Opened Ground Read online

  of working as the only thing that worked –

  the vulgarity of expecting ever

  gratitude or admiration, which

  would mean a stealing from him.

  The way his fortitude held and hardened

  because he did what he knew.

  His forehead like a hurled boule

  travelling unpainted space

  behind the apple and behind the mountain.

  The Old Icons

  Why, when it was all over, did I hold on to them?

  A patriot with folded arms in a shaft of light:

  the barred cell window and his sentenced face

  are the only bright spots in the little etching.

  An oleograph of snowy hills, the outlawed priest’s

  red vestments, with the redcoats toiling closer

  and the lookout coming like a fox across the gaps.

  And the old committee of the sedition-mongers,

  so well turned out in their clasped brogues and waistcoats,

  the legend of their names an informer’s list

  prepared by neat-cuffs, third from left, at rear,

  more compelling than the rest of them,

  pivoting an action that was his rack

  and others’ ruin, the very rhythm of his name

  a register of dear-bought treacheries

  grown transparent now, and inestimable.

  In Illo Tempore

  The big missal splayed

  and dangled silky ribbons

  of emerald and purple and watery white.

  Intransitively we would assist,

  confess, receive. The verbs

  assumed us. We adored.

  And we lifted our eyes to the nouns.

  Altar-stone was dawn and monstrance noon,

  the word ‘rubric’ itself a bloodshot sunset.

  Now I live by a famous strand

  where seabirds cry in the small hours

  like incredible souls

  and even the range wall of the promenade

  that I press down on for conviction

  hardly tempts me to credit it.

  On the Road

  The road ahead

  kept reeling in

  at a steady speed,

  the verges dripped.

  In my hands

  like a wrested trophy,

  the empty round

  of the steering wheel.

  The trance of driving

  made all roads one:

  the seraph-haunted, Tuscan

  footpath, the green

  oak-alleys of Dordogne

  or that track through corn

  where the rich young man

  asked his question –

  Master‚ what must I

  do to be saved?

  Or the road where the bird

  with an earth-red back

  and a white and black

  tail, like parquet

  of flint and jet,

  wheeled over me

  in visitation.

  Sell all you have

  and give to the poor.

  I was up and away

  like a human soul

  that plumes from the mouth

  in undulant, tenor

  black-letter Latin.

  I was one for sorrow,

  Noah’s dove,

  a panicked shadow

  crossing the deer path.

  If I came to earth

  it would be by way of

  a small east window

  I once squeezed through,

  scaling heaven

  by superstition,

  drunk and happy

  on a chapel gable.

  I would roost a night

  on the slab of exile,

  then hide in the cleft

  of that churchyard wall

  where hand after hand

  keeps wearing away

  at the cold, hard-breasted

  votive granite.

  And follow me.

  I would migrate

  through a high cave mouth

  into an oaten, sun-warmed cliff,

  on down the soft-nubbed,

  clay-floored passage,

  face-brush, wingflap,

  to the deepest chamber.

  There a drinking deer

  is cut into rock,

  its haunch and neck

  rise with the contours,

  the incised outline

  curves to a strained

  expectant muzzle

  and a nostril flared

  at a dried-up source.

  For my book of changes

  I would meditate

  that stone-faced vigil

  until the long dumbfounded

  spirit broke cover

  to raise a dust

  in the font of exhaustion.

  Villanelle for an Anniversary

  A spirit moved, John Harvard walked the yard,

  The atom lay unsplit, the west unwon,

  The books stood open and the gates unbarred.

  The maps dreamt on like moondust. Nothing stirred.

  The future was a verb in hibernation.

  A spirit moved, John Harvard walked the yard.

  Before the classic style, before the clapboard,

  All through the small hours of an origin,

  The books stood open and the gates unbarred.

  Night passage of a migratory bird.

  Wingflap. Gownflap. Like a homing pigeon

  A spirit moved, John Harvard walked the yard.

  Was that his soul (look) sped to its reward

  By grace or works? A shooting star? An omen?

  The books stood open and the gates unbarred.

  Begin again where frosts and tests were hard.

  Find yourself or founder. Here, imagine

  A spirit moves, John Harvard walks the yard,

  The books stand open and the gates unbarred.

  (1986)

  from THE HAW LANTERN (1987)

  For Bernard and Jane McCabe

  The riverbed, dried-up, half-full of leaves.

  Us, listening to a river in the trees.

  Alphabets

  I

  A shadow his father makes with joined hands

  And thumbs and fingers nibbles on the wall

  Like a rabbit’s head. He understands

  He will understand more when he goes to school.

  There he draws smoke with chalk the whole first week,

  Then draws the forked stick that they call a Y.

  This is writing. A swan’s neck and swan’s back

  Make the 2 he can see now as well as say.

  Two rafters and a cross-tie on the slate

  Are the letter some call ah, some call ay.

  There are charts, there are headlines, there is a right

  Way to hold the pen and a wrong way.

  First it is ‘copying out’, and then ‘English’,

  Marked correct with a little leaning hoe.

  Smells of inkwells rise in the classroom hush.

  A globe in the window tilts like a coloured O.

  II

  Declensions sang on air like a hosanna

  As, column after stratified column,

  Book One of Elementa Latina,

  Marbled and minatory, rose up in him.

  For he was fostered next in a stricter school

  Named for the patron saint of the oak wood

  Where classes switched to the pealing of a bell

  And he left the Latin forum for the shade

  Of new calligraphy that felt like home.

  The letters of this alphabet were trees.

  The capitals were orchards in full bloom,

  The lines of script like briars coiled in ditches.

  Here in her snooded garment and bare feet,

  All ringleted in assonance and woodnotes,

  The poet’s dream stole over him like sunlight

  And passed into the tenebrous
thickets.

  He learns this other writing. He is the scribe

  Who drove a team of quills on his white field.

  Round his cell door the blackbirds dart and dab.

  Then self-denial, fasting, the pure cold.

  By rules that hardened the farther they reached north

  He bends to his desk and begins again.

  Christ’s sickle has been in the undergrowth.

  The script grows bare and Merovingian.

  III

  The globe has spun. He stands in a wooden O.

  He alludes to Shakespeare. He alludes to Graves.

  Time has bulldozed the school and school window.

  Balers drop bales like printouts where stooked sheaves

  Make lambdas on the stubble once at harvest

  And the delta face of each potato pit

  Was patted straight and moulded against frost.

  All gone, with the omega that kept

  Watch above each door, the good-luck horseshoe.

  Yet shape-note language, absolute on air

  As Constantine’s sky-lettered IN HOC SIGNO

  Can still command him; or the necromancer

  Who would hang from the domed ceiling of his house

  A figure of the world with colours in it

  So that the figure of the universe

  And ‘not just single things’ would meet his sight

  When he walked abroad. As from his small window

  The astronaut sees all that he has sprung from,

  The risen, aqueous, singular, lucent O

  Like a magnified and buoyant ovum –

  Or like my own wide pre-reflective stare

  All agog at the plasterer on his ladder

  Skimming our gable and writing our name there

  With his trowel point, letter by strange letter.

  Terminus

  I

  When I hoked there, I would find

  An acorn and a rusted bolt.

  If I lifted my eyes, a factory chimney

  And a dormant mountain.

  If I listened, an engine shunting

  And a trotting horse.

  Is it any wonder when I thought

  I would have second thoughts?

  II

  When they spoke of the prudent squirrel’s hoard

  It shone like gifts at a nativity.

  When they spoke of the mammon of iniquity

  The coins in my pockets reddened like stove-lids.

  I was the march drain and the march drain’s banks

  Suffering the limit of each claim.

  III

  Two buckets were easier carried than one.

  I grew up in between.

  My left hand placed the standard iron weight.

  My right tilted a last grain in the balance.

  Baronies, parishes met where I was born.

  When I stood on the central stepping stone

  I was the last earl on horseback in midstream

  Still parleying, in earshot of his peers.

  From the Frontier of Writing

  The tightness and the nilness round that space

  when the car stops in the road, the troops inspect

  its make and number and, as one bends his face

  towards your window, you catch sight of more

  on a hill beyond, eyeing with intent

  down cradled guns that hold you under cover,

  and everything is pure interrogation

  until a rifle motions and you move

  with guarded unconcerned acceleration –

  a little emptier, a little spent

  as always by that quiver in the self,

  subjugated, yes, and obedient.

  So you drive on to the frontier of writing

  where it happens again. The guns on tripods;

  the sergeant with his on-off mike repeating

  data about you, waiting for the squawk

  of clearance; the marksman training down

  out of the sun upon you like a hawk.

  And suddenly you’re through, arraigned yet freed,

  as if you’d passed from behind a waterfall

  on the black current of a tarmac road

  past armour-plated vehicles, out between

  the posted soldiers flowing and receding

  like tree shadows into the polished windscreen.

  The Haw Lantern

  The wintry haw is burning out of season,

  crab of the thorn, a small light for small people,

  wanting no more from them but that they keep

  the wick of self-respect from dying out,

  not having to blind them with illumination.

  But sometimes when your breath plumes in the frost

  it takes the roaming shape of Diogenes

  with his lantern, seeking one just man;

  so you end up scrutinized from behind the haw

  he holds up at eye-level on its twig,

  and you flinch before its bonded pith and stone,

  its blood-prick that you wish would test and clear you,

  its pecked-at ripeness that scans you, then moves on.

  From the Republic of Conscience

  I

  When I landed in the republic of conscience

  it was so noiseless when the engines stopped

  I could hear a curlew high above the runway.

  At immigration, the clerk was an old man

  who produced a wallet from his homespun coat

  and showed me a photograph of my grandfather.

  The woman in customs asked me to declare

  the words of our traditional cures and charms

  to heal dumbness and avert the evil eye.

  No porters. No interpreter. No taxi.

  You carried your own burden and very soon

  your symptoms of creeping privilege disappeared.

  II

  Fog is a dreaded omen there but lightning

  spells universal good and parents hang

  swaddled infants in trees during thunderstorms.

  Salt is their precious mineral. And seashells

  are held to the ear during births and funerals.

  The base of all inks and pigments is seawater.

  Their sacred symbol is a stylized boat.

  The sail is an ear, the mast a sloping pen,

  the hull a mouth-shape, the keel an open eye.

  At their inauguration, public leaders

  must swear to uphold unwritten law and weep

  to atone for their presumption to hold office –

  and to affirm their faith that all life sprang

  from salt in tears which the sky-god wept

  after he dreamt his solitude was endless.

  III

  I came back from that frugal republic

  with my two arms the one length, the customs woman

  having insisted my allowance was myself.

  The old man rose and gazed into my face

  and said that was official recognition

  that I was now a dual citizen.

  He therefore desired me when I got home

  to consider myself a representative

  and to speak on their behalf in my own tongue.

  Their embassies, he said, were everywhere

  but operated independently

  and no ambassador would ever be relieved.

  Hailstones

  I

  My cheek was hit and hit:

  sudden hailstones

  pelted and bounced on the road.

  When it cleared again

  something whipped and knowledgeable

  had withdrawn

  and left me there with my chances.

  I made a small hard ball

  of burning water running from my hand

  just as I make this now

  out of the melt of the real thing

  smarting into its absence.

  II

  To be reckoned with, all the sa
me,

  those brats of showers.

  The way they refused permission,

  rattling the classroom window

  like a ruler across the knuckles,

  the way they were perfect first

  and then in no time dirty slush.

  Thomas Traherne had his orient wheat

  for proof and wonder

  but for us, it was the sting of hailstones

  and the unstingable hands of Eddie Diamond

  foraging in the nettles.

  III

  Nipple and hive, bite-lumps,

  small acorns of the almost pleasurable

  intimated and disallowed

  when the shower ended

  and everything said wait.

  For what? For forty years

  to say there, there you had