Opened Ground Read online

and I sat in the dark hall estranged from it

  as a couple vowed and called it their loving cup

  and held it in our gaze until the curtain

  jerked shut with an ordinary noise.

  Dipped and glamoured then by this translation,

  it was restored to its old haircracked doze

  on the mantelpiece, its parchment glazes fast –

  as the otter surfaced once with Ronan’s psalter

  miraculously unharmed, that had been lost

  a day and a night under the lough water.

  And so the saint praised God on the lough shore

  for that dazzle of impossibility

  I credited again in the sun-filled door,

  so absolutely light it could put out fire.

  XI

  As if the prisms of the kaleidoscope

  I plunged once in a butt of muddied water

  surfaced like a marvellous lightship

  and out of its silted crystals a monk’s face

  that had spoken years ago from behind a grille

  spoke again about the need and chance

  to salvage everything, to re-envisage

  the zenith and glimpsed jewels of any gift

  mistakenly abased …

  What came to nothing could always be replenished.

  ‘Read poems as prayers,’ he said, ‘and for your penance

  translate me something by Juan de la Cruz.’

  Returned from Spain to our chapped wilderness,

  his consonants aspirate, his forehead shining,

  he had made me feel there was nothing to confess.

  Now his sandalled passage stirred me on to this:

  How well I know that fountain, filling, running,

  although it is the night.

  That eternal fountain, hidden away,

  I know its haven and its secrecy

  although it is the night.

  But not its source because it does not have one,

  which is all sources’ source and origin

  although it is the night.

  No other thing can be so beautiful.

  Here the earth and heaven drink their fill

  although it is the night.

  So pellucid it never can be muddied,

  and I know that all light radiates from it

  although it is the night.

  I know no sounding-line can find its bottom,

  nobody ford or plumb its deepest fathom

  although it is the night.

  And its current so in flood it overspills

  to water hell and heaven and all peoples

  although it is the night.

  And the current that is generated there,

  as far as it wills to, it can flow that far

  although it is the night.

  And from these two a third current proceeds

  which neither of these two, I know, precedes

  although it is the night.

  This eternal fountain hides and splashes

  within this living bread that is life to us

  although it is the night.

  Hear it calling out to every creature.

  And they drink these waters, although it is dark here

  because it is the night.

  I am repining for this living fountain.

  Within this bread of life I see it plain

  although it is the night.

  XII

  Like a convalescent, I took the hand

  stretched down from the jetty, sensed again

  an alien comfort as I stepped on ground

  to find the helping hand still gripping mine,

  fish-cold and bony, but whether to guide

  or to be guided I could not be certain

  for the tall man in step at my side

  seemed blind, though he walked straight as a rush

  upon his ashplant, his eyes fixed straight ahead.

  Then I knew him in the flesh

  out there on the tarmac among the cars,

  wintered hard and sharp as a blackthorn bush.

  His voice eddying with the vowels of all rivers

  came back to me, though he did not speak yet,

  a voice like a prosecutor’s or a singer’s,

  cunning, narcotic, mimic, definite

  as a steel nib’s downstroke, quick and clean,

  and suddenly he hit a litter basket

  with his stick, saying, ‘Your obligation

  is not discharged by any common rite.

  What you do you must do on your own.

  The main thing is to write

  for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust

  that imagines its haven like your hands at night

  dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.

  You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.

  Take off from here. And don’t be so earnest,

  so ready for the sackcloth and the ashes.

  Let go, let fly, forget.

  You’ve listened long enough. Now strike your note.’

  It was as if I had stepped free into space

  alone with nothing that I had not known

  already. Raindrops blew in my face

  as I came to and heard the harangue and jeers

  going on and on. ‘The English language

  belongs to us. You are raking at dead fires,

  rehearsing the old whinges at your age.

  That subject people stuff is a cod’s game,

  infantile, like this peasant pilgrimage.

  You lose more of yourself than you redeem

  doing the decent thing. Keep at a tangent.

  When they make the circle wide, it’s time to swim

  out on your own and fill the element

  with signatures on your own frequency,

  echo-soundings, searches, probes, allurements,

  elver-gleams in the dark of the whole sea.’

  The shower broke in a cloudburst, the tarmac

  fumed and sizzled. As he moved off quickly

  the downpour loosed its screens round his straight walk.

  from Sweeney Redivivus

  The First Gloss

  Take hold of the shaft of the pen.

  Subscribe to the first step taken

  from a justified line

  into the margin.

  Sweeney Redivivus

  I stirred wet sand and gathered myself

  to climb the steep-flanked mound,

  my head like a ball of wet twine

  dense with soakage, but beginning

  to unwind.

  Another smell

  was blowing off the river, bitter

  as night airs in a scutch mill.

  The old trees were nowhere,

  the hedges thin as penwork

  and the whole enclosure lost

  under hard paths and sharp-ridged houses.

  And there I was, incredible to myself,

  among people far too eager to believe me

  and my story, even if it happened to be true.

  In the Beech

  I was a lookout posted and forgotten.

  On one side under me, the concrete road.

  On the other, the bullocks’ covert,

  the breath and plaster of a drinking place

  where the school-leaver discovered peace

  to touch himself in the reek of churned-up mud.

  And the tree itself a strangeness and a comfort,

  as much a column as a bole. The very ivy

  puzzled its milk-tooth frills and tapers

  over the grain: was it bark or masonry?

  I watched the red-brick chimney rear

  its stamen, course by course,

  and the steeplejacks up there at their antics

  like flies against the mountain.

  I felt the tanks’ advance beginning

  at the cynosure of the growth rings,

  then winced at their imperium refreshed

  in each powder
ed bolt-mark on the concrete.

  And the pilot with his goggles back came in

  so low I could see the cockpit rivets.

  My hidebound boundary tree. My tree of knowledge.

  My thick-tapped, soft-fledged, airy listening post.

  The First Kingdom

  The royal roads were cow paths.

  The queen mother hunkered on a stool

  and played the harpstrings of milk

  into a wooden pail.

  With seasoned sticks the nobles

  lorded it over the hindquarters of cattle.

  Units of measurement were pondered

  by the cartful, barrowful and bucketful.

  Time was a backward rote of names and mishaps,

  bad harvests, fires, unfair settlements,

  deaths in floods, murders and miscarriages.

  And if my rights to it all came only

  by their acclamation, what was it worth?

  I blew hot and blew cold.

  They were two-faced and accommodating.

  And seed, breed and generation still

  they are holding on, every bit

  as pious and exacting and demeaned.

  The First Flight

  It was more sleepwalk than spasm

  yet that was a time when the times

  were also in spasm –

  the ties and the knots running through us

  split open

  down the lines of the grain.

  As I drew close to pebbles and berries,

  the smell of wild garlic, relearning

  the acoustic of frost

  and the meaning of woodnote,

  my shadow over the field

  was only a spin-off,

  my empty place an excuse

  for shifts in the camp, old rehearsals

  of debts and betrayal.

  Singly they came to the tree

  with a stone in each pocket

  to whistle and bill me back in

  and I would collide and cascade

  through leaves when they left,

  my point of repose knocked askew.

  I was mired in attachment

  until they began to pronounce me

  a feeder off battlefields

  so I mastered new rungs of the air

  to survey out of reach

  their bonfires on hills, their hosting

  and fasting, the levies from Scotland

  as always, and the people of art

  diverting their rhythmical chants

  to fend off the onslaught of winds

  I would welcome and climb

  at the top of my bent.

  Drifting Off

  The guttersnipe and the albatross

  gliding for days without a single wingbeat

  were equally beyond me.

  I yearned for the gannet’s strike,

  the unbegrudging concentration

  of the heron.

  In the camaraderie of rookeries,

  in the spiteful vigilance of colonies

  I was at home.

  I learned to distrust

  the allure of the cuckoo

  and the gossip of starlings,

  kept faith with doughty bullfinches,

  levelled my wit too often

  to the small-minded wren

  and too often caved in

  to the pathos of waterhens

  and panicky corncrakes.

  I gave much credence to stragglers,

  overrated the composure of blackbirds

  and the folklore of magpies.

  But when goldfinch or kingfisher rent

  the veil of the usual,

  pinions whispered and braced

  as I stooped, unwieldy

  and brimming,

  my spurs at the ready.

  The Cleric

  I heard new words prayed at cows

  in the byre, found his sign

  on the crock and the hidden still,

  smelled fumes from his censer

  in the first smokes of morning.

  Next thing he was making a progress

  through gaps, stepping out sites,

  sinking his crozier deep

  in the fort-hearth.

  If he had stuck to his own

  cramp-jawed abbesses and intoners

  dibbling round the enclosure,

  his Latin and blather of love,

  his parchments and scheming

  in letters shipped over water –

  but no, he overbore

  with his unctions and orders,

  he had to get in on the ground.

  History that planted its standards

  on his gables and spires

  ousted me to the marches

  of skulking and whingeing.

  Or did I desert?

  Give him his due, in the end

  he opened my path to a kingdom

  of such scope and neuter allegiance

  my emptiness reigns at its whim.

  The Hermit

  As he prowled the rim of his clearing

  where the blade of choice had not spared

  one stump of affection

  he was like a ploughshare

  interred to sustain the whole field

  of force, from the bitted

  and high-drawn sideways curve

  of the horse’s neck to the aim

  held fast in the wrists and elbows –

  the more brutal the pull

  and the drive, the deeper

  and quieter the work of refreshment.

  The Master

  He dwelt in himself

  like a rook in an unroofed tower.

  To get close I had to maintain

  a climb up deserted ramparts

  and not flinch, not raise an eye

  to search for an eye on the watch

  from his coign of seclusion.

  Deliberately he would unclasp

  his book of withholding

  a page at a time, and it was nothing

  arcane, just the old rules

  we all had inscribed on our slates.

  Each character blocked on the parchment secure

  in its volume and measure.

  Each maxim given its space.

  Tell the truth. Do not be afraid.

  Durable, obstinate notions,

  like quarrymen’s hammers and wedges

  proofed by intransigent service.

  Like coping stones where you rest

  in the balm of the wellspring.

  How flimsy I felt climbing down

  the unrailed stairs on the wall,

  hearing the purpose and venture

  in a wingflap above me.

  The Scribes

  I never warmed to them.

  If they were excellent they were petulant

  and jaggy as the holly tree

  they rendered down for ink.

  And if I never belonged among them,

  they could never deny me my place.

  In the hush of the scriptorium

  a black pearl kept gathering in them

  like the old dry glut inside their quills.

  In the margin of texts of praise

  they scratched and clawed.

  They snarled if the day was dark

  or too much chalk had made the vellum bland

  or too little left it oily.

  Under the rumps of lettering

  they herded myopic angers.

  Resentment seeded in the uncurling

  fernheads of their capitals.

  Now and again I started up

  miles away and saw in my absence

  the sloped cursive of each back and felt them

  perfect themselves against me page by page.

  Let them remember this not inconsiderable

  contribution to their jealous art.

  Holly

  It rained when it should have snowed.

  When we went to gather holly

 
; the ditches were swimming, we were wet

  to the knees, our hands were all jags

  and water ran up our sleeves.

  There should have been berries

  but the sprigs we brought into the house

  gleamed like smashed bottle-glass.

  Now here I am, in a room that is decked

  with the red-berried, waxy-leafed stuff,

  and I almost forget what it’s like

  to be wet to the skin or longing for snow.

  I reach for a book like a doubter

  and want it to flare round my hand,

  a black-letter bush, a glittering shield-wall

  cutting as holly and ice.

  An Artist

  I love the thought of his anger.

  His obstinacy against the rock, his coercion

  of the substance from green apples.

  The way he was a dog barking

  at the image of himself barking.

  And his hatred of his own embrace