Opened Ground Read online

  Follower

  My father worked with a horse-plough,

  His shoulders globed like a full sail strung

  Between the shafts and the furrow.

  The horses strained at his clicking tongue.

  An expert. He would set the wing

  And fit the bright steel-pointed sock.

  The sod rolled over without breaking.

  At the headrig, with a single pluck

  Of reins, the sweating team turned round

  And back into the land. His eye

  Narrowed and angled at the ground,

  Mapping the furrow exactly.

  I stumbled in his hobnailed wake,

  Fell sometimes on the polished sod;

  Sometimes he rode me on his back

  Dipping and rising to his plod.

  I wanted to grow up and plough,

  To close one eye, stiffen my arm.

  All I ever did was follow

  In his broad shadow round the farm.

  I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,

  Yapping always. But today

  It is my father who keeps stumbling

  Behind me, and will not go away.

  Mid-Term Break

  I sat all morning in the college sick bay

  Counting bells knelling classes to a close.

  At two o’clock our neighbours drove me home.

  In the porch I met my father crying –

  He had always taken funerals in his stride –

  And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

  The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram

  When I came in, and I was embarrassed

  By old men standing up to shake my hand

  And tell me they were ‘sorry for my trouble’.

  Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,

  Away at school, as my mother held my hand

  In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.

  At ten o’clock the ambulance arrived

  With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

  Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops

  And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him

  For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

  Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,

  He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot.

  No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

  A four-foot box, a foot for every year.

  The Diviner

  Cut from the green hedge a forked hazel stick

  That he held tight by the arms of the V:

  Circling the terrain, hunting the pluck

  Of water, nervous, but professionally

  Unfussed. The pluck came sharp as a sting.

  The rod jerked with precise convulsions,

  Spring water suddenly broadcasting

  Through a green hazel its secret stations.

  The bystanders would ask to have a try.

  He handed them the rod without a word.

  It lay dead in their grasp till, nonchalantly,

  He gripped expectant wrists. The hazel stirred.

  Poem

  for Marie

  Love, I shall perfect for you the child

  Who diligently potters in my brain

  Digging with heavy spade till sods were piled

  Or puddling through muck in a deep drain.

  Yearly I would sow my yard-long garden.

  I’d strip a layer of sods to build the wall

  That was to keep out sow and pecking hen.

  Yearly, admitting these, the sods would fall.

  Or in the sucking clabber I would splash

  Delightedly and dam the flowing drain

  But always my bastions of clay and mush

  Would burst before the rising autumn rain.

  Love, you shall perfect for me this child

  Whose small imperfect limits would keep breaking:

  Within new limits now, arrange the world

  And square the circle: four walls and a ring.

  Personal Helicon

  for Michael Longley

  As a child, they could not keep me from wells

  And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.

  I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells

  Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.

  One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.

  I savoured the rich crash when a bucket

  Plummeted down at the end of a rope.

  So deep you saw no reflection in it.

  A shallow one under a dry stone ditch

  Fructified like any aquarium.

  When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch

  A white face hovered over the bottom.

  Others had echoes, gave back your own call

  With a clean new music in it. And one

  Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall

  Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.

  Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,

  To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring

  Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme

  To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

  Antaeus

  When I lie on the ground

  I rise flushed as a rose in the morning.

  In fights I arrange a fall on the ring

  To rub myself with sand.

  That is operative

  As an elixir. I cannot be weaned

  Off the earth’s long contour, her river-veins.

  Down here in my cave

  Girdered with root and rock

  I am cradled in the dark that wombed me

  And nurtured in every artery

  Like a small hillock.

  Let each new hero come

  Seeking the golden apples and Atlas:

  He must wrestle with me before he pass

  Into that realm of fame

  Among sky-born and royal.

  He may well throw me and renew my birth

  But let him not plan, lifting me off the earth,

  My elevation, my fall.

  (1966)

  from DOOR INTO THE DARK (1969)

  The Outlaw

  Kelly’s kept an unlicensed bull, well away

  From the road: you risked a fine but had to pay

  The normal fee if cows were serviced there.

  Once I dragged a nervous Friesian on a tether

  Down a lane of alder, shaggy with catkin,

  Down to the shed the bull was kept in.

  I gave Old Kelly the clammy silver, though why

  I could not guess. He grunted a curt ‘Go by.

  Get up on that gate.’ And from my lofty station

  I watched the businesslike conception.

  The door, unbolted, whacked back against the wall.

  The illegal sire fumbled from his stall

  Unhurried as an old steam engine shunting.

  He circled, snored and nosed. No hectic panting,

  Just the unfussy ease of a good tradesman;

  Then an awkward, unexpected jump, and

  His knobbled forelegs straddling her flank,

  He slammed life home, impassive as a tank,

  Dropping off like a tipped-up load of sand.

  ‘She’ll do,’ said Kelly and tapped his ashplant

  Across her hindquarters. ‘If not, bring her back.’

  I walked ahead of her, the rope now slack

  While Kelly whooped and prodded his outlaw

  Who, in his own time, resumed the dark, the straw.

  The Forge

  All I know is a door into the dark.

  Outside, old axles and iron hoops rusting;

  Inside, the hammered anvil’s short-pitched ring,

  The unpredictable fantail of sparks

  Or hiss when a new shoe toughens in water.

  The anvil must be somewhere in the centre,

  Horned as a unicorn, at one end square,

  S
et there immoveable: an altar

  Where he expends himself in shape and music.

  Sometimes, leather-aproned, hairs in his nose,

  He leans out on the jamb, recalls a clatter

  Of hoofs where traffic is flashing in rows;

  Then grunts and goes in, with a slam and flick

  To beat real iron out, to work the bellows.

  Thatcher

  Bespoke for weeks, he turned up some morning

  Unexpectedly, his bicycle slung

  With a light ladder and a bag of knives.

  He eyed the old rigging, poked at the eaves,

  Opened and handled sheaves of lashed wheat-straw.

  Next, the bundled rods: hazel and willow

  Were flicked for weight, twisted in case they’d snap.

  It seemed he spent the morning warming up:

  Then fixed the ladder, laid out well-honed blades

  And snipped at straw and sharpened ends of rods

  That, bent in two, made a white-pronged staple

  For pinning down his world, handful by handful.

  Couchant for days on sods above the rafters,

  He shaved and flushed the butts, stitched all together

  Into a sloped honeycomb, a stubble patch,

  And left them gaping at his Midas touch.

  The Peninsula

  When you have nothing more to say, just drive

  For a day all round the peninsula.

  The sky is tall as over a runway,

  The land without marks, so you will not arrive

  But pass through, though always skirting landfall.

  At dusk, horizons drink down sea and hill,

  The ploughed field swallows the whitewashed gable

  And you’re in the dark again. Now recall

  The glazed foreshore and silhouetted log,

  That rock where breakers shredded into rags,

  The leggy birds stilted on their own legs,

  Islands riding themselves out into the fog,

  And drive back home, still with nothing to say

  Except that now you will uncode all landscapes

  By this: things founded clean on their own shapes,

  Water and ground in their extremity.

  Requiem for the Croppies

  The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley –

  No kitchens on the run, no striking camp –

  We moved quick and sudden in our own country.

  The priest lay behind ditches with the tramp.

  A people, hardly marching – on the hike –

  We found new tactics happening each day:

  We’d cut through reins and rider with the pike

  And stampede cattle into infantry,

  Then retreat through hedges where cavalry must be thrown.

  Until, on Vinegar Hill, the fatal conclave.

  Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.

  The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.

  They buried us without shroud or coffin

  And in August the barley grew up out of the grave.

  Undine

  He slashed the briars, shovelled up grey silt

  To give me right-of-way in my own drains

  And I ran quick for him, cleaned out my rust.

  He halted, saw me finally disrobed,

  Running clear, with apparent unconcern.

  Then he walked by me. I rippled and I churned

  Where ditches intersected near the river

  Until he dug a spade deep in my flank

  And took me to him. I swallowed his trench

  Gratefully, dispersing myself for love

  Down in his roots, climbing his brassy grain –

  But once he knew my welcome, I alone

  Could give him subtle increase and reflection.

  He explored me so completely, each limb

  Lost its cold freedom. Human, warmed to him.

  The Wife’s Tale

  When I had spread it all on linen cloth

  Under the hedge, I called them over.

  The hum and gulp of the thresher ran down

  And the big belt slewed to a standstill, straw

  Hanging undelivered in the jaws.

  There was such quiet that I heard their boots

  Crunching the stubble twenty yards away.

  He lay down and said, ‘Give these fellows theirs,

  I’m in no hurry,’ plucking grass in handfuls

  And tossing it in the air. ‘That looks well.’

  (He nodded at my white cloth on the grass.)

  ‘I declare a woman could lay out a field

  Though boys like us have little call for cloths.’

  He winked, then watched me as I poured a cup

  And buttered the thick slices that he likes.

  ‘It’s threshing better than I thought, and mind

  It’s good clean seed. Away over there and look.’

  Always this inspection has to be made

  Even when I don’t know what to look for.

  But I ran my hand in the half-filled bags

  Hooked to the slots. It was hard as shot,

  Innumerable and cool. The bags gaped

  Where the chutes ran back to the stilled drum

  And forks were stuck at angles in the ground

  As javelins might mark lost battlefields.

  I moved between them back across the stubble.

  They lay in the ring of their own crusts and dregs,

  Smoking and saying nothing. ‘There’s good yield,

  Isn’t there?’ – as proud as if he were the land itself –

  ‘Enough for crushing and for sowing both.’

  And that was it. I’d come and he had shown me,

  So I belonged no further to the work.

  I gathered cups and folded up the cloth

  And went. But they still kept their ease,

  Spread out, unbuttoned, grateful, under the trees.

  Night Drive

  The smells of ordinariness

  Were new on the night drive through France:

  Rain and hay and woods on the air

  Made warm draughts in the open car.

  Signposts whitened relentlessly.

  Montreuil, Abbeville, Beauvais

  Were promised, promised, came and went,

  Each place granting its name’s fulfilment.

  A combine groaning its way late

  Bled seeds across its work-light.

  A forest fire smouldered out.

  One by one small cafés shut.

  I thought of you continuously

  A thousand miles south where Italy

  Laid its loin to France on the darkened sphere.

  Your ordinariness was renewed there.

  Relic of Memory

  The lough waters

  Can petrify wood:

  Old oars and posts

  Over the years

  Harden their grain,

  Incarcerate ghosts

  Of sap and season.

  The shallows lap

  And give and take:

  Constant ablutions,

  Such drowning love

  Stun a stake

  To stalagmite.

  Dead lava,

  The cooling star,

  Coal and diamond

  Or sudden birth

  Of burnt meteor

  Are too simple,

  Without the lure

  That relic stored –

  A piece of stone

  On the shelf at school,

  Oatmeal coloured.

  A Lough Neagh Sequence

  for the fishermen

  1 Up the Shore

  I

  The lough will claim a victim every year.

  It has virtue that hardens wood to stone.

  There is a town sunk beneath its water.

  It is the scar left by the Isle of Man.

  II

  At Toomebridge where it sluices towards the sea
/>   They’ve set new gates and tanks against the flow.

  From time to time they break the eels’ journey

  And lift five hundred stone in one go.

  III

  But up the shore in Antrim and Tyrone

  There is a sense of fair play in the game.

  The fishermen confront them one by one

  And sail miles out, and never learn to swim.

  IV

  ‘We’ll be the quicker going down,’ they say –

  And when you argue there are no storms here,

  That one hour floating’s sure to land them safely –

  ‘The lough will claim a victim every year.’

  2 Beyond Sargasso

  A gland agitating

  mud two hundred miles in-

  land, a scale of water

  on water working up

  estuaries, he drifted

  into motion half-way

  across the Atlantic,

  sure as the satellite’s

  insinuating pull

  in the ocean, as true

  to his orbit.

  Against