Opened Ground Read online

  into the limbo and dry urn of the larynx.

  The Adam’s apple in its weathered sac

  worked like the plunger of a pump in drought

  but yielded nothing to help the helpless smile.

  Morning field smells came past on the wind,

  the sex-cut of sweetbriar after rain,

  new meadow hay, birds’ nests filled with leaves.

  ‘You’d have thought that Anahorish School

  was purgatory enough for any man,’

  I said. ‘You have done your station.’

  Then a little trembling happened and his breath

  rushed the air softly as scythes in his lost meadows.

  ‘Birch trees have overgrown Leitrim Moss,

  dairy herds are grazing where the school was

  and the school garden’s loose black mould is grass.’

  He was gone with that and I was faced wrong way

  into more pilgrims absorbed in this exercise.

  As I stood among their whispers and bare feet

  the mists of all the mornings I’d set out

  for Latin classes with him, face to face,

  refreshed me. Mensa, mensa, mensam

  sang on the air like a busy sharping-stone.

  ‘We’ll go some day to my uncle’s farm at Toome –’

  Another master spoke. ‘For what is the great

  moving power and spring of verse? Feeling, and

  in particular, love. When I went last year

  I drank three cups of water from the well.

  It was very cold. It stung me in the ears.

  You should have met him –’ Coming in as usual

  with the rubbed quotation and his cocked bird’s eye

  dabbing for detail. When you’re on the road

  give lifts to people, you’ll always learn something.

  There he went, in his belted gaberdine,

  and after him, another fosterer,

  slack-shouldered and clear-eyed: ‘Sure I might have known

  once I had made the pad, you’d be after me

  sooner or later. Forty-two years on

  and you’ve got no farther! But after that again,

  where else would you go? Iceland, maybe? Maybe the Dordogne?’

  And then the parting shot. ‘In my own day

  the odd one came here on the hunt for women.’

  VI

  Freckle-face, fox-head, pod of the broom,

  Catkin-pixie, little fern-swish:

  Where did she arrive from?

  Like a wish wished

  And gone, her I chose at ‘secrets’

  And whispered to. When we were playing houses.

  I was sunstruck at the basilica door –

  A stillness far away, a space, a dish,

  A blackened tin and knocked-over stool –

  Like a tramped neolithic floor

  Uncovered among dunes where the bent grass

  Whispers on like reeds about Midas’s

  Secrets, secrets. I shut my ears to the bell.

  Head hugged. Eyes shut. Leaf ears. Don’t tell. Don’t tell.

  A stream of pilgrims answering the bell

  Trailed up the steps as I went down them

  Towards the bottle-green, still

  Shade of an oak. Shades of the Sabine farm

  On the beds of St Patrick’s Purgatory.

  Late summer, country distance, not an air:

  Loosen the toga for wine and poetry

  Till Phoebus returning routs the morning star.

  As a somnolent hymn to Mary rose

  I felt an old pang that packed bags of grain

  And the sloped shafts of forks and hoes

  Once mocked me with, at my own long virgin

  Fasts and thirsts, my nightly shadow feasts,

  Haunting the granaries of words like breasts.

  As if I knelt for years at a keyhole

  Mad for it, and all that ever opened

  Was the breathed-on grille of a confessional

  Until that night I saw her honey-skinned

  Shoulderblades and the wheatlands of her back

  Through the wide keyhole of her keyhole dress

  And a window facing the deep south of luck

  Opened and I inhaled the land of kindness.

  As little flowers that were all bowed and shut

  By the night chills rise on their stems and open

  As soon as they have felt the touch of sunlight,

  So I revived in my own wilting powers

  And my heart flushed, like somebody set free.

  Translated, given, under the oak tree.

  VII

  I had come to the edge of the water,

  soothed by just looking, idling over it

  as if it were a clear barometer

  or a mirror, when his reflection

  did not appear but I sensed a presence

  entering into my concentration

  on not being concentrated as he spoke

  my name. And though I was reluctant

  I turned to meet his face and the shock

  is still in me at what I saw. His brow

  was blown open above the eye and blood

  had dried on his neck and cheek. ‘Easy now,’

  he said, ‘it’s only me. You’ve seen men as raw

  after a football match … What time it was

  when I was wakened up I still don’t know

  but I heard this knocking, knocking, and it

  scared me, like the phone in the small hours,

  so I had the sense not to put on the light

  but looked out from behind the curtain.

  I saw two customers on the doorstep

  and an old Land Rover with the doors open

  parked on the street, so I let the curtain drop;

  but they must have been waiting for it to move

  for they shouted to come down into the shop.

  She started to cry then and roll round the bed,

  lamenting and lamenting to herself,

  not even asking who it was. “Is your head

  astray, or what’s come over you?” I roared, more

  to bring myself to my senses

  than out of any real anger at her

  for the knocking shook me, the way they kept it up,

  and her whingeing and half-screeching made it worse.

  All the time they were shouting, “Shop!

  Shop!” so I pulled on my shoes and a sportscoat

  and went back to the window and called out,

  “What do you want? Could you quieten the racket

  or I’ll not come down at all.” “There’s a child not well.

  Open up and see what you have got – pills

  or a powder or something in a bottle,”

  one of them said. He stepped back off the footpath

  so I could see his face in the streetlamp

  and when the other moved I knew them both.

  But bad and all as the knocking was, the quiet

  hit me worse. She was quiet herself now,

  lying dead still, whispering to watch out.

  At the bedroom door I switched on the light.

  “It’s odd they didn’t look for a chemist.

  Who are they anyway at this hour of the night?”

  she asked me, with the eyes standing in her head.

  “I know them to see,” I said, but something

  made me reach and squeeze her hand across the bed

  before I went downstairs into the aisle

  of the shop. I stood there, going weak

  in the legs. I remember the stale smell

  of cooked meat or something coming through

  as I went to open up. From then on

  you know as much about it as I do.’

  ‘Did they say nothing?’ ‘Nothing. What would they say?’

  ‘Were they in uniform? Not masked in any way?’

  ‘They were barefaced as they
would be in the day,

  shites thinking they were the be-all and the end-all.’

  ‘Not that it is any consolation

  but they were caught,’ I told him, ‘and got jail.’

  Big-limbed, decent, open-faced, he stood

  forgetful of everything now except

  whatever was welling up in his spoiled head,

  beginning to smile. ‘You’ve put on a bit of weight

  since you did your courting in that big Austin

  you got the loan of on a Sunday night.’

  Through life and death he had hardly aged.

  There always was an athlete’s cleanliness

  shining off him, and except for the ravaged

  forehead and the blood, he was still that same

  rangy midfielder in a blue jersey

  and starched pants, the one stylist on the team,

  the perfect, clean, unthinkable victim.

  ‘Forgive the way I have lived indifferent –

  forgive my timid circumspect involvement,’

  I surprised myself by saying. ‘Forgive

  my eye,’ he said, ‘all that’s above my head.’

  And then a stun of pain seemed to go through him

  and he trembled like a heatwave and faded.

  VIII

  Black water. White waves. Furrows snowcapped.

  A magpie flew from the basilica

  and staggered in the granite airy space

  I was staring into, on my knees

  at the hard mouth of St Brigid’s Bed.

  I came to and there at the bed’s stone hub

  was my archaeologist, very like himself,

  with his scribe’s face smiling its straight-lipped smile,

  starting at the sight of me with the same old

  pretence of amazement, so that the wing

  of wood-kerne’s hair fanned down over his brow.

  And then as if a shower were blackening

  already blackened stubble, the dark weather

  of his unspoken pain came over him.

  A pilgrim bent and whispering on his rounds

  inside the bed passed between us slowly.

  ‘Those dreamy stars that pulsed across the screen

  beside you in the ward – your heartbeats, Tom, I mean –

  scared me the way they stripped things naked.

  My banter failed too early in that visit.

  I could not take my eyes off the machine.

  I had to head back straightaway to Dublin,

  guilty and empty, feeling I had said nothing

  and that, as usual, I had somehow broken

  covenants, and failed an obligation.

  I half-knew we would never meet again …

  Did our long gaze and last handshake contain

  nothing to appease that recognition?’

  ‘Nothing at all. But familiar stone

  had me half-numbed to face the thing alone.

  I loved my still-faced archaeology.

  The small crab-apple physiognomies

  on high crosses, carved heads in abbeys …

  Why else dig in for years in that hard place

  in a muck of bigotry under the walls

  picking through shards and Williamite cannon balls?

  But all that we just turned to banter too.

  I felt that I should have seen far more of you

  and maybe would have – but dead at thirty-two!

  Ah poet, lucky poet, tell me why

  what seemed deserved and promised passed me by?’

  I could not speak. I saw a hoard of black

  basalt axeheads, smooth as a beetle’s back,

  a cairn of stone force that might detonate,

  the eggs of danger. And then I saw a face

  he had once given me, a plaster cast

  of an abbess, done by the Gowran master,

  mild-mouthed and cowled, a character of grace.

  ‘Your gift will be a candle in our house –’

  But he had gone when I looked to meet his eyes

  and hunkering instead there in his place

  was a bleeding, pale-faced boy, plastered in mud.

  ‘The red-hot pokers blazed a lovely red

  in Jerpoint the Sunday I was murdered,’

  he said quietly. ‘Now do you remember?

  You were there with poets when you got the word

  and stayed there with them, while your own flesh and blood

  was carted to Bellaghy from the Fews.

  They showed more agitation at the news

  than you did.’

  ‘But they were getting crisis

  first-hand, Colum, they had happened in on

  live sectarian assassination.

  I was dumb, encountering what was destined.’

  And so I pleaded with my second cousin.

  ‘I kept seeing a grey stretch of Lough Beg

  and the strand empty at daybreak.

  I felt like the bottom of a dried-up lake.’

  ‘You saw that, and you wrote that – not the fact.

  You confused evasion and artistic tact.

  The Protestant who shot me through the head

  I accuse directly, but indirectly, you

  who now atone perhaps upon this bed

  for the way you whitewashed ugliness and drew

  the lovely blinds of the Purgatorio

  and saccharined my death with morning dew.’

  Then I seemed to waken out of sleep

  among more pilgrims whom I did not know

  drifting to the hostel for the night.

  IX

  ‘My brain dried like spread turf, my stomach

  Shrank to a cinder and tightened and cracked.

  Often I was dogs on my own track

  Of blood on wet grass that I could have licked.

  Under the prison blanket, an ambush

  Stillness I felt safe in settled round me.

  Street lights came on in small towns, the bomb flash

  Came before the sound, I saw country

  I knew from Glenshane down to Toome

  And heard a car I could make out years away

  With me in the back of it like a white-faced groom,

  A hit-man on the brink, emptied and deadly.

  When the police yielded my coffin, I was light

  As my head when I took aim.’

  This voice from blight

  And hunger died through the black dorm:

  There he was, laid out with a drift of Mass cards

  At his shrouded feet. Then the firing party’s

  Volley in the yard. I saw woodworm

  In gate posts and door jambs, smelt mildew

  From the byre loft where he had watched and hid

  From fields that his draped coffin would raft through.

  Unquiet soul, they should have buried you

  In the bog where you threw your first grenade,

  Where only helicopters and curlews

  Make their maimed music, and sphagnum moss

  Could teach you its medicinal repose

  Until, when the weasel whistles on its tail,

  No other weasel will obey its call.

  I dreamt and drifted. All seemed to run to waste

  As down a swirl of mucky, glittering flood

  Strange polyp floated like a huge corrupt

  Magnolia bloom, surreal as a shed breast,

  My softly awash and blanching self-disgust.

  And I cried among night waters, ‘I repent

  My unweaned life that kept me competent

  To sleepwalk with connivance and mistrust.’

  Then, like a pistil growing from the polyp,

  A lighted candle rose and steadied up

  Until the whole bright-masted thing retrieved

  A course and the currents it had gone with

  Were what it rode and showed. No more adrift,

  My feet touched bottom and my heart revived.

&nb
sp; Then something round and clear

  And mildly turbulent, like a bubbleskin

  Or a moon in smoothly rippled lough water

  Rose in a cobwebbed space: the molten

  Inside-sheen of an instrument

  Revolved its polished convexes full

  Upon me, so close and brilliant

  I seemed to pitch back in a headlong fall.

  And then it was the clarity of waking

  To sunlight and a bell and gushing taps

  In the next cubicle. Still there for the taking!

  The old brass trumpet with its valves and stops

  I found once in loft thatch, a mystery

  I shied from then for I thought such trove beyond me.

  ‘I hate how quick I was to know my place.

  I hate where I was born, hate everything

  That made me biddable and unforthcoming,’

  I mouthed at my half-composed face

  In the shaving mirror, like somebody

  Drunk in the bathroom during a party,

  Lulled and repelled by his own reflection.

  As if the cairnstone could defy the cairn.

  As if the eddy could reform the pool.

  As if a stone swirled under a cascade,

  Eroded and eroding in its bed,

  Could grind itself down to a different core.

  Then I thought of the tribe whose dances never fail

  For they keep dancing till they sight the deer.

  X

  Morning stir in the hostel. A pot

  hooked on forged links. Soot flakes. Plumping water.

  The open door brilliant with sunlight.

  Hearthsmoke rambling and a thud of earthenware

  drumming me back until I saw the mug

  beyond my reach on its high shelf, the one

  patterned with blue cornflowers, sprig after sprig

  repeating round it, as quiet as a milestone …

  When had it not been there? There was one night

  when fit-up actors used it for a prop