Opened Ground Read online

  To end up in a draughty lamplit station

  After the trains have gone, the wet track

  Bared and tensed as I am, all attention

  For your step following and damned if I look back.

  Sloe Gin

  The clear weather of juniper

  darkened into winter.

  She fed gin to sloes

  and sealed the glass container.

  When I unscrewed it

  I smelled the disturbed

  tart stillness of a bush

  rising through the pantry.

  When I poured it

  it had a cutting edge

  and flamed

  like Betelgeuse.

  I drink to you

  in smoke-mirled, blue-

  black sloes, bitter

  and dependable.

  Chekhov on Sakhalin

  for Derek Mahon

  So, he would pay his ‘debt to medicine’.

  But first he drank cognac by the ocean

  With his back to all he had travelled there to face.

  His head was swimming free as the troikas

  Of Tyumen, he looked down from the rail

  Of his thirty years and saw a mile

  Into himself as if he were clear water:

  Lake Baikal from the deckrail of the steamer.

  So far away, Moscow was like lost youth.

  And who was he, to savour in his mouth

  Fine spirits that the puzzled literati

  Packed off with him to a penal colony –

  Him, born, you may say, under the counter?

  At least that meant he knew its worth. No cantor

  In full throat by the iconostasis

  Got holier joy than he got from that glass

  That shone and warmed like diamonds warming

  On some pert young cleavage in a salon,

  Inviolable and affronting.

  He felt the glass go cold in the midnight sun.

  When he staggered up and smashed it on the stones

  It rang as clearly as the convicts’ chains

  That haunted him. All through the months to come

  It rang on like the burden of his freedom

  To try for the right tone – not tract, not thesis –

  And walk away from floggings. He who thought to squeeze

  His slave’s blood out and waken the free man

  Shadowed a convict guide through Sakhalin.

  Sandstone Keepsake

  It is a kind of chalky russet

  solidified gourd, sedimentary

  and so reliably dense and bricky

  I often clasp it and throw it from hand to hand.

  It was ruddier, with an underwater

  hint of contusion, when I lifted it,

  wading a shingle beach on Inishowen.

  Across the estuary light after light

  came on silently round the perimeter

  of the camp. A stone from Phlegethon,

  bloodied on the bed of hell’s hot river?

  Evening frost and the salt water

  made my hand smoke, as if I’d plucked the heart

  that damned Guy de Montfort to the boiling flood –

  but not really, though I remembered

  his victim’s heart in its casket, long venerated.

  Anyhow, there I was with the wet red stone

  in my hand, staring across at the watch-towers

  from my free state of image and allusion,

  swooped on, then dropped by trained binoculars:

  a silhouette not worth bothering about,

  out for the evening in scarf and waders

  and not about to set times wrong or right,

  stooping along, one of the venerators.

  from Shelf Life

  Granite Chip

  Houndstooth stone. Aberdeen of the mind.

  Saying An union in the cup I’ll throw

  I have hurt my hand, pressing it hard around

  this bit hammered off Joyce’s Martello

  Tower, this flecked insoluble brilliant

  I keep but feel little in common with –

  a kind of stone-age circumcising knife,

  a Calvin edge in my complaisant pith.

  Granite is jaggy, salty, punitive

  and exacting. Come to me, it says

  all you who labour and are burdened, I

  will not refresh you. And it adds, Seize

  the day. And, You can take me or leave me.

  Old Smoothing Iron

  Often I watched her lift it

  from where its compact wedge

  rode the back of the stove

  like a tug at anchor.

  To test its heat she’d stare

  and spit in its iron face

  or hold it up next her cheek

  to divine the stored danger.

  Soft thumps on the ironing board.

  Her dimpled angled elbow

  and intent stoop

  as she aimed the smoothing iron

  like a plane into linen,

  like the resentment of women.

  To work, her dumb lunge says,

  is to move a certain mass

  through a certain distance,

  is to pull your weight and feel

  exact and equal to it.

  Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.

  Stone from Delphi

  To be carried back to the shrine some dawn

  when the sea spreads its far sun-crops to the south

  and I make a morning offering again:

  that I may escape the miasma of spilled blood,

  govern the tongue, fear hybris, fear the god

  until he speaks in my untrammelled mouth.

  Making Strange

  I stood between them,

  the one with his travelled intelligence

  and tawny containment,

  his speech like the twang of a bowstring,

  and another, unshorn and bewildered

  in the tubs of his Wellingtons,

  smiling at me for help,

  faced with this stranger I’d brought him.

  Then a cunning middle voice

  came out of the field across the road

  saying, ‘Be adept and be dialect,

  tell of this wind coming past the zinc hut,

  call me sweetbriar after the rain

  or snowberries cooled in the fog.

  But love the cut of this travelled one

  and call me also the cornfield of Boaz.

  Go beyond what’s reliable

  in all that keeps pleading and pleading,

  these eyes and puddles and stones,

  and recollect how bold you were

  when I visited you first

  with departures you cannot go back on.’

  A chaffinch flicked from an ash and next thing

  I found myself driving the stranger

  through my own country, adept

  at dialect, reciting my pride

  in all that I knew, that began to make strange

  at that same recitation.

  The Birthplace

  I

  The deal table where he wrote, so small and plain,

  the single bed a dream of discipline.

  And a flagged kitchen downstairs, its mote-slants

  of thick light: the unperturbed, reliable

  ghost life he carried, with no need to invent.

  And high trees round the house, breathed upon

  day and night by winds as slow as a cart

  coming late from market, or the stir

  a fiddle could make in his reluctant heart.

  II

  That day, we were like one

  of his troubled couples, speechless

  until he spoke for them,

  haunters of silence at noon

  in a deep lane that was sexual

  with ferns and butterflies,

  scared at our hurt,

  throat-sick, heat-struck, driven
/>
  into the damp-floored wood

  where we made an episode

  of ourselves, unforgettable,

  unmentionable,

  and broke out again like cattle

  through bushes, wet and raised,

  only yards from the house.

  III

  Everywhere being nowhere,

  who can prove

  one place more than another?

  We come back emptied,

  to nourish and resist

  the words of coming to rest:

  birthplace, roofbeam, whitewash,

  flagstone, hearth,

  like unstacked iron weights

  afloat among galaxies.

  Still, was it thirty years ago

  I read until first light

  for the first time, to finish

  The Return of the Native?

  The corncrake in the aftergrass

  verified himself, and I heard

  roosters and dogs, the very same

  as if he had written them.

  Changes

  As you came with me in silence

  to the pump in the long grass

  I heard much that you could not hear:

  the bite of the spade that sank it,

  the slithering and grumble

  as the mason mixed his mortar,

  and women coming with white buckets

  like flashes on their ruffled wings.

  The cast-iron rims of the lid

  clinked as I uncovered it,

  something stirred in its mouth.

  I had a bird’s eye view of a bird,

  finch-green, speckly white,

  nesting on dry leaves, flattened, still,

  suffering the light.

  So I roofed the citadel

  as gently as I could, and told you

  and you gently unroofed it

  but where was the bird now?

  There was a single egg, pebbly white,

  and in the rusted bend of the spout

  tail feathers splayed and sat tight.

  So tender, I said, ‘Remember this.

  It will be good for you to retrace this path

  when you have grown away and stand at last

  at the very centre of the empty city.’

  A Bat on the Road

  A batlike soul waking to consciousness of itself in darkness and secrecy and loneliness.

  You would hoist an old hat on the tines of a fork

  and trawl the mouth of the bridge for the slight

  bat-thump and flutter. Skinny downy webs,

  babynails clawing the sweatband … But don’t

  bring it down, don’t break its flight again,

  don’t deny it; this time let it go free.

  Follow its bat-flap under the stone bridge,

  under the Midland and Scottish Railway

  and lose it there in the dark.

  Next thing it shadows moonslicked laurels

  or skims the lapped net on a tennis court.

  Next thing it’s ahead of you in the road.

  What are you after? You keep swerving off,

  flying blind over ashpits and netting wire;

  invited by the brush of a word like peignoir,

  rustles and glimpses, shot silk, the stealth of floods

  So close to me I could hear her breathing

  and there by the lighted window behind trees

  it hangs in creepers matting the brickwork

  and now it’s a wet leaf blowing in the drive,

  now soft-deckled, shadow-convolvulus

  by the White Gates. Who would have thought it? At the White Gates

  She let them do whatever they liked. Cling there

  as long as you want. There is nothing to hide.

  A Hazel Stick for Catherine Ann

  The living mother-of-pearl of a salmon

  just out of the water

  is gone just like that, but your stick

  is kept salmon-silver.

  Seasoned and bendy,

  it convinces the hand

  that what you have you hold

  to play with and pose with

  and lay about with.

  But then too it points back to cattle

  and spatter and beating

  the bars of a gate –

  the very stick we might cut

  from your family tree.

  The living cobalt of an afternoon

  dragonfly drew my eye to it first

  and the evening I trimmed it for you

  you saw your first glow-worm –

  all of us stood round in silence, even you

  gigantic enough to darken the sky

  for a glow-worm.

  And when I poked open the grass

  a tiny brightening den lit the eye

  in the blunt pared end of your stick.

  A Kite for Michael and Christopher

  All through that Sunday afternoon

  a kite flew above Sunday,

  a tightened drumhead, a flitter of blown chaff.

  I’d seen it grey and slippy in the making,

  I’d tapped it when it dried out white and stiff,

  I’d tied the bows of newspaper

  along its six-foot tail.

  But now it was far up like a small black lark

  and now it dragged as if the bellied string

  were a wet rope hauled upon

  to lift a shoal.

  My friend says that the human soul

  is about the weight of a snipe,

  yet the soul at anchor there,

  the string that sags and ascends,

  weighs like a furrow assumed into the heavens.

  Before the kite plunges down into the wood

  and this line goes useless

  take in your two hands, boys, and feel

  the strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief.

  You were born fit for it.

  Stand in here in front of me

  and take the strain.

  The Railway Children

  When we climbed the slopes of the cutting

  We were eye-level with the white cups

  Of the telegraph poles and the sizzling wires.

  Like lovely freehand they curved for miles

  East and miles west beyond us, sagging

  Under their burden of swallows.

  We were small and thought we knew nothing

  Worth knowing. We thought words travelled the wires

  In the shiny pouches of raindrops,

  Each one seeded full with the light

  Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves

  So infinitesimally scaled

  We could stream through the eye of a needle.

  Widgeon

  for Paul Muldoon

  It had been badly shot.

  While he was plucking it

  he found, he says, the voice box –

  like a flute stop

  in the broken windpipe –

  and blew upon it

  unexpectedly

  his own small widgeon cries.

  Sheelagh na Gig

  at Kilpeck

  I

  We look up at her

  hunkered into her angle

  under the eaves.

  She bears the whole stone burden

  on the small of her back and shoulders

  and pinioned elbows,

  the astute mouth, the gripping fingers

  saying push, push hard,

  push harder.

  As the hips go high

  her big tadpole forehead

  is rounded out in sunlight.

  And here beside her are two birds,

  a rabbit’s head, a ram’s,

  a mouth devouring heads.

  II

  Her hands holding herself

  are like hands in an old barn

  holding a bag open.

  I was outside looking in

  at its lapped and supple mouth
<
br />   running grain.

  I looked up under the thatch

  at the dark mouth and eye

  of a bird’s nest or a rat hole,

  smelling the rose on the wall,

  mildew, an earthen floor,

  the warm depth of the eaves.

  And then one night in the yard

  I stood still under heavy rain

  wearing the bag like a caul.

  III

  We look up to her,

  her ring-fort eyes,

  her little slippy shoulders,

  her nose incised and flat,

  and feel light-headed looking up.

  She is twig-boned, saddle-sexed,

  grown-up, grown ordinary,

  seeming to say,