Opened Ground Read online

  ‘Yes, look at me to your heart’s content

  but look at every other thing.’

  And here is a leaper in a kilt,

  two figures kissing,

  a mouth with sprigs,

  a running hart, two fishes,

  a damaged beast with an instrument.

  ‘Aye’

  (from ‘The Loaming’)

  Big voices in the womanless kitchen.

  They never lit a lamp in the summertime

  but took the twilight as it came

  like solemn trees. They sat on in the dark

  with their pipes red in their mouths, the talk come down

  to Aye and Aye again and, when the dog shifted,

  a curt There boy!

  I closed my eyes

  to make the light motes stream behind them

  and my head went airy, my chair rode

  high and low among branches and the wind

  stirred up a rookery in the next long Aye.

  The King of the Ditchbacks

  for John Montague

  I

  As if a trespasser

  unbolted a forgotten gate

  and ripped the growth

  tangling its lower bars –

  just beyond the hedge

  he has opened a dark morse

  along the bank,

  a crooked wounding

  of silent, cobwebbed

  grass. If I stop

  he stops

  like the moon.

  He lives in his feet

  and ears, weather-eyed,

  all pad and listening,

  a denless mover.

  Under the bridge

  his reflection shifts

  sideways to the current,

  mothy, alluring.

  I am haunted

  by his stealthy rustling,

  the unexpected spoor,

  the pollen settling.

  II

  I was sure I knew him. The time I’d spent obsessively in that upstairs room bringing myself close to him: each entranced hiatus as I chainsmoked and stared out the dormer into the grassy hillside I was laying myself open. He was depending on me as I hung out on the limb of a translated phrase like a youngster dared out on to an alder branch over the whirlpool. Small dreamself in the branches. Dream fears I inclined towards, interrogating:

  – Are you the one I ran upstairs to find drowned under running water in the bath?

  – The one the mowing machine severed like a hare in the stiff frieze of harvest?

  – Whose little bloody clothes we buried in the garden?

  – The one who lay awake in darkness a wall’s breadth from the troubled hoofs?

  After I had dared these invocations, I went back towards the gate to follow him. And my stealth was second nature to me, as if I were coming into my own. I remembered I had been vested for this calling.

  III

  When I was taken aside that day

  I had the sense of election:

  they dressed my head in a fishnet

  and plaited leafy twigs through meshes

  so my vision was a bird’s

  at the heart of a thicket

  and I spoke as I moved

  like a voice from a shaking bush.

  King of the ditchbacks,

  I went with them obediently

  to the edge of a pigeon wood –

  deciduous canopy, screened wain of evening

  we lay beneath in silence.

  No birds came, but I waited

  among briars and stones, or whispered

  or broke the watery gossamers

  if I moved a muscle.

  ‘Come back to us,’ they said, ‘in harvest,

  when we hide in the stooked corn,

  when the gundogs can hardly retrieve

  what’s brought down.’ And I saw myself

  rising to move in that dissimulation,

  top-knotted, masked in sheaves, noting

  the fall of birds: a rich young man

  leaving everything he had

  for a migrant solitude.

  Station Island

  I

  A hurry of bell-notes

  flew over morning hush

  and water-blistered cornfields,

  an escaped ringing

  that stopped as quickly

  as it started. Sunday,

  the silence breathed

  and could not settle back

  for a man had appeared

  at the side of the field

  with a bow-saw, held

  stiffly up like a lyre.

  He moved and stopped to gaze

  up into hazel bushes,

  angled his saw in,

  pulled back to gaze again

  and move on to the next.

  ‘I know you, Simon Sweeney,

  for an old Sabbath-breaker

  who has been dead for years.’

  ‘Damn all you know,’ he said,

  his eye still on the hedge

  and not turning his head.

  ‘I was your mystery man

  and am again this morning.

  Through gaps in the bushes,

  your First Communion face

  would watch me cutting timber.

  When cut or broken limbs

  of trees went yellow, when

  woodsmoke sharpened air

  or ditches rustled

  you sensed my trail there

  as if it had been sprayed.

  It left you half afraid.

  When they bade you listen

  in the bedroom dark

  to wind and rain in the trees

  and think of tinkers camped

  under a heeled-up cart

  you shut your eyes and saw

  a wet axle and spokes

  in moonlight, and me

  streaming from the shower,

  headed for your door.’

  Sunlight broke in the hazels,

  the quick bell-notes began

  a second time. I turned

  at another sound:

  a crowd of shawled women

  were wading the young corn,

  their skirts brushing softly.

  Their motion saddened morning.

  It whispered to the silence,

  ‘Pray for us, pray for us,’

  it conjured through the air

  until the field was full

  of half-remembered faces,

  a loosed congregation

  that straggled past and on.

  As I drew behind them

  I was a fasted pilgrim,

  light-headed, leaving home

  to face into my station.

  ‘Stay clear of all processions!’

  Sweeney shouted at me,

  but the murmur of the crowd

  and their feet slushing through

  the tender, bladed growth

  had opened a drugged path

  I was set upon.

  I trailed those early-risers

  fallen into step

  before the smokes were up.

  The quick bell rang again.

  II

  I was parked on a high road, listening

  to peewits and wind blowing round the car

  when something came to life in the driving mirror,

  someone walking fast in an overcoat

  and boots, bareheaded, big, determined

  in his sure haste along the crown of the road

  so that I felt myself the challenged one.

  The car door slammed. I was suddenly out

  face to face with an aggravated man

  raving on about nights spent listening for

  gun butts to come cracking on the door,

  yeomen on the rampage, and his neighbour

  among them, hammering home the shape of things.

  ‘Round about here you overtook the women,’

  I said, as the thing came clear. ‘Your Lough Derg Pilgrim

  haunts
me every time I cross this mountain –

  as if I am being followed, or following.

  I’m on my road there now to do the station.’

  ‘O holy Jesus Christ, does nothing change?’

  His head jerked sharply side to side and up

  like a diver’s surfacing after a plunge,

  then with a look that said, Who is this cub

  anyhow, he took cognizance again

  of where he was: the road, the mountain top,

  and the air, softened by a shower of rain,

  worked on his anger visibly until:

  ‘It is a road you travel on your own.

  I who learned to read in the reek of flax

  and smelled hanged bodies rotting on their gibbets

  and saw their looped slime gleaming from the sacks –

  hard-mouthed Ribbonmen and Orange bigots

  made me into the old fork-tongued turncoat

  who mucked the byre of their politics.

  If times were hard, I could be hard too.

  I made the traitor in me sink the knife.

  And maybe there’s a lesson there for you,

  whoever you are, wherever you come out of,

  for though there’s something natural in your smile

  there’s something in it strikes me as defensive.’

  ‘The angry role was never my vocation,’

  I said. ‘I come from County Derry,

  where the last marching bands of Ribbonmen

  on Patrick’s Day still played their “Hymn to Mary”.

  Obedient strains like theirs tuned me first

  and not that harp of unforgiving iron

  the Fenians strung. A lot of what you wrote

  I heard and did: this Lough Derg station,

  flax-pullings, dances, fair-days, crossroads chat

  and the shaky local voice of education.

  All that. And always, Orange drums.

  And neighbours on the roads at night with guns.’

  ‘I know, I know, I know, I know,’ he said,

  ‘but you have to try to make sense of what comes.

  Remember everything and keep your head.’

  ‘The alders in the hedge,’ I said, ‘mushrooms,

  dark-clumped grass where cows or horses dunged,

  the cluck when pith-lined chestnut shells split open

  in your hand, the melt of shells corrupting,

  old jam pots in a drain clogged up with mud –’

  But now Carleton was interrupting:

  ‘All this is like a trout kept in a spring

  or maggots sown in wounds for desperate ointment –

  another life that cleans our element.

  We are earthworms of the earth, and all that

  has gone through us is what will be our trace.’

  He turned on his heel when he was saying this

  and headed up the road at the same hard pace.

  III

  I knelt. Hiatus. Habit’s afterlife …

  I was back among bead clicks and the murmurs

  from inside confessionals, side altars

  where candles died insinuating slight

  intimate smells of wax at body heat.

  There was an active, wind-stilled hush, as if

  in a shell the listened-for ocean stopped

  and a tide rested and sustained the roof.

  A seaside trinket floated then and idled

  in vision, like phosphorescent weed,

  a toy grotto with seedling mussel shells

  and cockles glued in patterns over it,

  pearls condensed from a child invalid’s breath

  into a shimmering ark, my house of gold

  that housed the snowdrop weather of her death

  long ago. I would stow away in the hold

  of our big oak sideboard and forage for it

  laid past in its tissue paper for good.

  It was like touching birds’ eggs, robbing the nest

  of the word wreath, as kept and dry and secret

  as her name, which they hardly ever spoke

  but was a white bird trapped inside me

  beating scared wings when Health of the Sick

  fluttered its pray for us in the litany.

  A cold draught blew under the kneeling boards.

  I thought of walking round

  and round a space utterly empty,

  utterly a source, like the idea of sound

  or like the absence sensed in swamp-fed air

  above a ring of walked-down grass and rushes

  where we once found the bad carcass and scrags of hair

  of our dog that had disappeared weeks before.

  IV

  Blurred swimmings as I faced the sun, my back

  to the stone pillar and the iron cross,

  ready to say the dream words I renounce …

  Blurred oval prints of newly ordained faces,

  ‘Father’ pronounced with a fawning relish,

  the sunlit tears of parents being blessed.

  I saw a young priest, glossy as a blackbird,

  as if he had stepped from his anointing

  a moment ago: his purple stole and cord

  or cincture loosely tied, his polished shoes

  unexpectedly secular beneath

  a pleated, lace-hemmed alb of linen cloth.

  His name had lain undisturbed for years

  like an old bicycle wheel in a ditch

  ripped at last from under jungling briars,

  wet and perished. My arms were open wide

  but I could not say the words. ‘The rain forest,’ he said,

  ‘you’ve never seen the like of it. I lasted

  only a couple of years. Bare-breasted

  women and rat-ribbed men. Everything wasted.

  I rotted like a pear. I sweated Masses …’

  His breath came short and shorter. ‘In long houses

  I raised the chalice above headdresses.

  In hoc signo … On that abandoned

  mission compound, my vocation

  is a steam off the drenched creepers.’

  I had broken off from my renunciation

  while he was speaking, so as to clear the way

  for other pilgrims queueing to get started.

  ‘I’m older now than you when you went away,’

  I ventured, feeling a strange reversal.

  ‘I never could see you on the foreign missions.

  I could only see you on a bicycle,

  a clerical student home for the summer,

  doomed to the decent thing. Visiting neighbours.

  Drinking tea and praising home-made bread.

  Something in them would be ratified

  when they saw you at the door in your black suit,

  arriving like some sort of holy mascot.

  You gave too much relief, you raised a siege

  the world had laid against their kitchen grottoes

  hung with holy pictures and crucifixes.’

  ‘And you,’ he faltered, ‘what are you doing here

  but the same thing? What possessed you?

  I at least was young and unaware

  that what I thought was chosen was convention.

  But all this you were clear of you walked into

  over again. And the god has, as they say, withdrawn.

  What are you doing, going through these motions?

  Unless … Unless …’ Again he was short of breath

  and his whole fevered body yellowed and shook.

  ‘Unless you are here taking the last look.’

  Then where he stood was empty as the roads

  we both grew up beside, where the sick man

  had taken his last look one drizzly evening

  when the tarmac steamed with the first breath of spring,

  a knee-deep mist I waded silently

  behind him, on his circuits, visiting.

  V

  An old man’s
hands, like soft paws rowing forward,

  groped for and warded off the air ahead.

  Barney Murphy shuffled on the concrete.

  Master Murphy. I heard the weakened voice

  bulling in sudden rage all over again

  and fell in behind, my eyes fixed on his heels

  like a man lifting swathes at a mower’s heels.

  His sockless feet were like the dried broad bean

  that split its stitches in the display jar

  high on a window in the old classroom,

  white as shy faces in the classroom door.

  ‘Master,’ those elders whispered, ‘I wonder, master …’

  rustling envelopes, proffering them, withdrawing,

  waiting for him to sign beside their mark,

  and ‘Master’ I repeated to myself

  so that he stopped but did not turn or move,

  gone quiet in the shoulders, his small head

  vigilant in the cold gusts off the lough.

  I moved ahead and faced him, shook his hand.

  Above the winged collar, his mottled face

  went distant in a smile as the voice

  readied itself and husked and scraped, ‘Good man,

  good man yourself,’ then lapsed again