Opened Ground Read online

the truest foretaste of your aftermath –

  in that dilation

  when the light opened in silence

  and a car with wipers going still

  laid perfect tracks in the slush.

  The Stone Verdict

  When he stands in the judgement place

  With his stick in his hand and the broad hat

  Still on his head, maimed by self-doubt

  And an old disdain of sweet talk and excuses,

  It will be no justice if the sentence is blabbed out.

  He will expect more than words in the ultimate court

  He relied on through a lifetime’s speechlessness.

  Let it be like the judgement of Hermes,

  God of the stone heap, where the stones were verdicts

  Cast solidly at his feet, piling up around him

  Until he stood waist-deep in the cairn

  Of his absolution: maybe a gate-pillar

  Or a tumbled wallstead where hogweed earths the silence

  Somebody will break at last to say, ‘Here

  His spirit lingers,’ and will have said too much.

  The Spoonbait

  So a new similitude is given us

  And we say: The soul may be compared

  Unto a spoonbait that a child discovers

  Beneath the sliding lid of a pencil case,

  Glimpsed once and imagined for a lifetime

  Risen and free and spooling out of nowhere –

  A shooting star going back up the darkness.

  It flees him and it burns him all at once

  Like the single drop that Dives implored

  Falling and falling into a great gulf.

  Then exit, the polished helmet of a hero

  Laid out amidships above scudding water.

  Exit, alternatively, a toy of light

  Reeled through him upstream, snagging on nothing.

  Clearances

  in memoriam M.K.H., 1911–1984

  She taught me what her uncle once taught her:

  How easily the biggest coal block split

  If you got the grain and hammer angled right.

  The sound of that relaxed alluring blow,

  Its co-opted and obliterated echo,

  Taught me to hit, taught me to loosen,

  Taught me between the hammer and the block

  To face the music. Teach me now to listen,

  To strike it rich behind the linear black.

  I

  A cobble thrown a hundred years ago

  Keeps coming at me, the first stone

  Aimed at a great-grandmother’s turncoat brow.

  The pony jerks and the riot’s on.

  She’s crouched low in the trap

  Running the gauntlet that first Sunday

  Down the brae to Mass at a panicked gallop.

  He whips on through the town to cries of ‘Lundy!’

  Call her ‘The Convert’. ‘The Exogamous Bride’.

  Anyhow, it is a genre piece

  Inherited on my mother’s side

  And mine to dispose with now she’s gone.

  Instead of silver and Victorian lace,

  The exonerating, exonerated stone.

  II

  Polished linoleum shone there. Brass taps shone.

  The china cups were very white and big –

  An unchipped set with sugar bowl and jug.

  The kettle whistled. Sandwich and tea scone

  Were present and correct. In case it run,

  The butter must be kept out of the sun.

  And don’t be dropping crumbs. Don’t tilt your chair.

  Don’t reach. Don’t point. Don’t make noise when you stir.

  It is Number 5, New Row, Land of the Dead,

  Where grandfather is rising from his place

  With spectacles pushed back on a clean bald head

  To welcome a bewildered homing daughter

  Before she even knocks. ‘What’s this? What’s this?’

  And they sit down in the shining room together.

  III

  When all the others were away at Mass

  I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.

  They broke the silence, let fall one by one

  Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:

  Cold comforts set between us, things to share

  Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.

  And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes

  From each other’s work would bring us to our senses.

  So while the parish priest at her bedside

  Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying

  And some were responding and some crying

  I remembered her head bent towards my head,

  Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives –

  Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

  IV

  Fear of affectation made her affect

  Inadequacy whenever it came to

  Pronouncing words ‘beyond her’. Bertold Brek.

  She’d manage something hampered and askew

  Every time, as if she might betray

  The hampered and inadequate by too

  Well-adjusted a vocabulary.

  With more challenge than pride, she’d tell me, ‘You

  Know all them things.’ So I governed my tongue

  In front of her, a genuinely well-

  Adjusted adequate betrayal

  Of what I knew better. I’d naw and aye

  And decently relapse into the wrong

  Grammar which kept us allied and at bay.

  V

  The cool that came off sheets just off the line

  Made me think the damp must still be in them

  But when I took my corners of the linen

  And pulled against her, first straight down the hem

  And then diagonally, then flapped and shook

  The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind,

  They made a dried-out undulating thwack.

  So we’d stretch and fold and end up hand to hand

  For a split second as if nothing had happened

  For nothing had that had not always happened

  Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go,

  Coming close again by holding back

  In moves where I was X and she was O

  Inscribed in sheets she’d sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.

  VI

  In the first flush of the Easter holidays

  The ceremonies during Holy Week

  Were highpoints of our Sons and Lovers phase.

  The midnight fire. The paschal candlestick.

  Elbow to elbow, glad to be kneeling next

  To each other up there near the front

  Of the packed church, we would follow the text

  And rubrics for the blessing of the font.

  As the hind longs for the streams, so my soul …

  Dippings. Towellings. The water breathed on.

  The water mixed with chrism and with oil.

  Cruet tinkle. Formal incensation

  And the psalmist’s outcry taken up with pride:

  Day and night my tears have been my bread.

  VII

  In the last minutes he said more to her

  Almost than in all their life together.

  ‘You’ll be in New Row on Monday night

  And I’ll come up for you and you’ll be glad

  When I walk in the door … Isn’t that right?’

  His head was bent down to her propped-up head.

  She could not hear but we were overjoyed.

  He called her good and girl. Then she was dead,

  The searching for a pulsebeat was abandoned

  And we all knew one thing by being there.

  The space we stood around had been emptied

  Into us to keep, it penetrated

  Clearances that suddenly stood open.

  High cries were felled and a pure change happened.

&n
bsp; VIII

  I thought of walking round and round a space

  Utterly empty, utterly a source

  Where the decked chestnut tree had lost its place

  In our front hedge above the wallflowers.

  The white chips jumped and jumped and skited high.

  I heard the hatchet’s differentiated

  Accurate cut, the crack, the sigh

  And collapse of what luxuriated

  Through the shocked tips and wreckage of it all.

  Deep-planted and long gone, my coeval

  Chestnut from a jam jar in a hole,

  Its heft and hush become a bright nowhere,

  A soul ramifying and forever

  Silent, beyond silence listened for.

  The Milk Factory

  Scuts of froth swirled from the discharge pipe.

  We halted on the other bank and watched

  A milky water run from the pierced side

  Of milk itself, the crock of its substance spilt

  Across white limbo floors where shift-workers

  Waded round the clock, and the factory

  Kept its distance like a bright-decked star-ship.

  There we go, soft-eyed calves of the dew,

  Astonished and assumed into fluorescence.

  The Wishing Tree

  I thought of her as the wishing tree that died

  And saw it lifted, root and branch, to heaven,

  Trailing a shower of all that had been driven

  Need by need by need into its hale

  Sap-wood and bark: coin and pin and nail

  Came streaming from it like a comet-tail

  New-minted and dissolved. I had a vision

  Of an airy branch-head rising through damp cloud,

  Of turned-up faces where the tree had stood.

  Grotus and Coventina

  Far from home Grotus dedicated an altar to Coventina

  Who holds in her right hand a waterweed

  And in her left a pitcher spilling out a river.

  Anywhere Grotus looked at running water he felt at home

  And when he remembered the stone where he cut his name

  Some dried-up course beneath his breastbone started

  Pouring and darkening – more or less the way

  The thought of his stunted altar works on me.

  Remember when our electric pump gave out,

  Priming it with bucketfuls, our idiotic rage

  And hangdog phone-calls to the farm next door

  For somebody please to come and fix it?

  And when it began to hammer on again,

  Jubilation at the tap’s full force, the sheer

  Given fact of water, how you felt you’d never

  Waste one drop but know its worth better always.

  Do you think we could run through all that one more time?

  I’ll be Grotus, you be Coventina.

  Wolfe Tone

  Light as a skiff, manoeuvrable

  yet outmanoeuvred,

  I affected epaulettes and a cockade,

  wrote a style well-bred and impervious

  to the solidarity I angled for,

  and played the ancient Roman with a razor.

  I was the shouldered oar that ended up

  far from the brine and whiff of venture,

  like a scratching-post or a crossroads flagpole,

  out of my element among small farmers –

  I who once wakened to the shouts of men

  rising from the bottom of the sea,

  men in their shirts mounting through deep water

  when the Atlantic stove our cabin’s dead lights in

  and the big fleet split and Ireland dwindled

  as we ran before the gale under bare poles.

  From the Canton of Expectation

  I

  We lived deep in a land of optative moods,

  under high, banked clouds of resignation.

  A rustle of loss in the phrase Not in our lifetime,

  the broken nerve when we prayed Vouchsafe or Deign,

  were creditable, sufficient to the day.

  Once a year we gathered in a field

  of dance platforms and tents where children sang

  songs they had learned by rote in the old language.

  An auctioneer who had fought in the brotherhood

  enumerated the humiliations

  we always took for granted, but not even he

  considered this, I think, a call to action.

  Iron-mouthed loudspeakers shook the air

  yet nobody felt blamed. He had confirmed us.

  When our rebel anthem played the meeting shut

  we turned for home and the usual harassment

  by militiamen on overtime at roadblocks.

  II

  And next thing, suddenly, this change of mood.

  Books open in the newly wired kitchens.

  Young heads that might have dozed a life away

  against the flanks of milking cows were busy

  paving and pencilling their first causeways

  across the prescribed texts. The paving stones

  of quadrangles came next and a grammar

  of imperatives, the new age of demands.

  They would banish the conditional for ever,

  this generation born impervious to

  the triumph in our cries of de profundis.

  Our faith in winning by enduring most

  they made anathema, intelligences

  brightened and unmannerly as crowbars.

  III

  What looks the strongest has outlived its term.

  The future lies with what’s affirmed from under.

  These things that corroborated us when we dwelt

  under the aegis of our stealthy patron,

  the guardian angel of passivity,

  now sink a fang of menace in my shoulder.

  I repeat the word ‘stricken’ to myself

  and stand bareheaded under the banked clouds

  edged more and more with brassy thunderlight.

  I yearn for hammerblows on clinkered planks,

  the uncompromised report of driven thole-pins,

  to know there is one among us who never swerved

  from all his instincts told him was right action,

  who stood his ground in the indicative,

  whose boat will lift when the cloudburst happens.

  The Mud Vision

  Statues with exposed hearts and barbed-wire crowns

  Still stood in alcoves, hares flitted beneath

  The dozing bellies of jets, our menu-writers

  And punks with aerosol sprays held their own

  With the best of them. Satellite link-ups

  Wafted over us the blessings of popes, heliports

  Maintained a charmed circle for idols on tour

  And casualties on their stretchers. We sleepwalked

  The line between panic and formulae, screentested

  Our first native models and the last of the mummers,

  Watching ourselves at a distance, advantaged

  And airy as a man on a springboard

  Who keeps limbering up because the man cannot dive.

  And then in the foggy midlands it appeared,

  Our mud vision, as if a rose window of mud

  Had invented itself out of the glittery damp,

  A gossamer wheel, concentric with its own hub

  Of nebulous dirt, sullied yet lucent.

  We had heard of the sun standing still and the sun

  That changed colour, but we were vouchsafed

  Original clay, transfigured and spinning.

  And then the sunsets ran murky, the wiper

  Could never entirely clean off the windscreen,

  Reservoirs tasted of silt, a light fuzz

  Accrued in the hair and the eyebrows, and some

  Took to wearing a smudge on their foreheads

  To be prepared for whatever. Vigils
r />   Began to be kept around puddled gaps,

  On altars bulrushes ousted the lilies

  And a rota of invalids came and went

  On beds they could lease placed in range of the shower.

  A generation who had seen a sign!

  Those nights when we stood in an umber dew and smelled

  Mould in the verbena, or woke to a light

  Furrow-breath on the pillow, when the talk

  Was all about who had seen it and our fear

  Was touched with a secret pride, only ourselves

  Could be adequate then to our lives. When the rainbow

  Curved flood-brown and ran like a water-rat’s back

  So that drivers on the hard shoulder switched off to watch,

  We wished it away, and yet we presumed it a test

  That would prove us beyond expectation.

  We lived, of course, to learn the folly of that.

  One day it was gone and the east gable

  Where its trembling corolla had balanced

  Was starkly a ruin again, with dandelions

  Blowing high up on the ledges, and moss

  That slumbered on through its increase. As cameras raked

  The site from every angle, experts

  Began their post factum jabber and all of us

  Crowded in tight for the big explanations.

  Just like that, we forgot that the vision was ours,

  Our one chance to know the incomparable

  And dive to a future. What might have been origin

  We dissipated in news. The clarified place

  Had retrieved neither us nor itself – except

  You could say we survived. So say that, and watch us