed head of Menalippus

  As if it were some spattered carnal melon.

  ‘You,’ I shouted, ‘you on top, what hate

  Makes you so ravenous and insatiable?

  What keeps you so monstrously at rut?

  Is there any story I can tell

  For you, in the world above, against him?

  If my tongue by then’s not withered in my throat

  I will report the truth and clear your name.’

  That sinner eased his mouth up off his meal

  To answer me, and wiped it with the hair

  Left growing on his victim’s ravaged skull,

  Then said, ‘Even before I speak

  The thought of having to relive all that

  Desperate time makes my heart sick;

  Yet while I weep to say them, I would sow

  My words like curses – that they might increase

  And multiply upon this head I gnaw.

  I know you come from Florence by your accent

  But I have no idea who you are

  Nor how you ever managed your descent.

  Still, you should know my name, for I was Count

  Ugolino, this was Archbishop Roger,

  And why I act the jockey to his mount

  Is surely common knowledge; how my good faith

  Was easy prey to his malignancy,

  How I was taken, held, and put to death.

  But you must hear something you cannot know

  If you’re to judge him – the cruelty

  Of my death at his hands. So listen now.

  Others will pine as I pined in that jail

  Which is called Hunger after me, and watch

  As I watched through a narrow hole

  Moon after moon, bright and somnambulant,

  Pass overhead, until that night I dreamt

  The bad dream and my future’s veil was rent.

  I saw a wolf-hunt: this man rode the hill

  Between Pisa and Lucca, hounding down
<
br />   The wolf and wolf-cubs. He was lordly and masterful,

  His pack in keen condition, his company

  Deployed ahead of him, Gualandi

  And Sismundi as well, and Lanfranchi,

  Who soon wore down wolf-father and wolf-sons

  And my hallucination

  Was all sharp teeth and bleeding flanks ripped open.

  When I awoke before the dawn, my head

  Swam with cries of my sons who slept in tears

  Beside me there, crying out for bread.

  (If your sympathy has not already started

  At all that my heart was foresuffering

  And if you are not crying, you are hardhearted.)

  They were awake now, it was near the time

  For food to be brought in as usual,

  Each one of them disturbed after his dream,

  When I heard the door being nailed and hammered

  Shut, far down in the nightmare tower.

  I stared in my sons’ faces and spoke no word.

  My eyes were dry and my heart was stony.

  They cried and my little Anselm said,

  “What’s wrong? Why are you staring, Daddy?”

  But I shed no tears, I made no reply

  All through that day, all through the night that followed

  Until another sun blushed in the sky

  And sent a small beam probing the distress

  Inside those prison walls. Then when I saw

  The image of my face in their four faces

  I bit on my two hands in desperation

  And they, since they thought hunger drove me to it,

  Rose up suddenly in agitation

  Saying, “Father, it will greatly ease our pain

  If you eat us instead, and you who dressed us

  In this sad flesh undress us here again.”

  So then I calmed myself to keep them calm.

  We hushed. That day and the next stole past us

  And earth seemed hardened against me and them.

  For four days we let the silence gather.

  Then, throwing himself flat in front of me,

  Gaddo said, “Why don’t you help me, Father?”

  He died like that, and surely as you see

  Me here, one by one I saw my three

  Drop dead during the fifth day and the sixth day

  Until I saw no more. Searching, blinded,

  For two days I groped over them and called them.

  Then hunger killed where grief had only wounded.’

  When he had said all this, his eyes rolled

  And his teeth, like a dog’s teeth clamping round a bone,

  Bit into the skull and again took hold.

  Pisa! Pisa, your sounds are like a hiss

  Sizzling in our country’s grassy language.

  And since the neighbour states have been remiss

  In your extermination, let a huge

  Dyke of islands bar the Arno’s mouth, let

  Capraia and Gorgona dam and deluge

  You and your population. For the sins

  Of Ugolino, who betrayed your forts,

  Should never have been visited on his sons.

  Your atrocity was Theban. They were young

  And innocent: Hugh and Brigata

  And the other two whose names are in my song.

  from SWEENEY ASTRAY (1983)

  Sweeney in Flight

  When Sweeney heard the shouts of the soldiers and the big noise of the army, he rose out of the tree towards the dark clouds and ranged far over mountains and territories.

  A long time he went faring all through Ireland,

  poking his way into hard rocky clefts,

  shouldering through ivy bushes,

  unsettling falls of pebbles in narrow defiles,

  wading estuaries,

  breasting summits,

  trekking through glens,

  until he found the pleasures of Glen Bolcain.

  That place is a natural asylum where all the madmen of Ireland used to assemble once their year in madness was complete.

  Glen Bolcain is like this:

  it has four gaps to the wind,

  pleasant woods, clean-banked wells,

  cold springs and clear sandy streams

  where green-topped watercress and languid brooklime

  philander over the surface.

  It is nature’s pantry

  with its sorrels, its wood-sorrels,

  its berries, its wild garlic,

  its black sloes and its brown acorns.

  The madmen would beat each other for the pick of its watercresses and for the beds on its banks.

  Sweeney stayed a long time in that glen until one night he was cooped up in the top of a tall ivy-grown hawthorn. He could hardly endure it, for every time he twisted or turned, the thorny twigs would flail him so that he was prickled and cut and bleeding all over. He changed from that station to another one, a clump of thick briars with a single young blackthorn standing up out of the thorny bed, and he settled in the top of the blackthorn. But it was too slender. It wobbled and bent so that Sweeney fell heavily through the thicket and ended up on the ground like a man in a bloodbath. Then he gathered himself up, exhausted and beaten, and came out of the thicket, saying:

  – It is hard to bear this life after the pleasant times I knew. And it has been like this a year to the night last night!

  Then he spoke this poem:

  A year until last night

  I have lived among dark trees,

  between the flood and ebb-tide,

  going cold and naked

  with no pillow for my head,

  no human company

  and, so help me, God,

  no spear and no sword!

  No sweet talk with women.

  Instead, I pine

  for cresses, for the clean

  pickings of brooklime.

  No surge of royal blood,

  camped here in solitude;

  no glory flames the wood,

  no friends, no music.

  Tell the truth: a hard lot.

  And no shirking this fate;

  no sleep, no respite,

  no hope for a long time.

  No house humming full,

  no men, loud with good will,

  nobody to call me king,

  no drink or banqueting.

  A great gulf yawns now

  between me and my retinue,

  between craziness and reason.

  Scavenging through the glen

  on my mad king’s visit:

  no pomp or poet’s circuit

  but wild scuttles in the wood.

  Heavenly saints! O Holy God!

  No skilled musicians’ cunning,

  no soft discoursing women,

  no open-handed giving;

  my doom to be a long dying.

  Our sorrows were multiplied

  that Tuesday when Congal fell.

  Our dead made a great harvest,

  our remnant, a last swathe.

  This has been my plight.

  Suddenly cast out,

  grieving and astray,

  a year until last night.

  Sweeney kept going until he reached the church at Swim-Two-Birds on the Shannon, which is now called Cloon-burren; he arrived there on a Friday, to be exact. The clerics of the church were singing nones, women were beating flax and one was giving birth to a child.

  – It is unseemly, said Sweeney, for the women to violate the Lord’s fast day. That woman beating the flax reminds me of our beating at Moira.

  Then he heard the vesper bell ringing and said:

  – It would be sweeter to listen to the notes of the cuckoos on the banks of the Bann than to the whinge of this bell tonight.

  Then he uttered the poem:

  I perched for rest and imagined

  cuckoos calling across water,

  the Bann cuckoo, calling sweeter

  than church bells that whin
ge and grind.

  Friday is the wrong day, woman,

  for you to give birth to a son,

  the day when Mad Sweeney fasts

  for love of God, in penitence.

  Do not just discount me. Listen.

  At Moira my tribe was beaten,

  beetled, heckled, hammered down,

  like flax being scutched by these women.

  From the cliff of Lough Diolar

  up to Derry Colmcille

  I saw the great swans, heard their calls

  sweetly rebuking wars and battles.

  From lonely cliff-tops, the stag

  bells and makes the whole glen shake

  and re-echo. I am ravished.

  Unearthly sweetness shakes my breast.

  O Christ, the loving and the sinless,

  hear my prayer, attend, O Christ,

  and let nothing separate us.

  Blend me forever in your sweetness.

  It was the end of the harvest season and Sweeney heard a hunting-call from a company in the skirts of the wood.

  – This will be the outcry of the Ui Faolain coming to kill me, he said. I slew their king at Moira and this host is out to avenge him.

  He heard the stag bellowing and he made a poem in which he praised aloud all the trees of Ireland, and rehearsed some of his own hardships and sorrows, saying:

  The bushy leafy oak tree

  is highest in the wood,

  the forking shoots of hazel

  hide sweet hazel-nuts.

  The alder is my darling,

  all thornless in the gap,

  some milk of human kindness

  coursing in its sap.

  The blackthorn is a jaggy creel

  stippled with dark sloes;