Opened Ground Page 19

  So the whole rig went over into a deep

  Whirlpool, hoofs, chains, shafts, cartwheels, barrel

  And tackle, all tumbling off the world,

  And the hat already merrily swept along

  The quieter reaches. That afternoon

  I saw him face to face, he came to me

  With his damp footprints out of the river,

  And there was nothing between us there

  That might not still be happily ever after.

  An August Night

  His hands were warm and small and knowledgeable.

  When I saw them again last night, they were two ferrets,

  Playing all by themselves in a moonlit field.

  Field of Vision

  I remember this woman who sat for years

  In a wheelchair, looking straight ahead

  Out the window at sycamore trees unleafing

  And leafing at the far end of the lane.

  Straight out past the TV in the corner,

  The stunted, agitated hawthorn bush,

  The same small calves with their backs to wind and rain,

  The same acre of ragwort, the same mountain.

  She was steadfast as the big window itself.

  Her brow was clear as the chrome bits of the chair.

  She never lamented once and she never

  Carried a spare ounce of emotional weight.

  Face to face with her was an education

  Of the sort you got across a well-braced gate –

  One of those lean, clean, iron, roadside ones

  Between two whitewashed pillars, where you could see

  Deeper into the country than you expected

  And discovered that the field behind the hedge

  Grew more distinctly strange as you kept standing

  Focused and drawn in by what barred the way.

  The Pitchfork

  Of all implements, the pitchfork was the one

  That came near to an imagined perfection:

  When he tightened his raised hand and aimed with it,

  It felt like a javelin, accurate and light.

  So whether he played the warrior or the athlete

  Or worked in earnest in the chaff and sweat,

  He loved its grain of tapering, dark-flecked ash

  Grown satiny from its own natural polish.

  Riveted steel, turned timber, burnish, grain,

  Smoothness, straightness, roundness, length and sheen.

  Sweat-cured, sharpened, balanced, tested, fitted.

  The springiness, the clip and dart of it.

  And then when he thought of probes that reached the farthest,

  He would see the shaft of a pitchfork sailing past

  Evenly, imperturbably through space,

  Its prongs starlit and absolutely soundless –

  But has learned at last to follow that simple lead

  Past its own aim, out to an other side

  Where perfection – or nearness to it – is imagined

  Not in the aiming but the opening hand.

  The Settle Bed

  Willed down, waited for, in place at last and for good.

  Trunk-hasped, cart-heavy, painted an ignorant brown.

  And pew-strait, bin-deep, standing four-square as an ark.

  If I lie in it, I am cribbed in seasoned deal

  Dry as the unkindled boards of a funeral ship.

  My measure has been taken, my ear shuttered up.

  Yet I hear an old sombre tide awash in the headboard:

  Unpathetic och ochs and och hohs, the long bedtime

  Sigh-life of Ulster, unwilling, unbeaten,

  Protestant, Catholic, the Bible, the beads,

  Late talks at gables by moonlight, boots on the hearth,

  The small hours chimed sweetly away so next thing it was

  The cock on the ridge-tiles.

  And now this is ‘an inheritance’ –

  Upright, rudimentary, unshiftably planked

  In the long long ago, yet willable forward

  Again and again and again, cargoed with

  Its own dumb, tongue-and-groove worthiness

  And un-get-roundable weight. But to conquer that weight,

  Imagine a dower of settle beds tumbled from heaven

  Like some nonsensical vengeance come on the people,

  Then learn from that harmless barrage that whatever is given

  Can always be reimagined, however four-square,

  Plank-thick, hull-stupid and out of its time

  It happens to be. You are free as the lookout,

  That far-seeing joker posted high over the fog,

  Who declared by the time that he had got himself down

  The actual ship had stolen away from beneath him.

  from Glanmore Revisited

  I Scrabble

  in memoriam Tom Delaney, archaeologist

  Bare flags. Pump water. Winter-evening cold.

  Our backs might never warm up but our faces

  Burned from the hearth-blaze and the hot whiskeys.

  It felt remembered even then, an old

  Rightness half-imagined or foretold,

  As green sticks hissed and spat into the ashes

  And whatever rampaged out there couldn’t reach us,

  Firelit, shuttered, slated and stone-walled.

  Year after year, our game of Scrabble: love

  Taken for granted like any other word

  That was chanced on and allowed within the rules.

  So ‘scrabble’ let it be. Intransitive.

  Meaning to scratch or rake at something hard.

  Which is what he hears. Our scraping, clinking tools.

  II The Cot

  Scythe and axe and hedge-clippers, the shriek

  Of the gate the children used to swing on,

  Poker, scuttle, tongs, a gravel rake –

  The old activity starts up again

  But starts up differently. We’re on our own

  Years later in the same locus amoenus,

  Tenants no longer, but in full possession

  Of an emptied house and whatever keeps between us.

  Which must be more than keepsakes, even though

  The child’s cot’s back in place where Catherine

  Woke in the dawn and answered doodle doo

  To the rooster in the farm across the road –

  And is the same cot I myself slept in

  When the whole world was a farm that eked and crowed.

  V Lustral Sonnet

  Breaking and entering: from early on

  Words that thrilled me far more than they scared me –

  Even when I’d ‘come into my own’

  And owned a house, a man of property

  Who lacked the proper outlook. I would never

  Double-bar the door or lock the gate

  Or draw the blinds or pull the curtains over

  Or give ‘security’ a second thought.

  But all changed when I took possession here

  And had the old bed sawn on my instruction

  Since the only way to move it down the stair

  Was to cut the frame in two. A bad action,

  So Greek with consequence, so dangerous,

  Only pure words and deeds secure the house.

  VII The Skylight

  You were the one for skylights. I opposed

  Cutting into the seasoned tongue-and-groove

  Of pitch pine. I liked it low and closed,

  Its claustrophobic, nest-up-in-the-roof

  Effect. I liked the snuff-dry feeling,

  The perfect, trunk-lid fit of the old ceiling.

  Under there, it was all hutch and hatch.

  The blue slates kept the heat like midnight thatch.

  But when the slates came off, extravagant

  Sky entered and held surprise wide open.

  For days I felt like an inhabitant

  Of that house where the man sick of the palsy<
br />
  Was lowered through the roof, had his sins forgiven,

  Was healed, took up his bed and walked away.

  A Pillowed Head

  Matutinal. Mother-of-pearl

  Summer come early. Slashed carmines

  And washed milky blues.

  To be first on the road,

  Up with the ground-mists and pheasants.

  To be older and grateful

  That this time you too were half-grateful

  The pangs had begun – prepared

  And clear-headed, foreknowing

  The trauma, entering on it

  With full consent of the will.

  (The first time, dismayed and arrayed

  In your cut-off white cotton gown,

  You were more bride than earth-mother

  Up on the stirrup-rigged bed,

  Who were self-possessed now

  To the point of a walk on the pier

  Before you checked in.)

  And then later on I half-fainted

  When the little slapped palpable girl

  Was handed to me; but as usual

  Came to in two wide-open eyes

  That had been dawned into farther

  Than ever, and had outseen the last

  Of all of those mornings of waiting

  When your domed brow was one long held silence

  And the dawn chorus anything but.

  A Royal Prospect

  On the day of their excursion up the Thames

  To Hampton Court, they were nearly sunstruck.

  She with her neck bared in a page-boy cut,

  He all dreamy anyhow, wild for her

  But pretending to be a thousand miles away,

  Studying the boat’s wake in the water.

  And here are the photographs. Head to one side,

  In her sleeveless blouse, one bare shoulder high

  And one arm loose, a bird with a dropped wing

  Surprised in cover. He looks at you straight,

  Assailable, enamoured, full of vows,

  Young dauphin in the once-upon-a-time.

  And next the lowish red-brick Tudor frontage.

  No more photographs, however, now

  We are present there as the smell of grass

  And suntan oil, standing like their sixth sense

  Behind them at the entrance to the maze,

  Heartbroken for no reason, willing them

  To dare it to the centre they are lost for …

  Instead, like reflections staggered through warped glass,

  They reappear as in a black and white

  Old grainy newsreel, where their pleasure-boat

  Goes back spotlit across sunken bridges

  And they alone are borne downstream unscathed,

  Between mud banks where the wounded rave all night

  At flameless blasts and echoless gunfire –

  In all of which is ominously figured

  Their free passage through historic times,

  Like a silk train being brushed across a leper

  Or the safe conduct of two royal favourites,

  Unhindered and resented and bright-eyed.

  So let them keep a tally of themselves

  And be accountable when called upon

  For although by every golden mean their lot

  Is fair and due, pleas will be allowed

  Against every right and title vested in them

  (And in a court where mere innocuousness

  Has never gained approval or acquittal.)

  Wheels within Wheels

  I

  The first real grip I ever got on things

  Was when I learned the art of pedalling

  (By hand) a bike turned upside down, and drove

  Its back wheel preternaturally fast.

  I loved the disappearance of the spokes,

  The way the space between the hub and rim

  Hummed with transparency. If you threw

  A potato into it, the hooped air

  Spun mush and drizzle back into your face;

  If you touched it with a straw, the straw frittered.

  Something about the way those pedal treads

  Worked very palpably at first against you

  And then began to sweep your hand ahead

  Into a new momentum – that all entered me

  Like an access of free power, as if belief

  Caught up and spun the objects of belief

  In an orbit coterminous with longing.

  II

  But enough was not enough. Who ever saw

  The limit in the given anyhow?

  In fields beyond our house there was a well

  (‘The well’ we called it. It was more a hole

  With water in it, with small hawthorn trees

  On one side, and a muddy, dungy ooze

  On the other, all tramped through by cattle).

  I loved that too. I loved the turbid smell,

  The sump-life of the place like old chain oil.

  And there, next thing, I brought my bicycle.

  I stood its saddle and its handlebars

  Into the soft bottom, I touched the tyres

  To the water’s surface, then turned the pedals

  Until like a mill-wheel pouring at the treadles

  (But here reversed and lashing a mare’s tail)

  The world-refreshing and immersed back wheel

  Spun lace and dirt-suds there before my eyes

  And showered me in my own regenerate clays.

  For weeks I made a nimbus of old glit.

  Then the hub jammed, rims rusted, the chain snapped.

  III

  Nothing rose to the occasion after that

  Until, in a circus ring, drumrolled and spotlit,

  Cowgirls wheeled in, each one immaculate

  At the still centre of a lariat.

  Perpetuum mobile. Sheer pirouette.

  Tumblers. Jongleurs. Ring-a-rosies. Stet!

  Fosterling

  ‘That heavy greenness fostered by water’

  John Montague

  At school I loved one picture’s heavy greenness –

  Horizons rigged with windmills’ arms and sails.

  The millhouses’ still outlines. Their in-placeness

  Still more in place when mirrored in canals.

  I can’t remember not ever having known

  The immanent hydraulics of a land

  Of glar and glit and floods at dailigone.

  My silting hope. My lowlands of the mind.

  Heaviness of being. And poetry

  Sluggish in the doldrums of what happens.

  Me waiting until I was nearly fifty

  To credit marvels. Like the tree-clock of tin cans

  The tinkers made. So long for air to brighten,

  Time to be dazzled and the heart to lighten.

  from Squarings

  Lightenings

  i

  Shifting brilliancies. Then winter light

  In a doorway, and on the stone doorstep

  A beggar shivering in silhouette.

  So the particular judgement might be set:

  Bare wallstead and a cold hearth rained into –

  Bright puddle where the soul-free cloud-life roams.

  And after the commanded journey, what?

  Nothing magnificent, nothing unknown.

  A gazing out from far away, alone.

  And it is not particular at all,

  Just old truth dawning: there is no next-time-round.

  Unroofed scope. Knowledge-freshening wind.

  ii

  Roof it again. Batten down. Dig in.

  Drink out of tin. Know the scullery cold,

  A latch, a door-bar, forged tongs and a grate.

  Touch the crossbeam, drive iron in a wall,

  Hang a line to verify the plumb

  From lintel, coping-stone and chimney-breast.

  Relocate the bedrock in the threshold.

  Take
squarings from the recessed gable pane.

  Make your study the unregarded floor.

  Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure

  The bastion of sensation. Do not waver

  Into language. Do not waver in it.

  iii

  Squarings? In the game of marbles, squarings

  Were all those anglings, aimings, feints and squints

  You were allowed before you’d shoot, all those

  Hunkerings, tensings, pressures of the thumb,

  Test-outs and pull-backs, re-envisagings,

  All the ways your arms kept hoping towards

  Blind certainties that were going to prevail

  Beyond the one-off moment of the pitch.

  A million million accuracies passed

  Between your muscles’ outreach and that space

  Marked with three round holes and a drawn line.

  You squinted out from a skylight of the world.

  v

  Three marble holes thumbed in the concrete road

  Before the concrete hardened still remained

  Three decades after the marble-player vanished

  Into Australia. Three stops to play

  The music of the arbitrary on.

  Blow on them now and hear an undersong

  Your levelled breath made once going over

  The empty bottle. Improvise. Make free

  Like old hay in its flimsy afterlife