Opened Ground Read online

  High on a windblown hedge. Ocarina earth.

  Three listening posts up on some hard-baked tier

  Above the resonating amphorae.

  vi

  Once, as a child, out in a field of sheep,

  Thomas Hardy pretended to be dead

  And lay down flat among their dainty shins.

  In that sniffed-at, bleated-into, grassy space

  He experimented with infinity.

  His small cool brow was like an anvil waiting

  For sky to make it sing the perfect pitch

  Of his dumb being, and that stir he caused

  In the fleece-hustle was the original

  Of a ripple that would travel eighty years

  Outward from there, to be the same ripple

  Inside him at its last circumference.

  vii

  (I misremembered. He went down on all fours,

  Florence Emily says, crossing a ewe-leaze.

  Hardy sought the creatures face to face,

  Their witless eyes and liability

  To panic made him feel less alone,

  Made proleptic sorrow stand a moment

  Over him, perfectly known and sure.

  And then the flock’s dismay went swimming on

  Into the blinks and murmurs and deflections

  He’d know at parties in renowned old age

  When sometimes he imagined himself a ghost

  And circulated with that new perspective.)

  viii

  The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise

  Were all at prayers inside the oratory

  A ship appeared above them in the air.

  The anchor dragged along behind so deep

  It hooked itself into the altar rails

  And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,

  A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope

  And struggled to release it. But in vain.

  ‘This man can’t bear our life here and will drown,’

  The abbot said, ‘unless we help him.’ So

  They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back

  Out of the marvellous as he had known it.

  ix

  A boat that did not rock or wobble once

  Sat in long grass one Sunday afternoon

  In nineteen forty-one or two. The heat

  Out on Lough Neagh and in where cattle stood

  Jostling and skittering near the hedge

  Grew redolent of the tweed skirt and tweed sleeve

  I nursed on. I remember little treble

  Timber-notes their smart heels struck from planks,

  Me cradled in an elbow like a secret

  Open now as the eye of heaven was then

  Above three sisters talking, talking steady

  In a boat the ground still falls and falls from under.

  x

  Overhang of grass and seedling birch

  On the quarry face. Rock-hob where you watched

  All that cargoed brightness travelling

  Above and beyond and sumptuously across

  The water in its clear deep dangerous holes

  On the quarry floor. Ultimate

  Fathomableness, ultimate

  Stony up-againstness: could you reconcile

  What was diaphanous there with what was massive?

  Were you equal to or were you opposite

  To build-ups so promiscuous and weightless?

  Shield your eyes, look up and face the music.

  xii

  And lightening? One meaning of that

  Beyond the usual sense of alleviation,

  Illumination, and so on, is this:

  A phenomenal instant when the spirit flares

  With pure exhilaration before death –

  The good thief in us harking to the promise!

  So paint him on Christ’s right hand, on a promontory

  Scanning empty space, so body-racked he seems

  Untranslatable into the bliss

  Ached for at the moon-rim of his forehead,

  By nail-craters on the dark side of his brain:

  This day thou shalt be with Me in Paradise.

  Settings

  xiii

  Hazel stealth. A trickle in the culvert.

  Athletic sealight on the doorstep slab,

  On the sea itself, on silent roofs and gables.

  Whitewashed suntraps. Hedges hot as chimneys.

  Chairs on all fours. A plate-rack braced and laden.

  The fossil poetry of hob and slate.

  Desire within its moat, dozing at ease –

  Like a gorged cormorant on the rock at noon,

  Exiled and in tune with the big glitter.

  Re-enter this as the adult of solitude,

  The silence-forder and the definite

  Presence you sensed withdrawing first time round.

  xiv

  One afternoon I was seraph on gold leaf.

  I stood on the railway sleepers hearing larks,

  Grasshoppers, cuckoos, dog-barks, trainer planes

  Cutting and modulating and drawing off.

  Heat wavered on the immaculate line

  And shine of the cogged rails. On either side,

  Dog daisies stood like vestals, the hot stones

  Were clover-meshed and streaked with engine oil.

  Air spanned, passage waited, the balance rode,

  Nothing prevailed, whatever was in store

  Witnessed itself already taking place

  In a time marked by assent and by hiatus.

  xv

  And strike this scene in gold too, in relief,

  So that a greedy eye cannot exhaust it:

  Stable straw, Rembrandt-gleam and burnish

  Where my father bends to a tea-chest packed with salt,

  The hurricane lamp held up at eye-level

  In his bunched left fist, his right hand foraging

  For the unbleeding, vivid-fleshed bacon,

  Home-cured hocks pulled up into the light

  For pondering a while and putting back.

  That night I owned the piled grain of Egypt.

  I watched the sentry’s torchlight on the hoard.

  I stood in the door, unseen and blazed upon.

  xix

  Memory as a building or a city,

  Well lighted, well laid out, appointed with

  Tableaux vivants and costumed effigies –

  Statues in purple cloaks, or painted red,

  Ones wearing crowns, ones smeared with mud or blood:

  So that the mind’s eye could haunt itself

  With fixed associations and learn to read

  Its own contents in meaningful order,

  Ancient textbooks recommended that

  Familiar places be linked deliberately

  With a code of images. You knew the portent

  In each setting, you blinked and concentrated.

  xxii

  Where does spirit live? Inside or outside

  Things remembered, made things, things unmade?

  What came first, the seabird’s cry or the soul

  Imagined in the dawn cold when it cried?

  Where does it roost at last? On dungy sticks

  In a jackdaw’s nest up in the old stone tower

  Or a marble bust commanding the parterre?

  How habitable is perfected form?

  And how inhabited the windy light?

  What’s the use of a held note or held line

  That cannot be assailed for reassurance?

  (Set questions for the ghost of W.B.)

  xxiv

  Deserted harbour stillness. Every stone

  Clarified and dormant under water,

  The harbour wall a masonry of silence.

  Fullness. Shimmer. Laden high Atlantic

  The moorings barely stirred in, very slight

  Clucking of the swell against boat boards.

  Perfected vision: cockle
minarets

  Consigned down there with green-slicked bottle glass,

  Shell-debris and a reddened bud of sandstone.

  Air and ocean known as antecedents

  Of each other. In apposition with

  Omnipresence, equilibrium, brim.

  Crossings

  xxvii

  Everything flows. Even a solid man,

  A pillar to himself and to his trade,

  All yellow boots and stick and soft felt hat,

  Can sprout wings at the ankle and grow fleet

  As the god of fair days, stone posts, roads and crossroads,

  Guardian of travellers and psychopomp.

  ‘Look for a man with an ashplant on the boat,’

  My father told his sister setting out

  For London, ‘and stay near him all night

  And you’ll be safe.’ Flow on, flow on

  The journey of the soul with its soul guide

  And the mysteries of dealing-men with sticks!

  xxix

  Scissor-and-slap abruptness of a latch.

  Its coldness to the thumb. Its see-saw lift

  And drop and innocent harshness.

  Which is a music of binding and of loosing

  Unheard in this generation, but there to be

  Called up or called down at a touch renewed.

  Once the latch pronounces, roof

  Is original again, threshold fatal,

  The sanction powerful as the foreboding.

  Your footstep is already known, so bow

  Just a little, raise your right hand,

  Make impulse one with wilfulness, and enter.

  xxx

  On St Brigid’s Day the new life could be entered

  By going through her girdle of straw rope:

  The proper way for men was right leg first,

  Then right arm and right shoulder, head, then left

  Shoulder, arm and leg. Women drew it down

  Over the body and stepped out of it.

  The open they came into by these moves

  Stood opener, hoops came off the world,

  They could feel the February air

  Still soft above their heads and imagine

  The limp rope fray and flare like wind-borne gleanings

  Or an unhindered goldfinch over ploughland.

  xxxii

  Running water never disappointed.

  Crossing water always furthered something.

  Stepping stones were stations of the soul.

  A kesh could mean the track some called a causey

  Raised above the wetness of the bog,

  Or the causey where it bridged old drains and streams.

  It steadies me to tell these things. Also

  I cannot mention keshes or the ford

  Without my father’s shade appearing to me

  On a path towards sunset, eyeing spades and clothes

  That turf-cutters stowed perhaps or souls cast off

  Before they crossed the log that spans the burn.

  xxxiii

  Be literal a moment. Recollect

  Walking out on what had been emptied out

  After he died, turning your back and leaving.

  That morning tiles were harder, windows colder,

  The raindrops on the pane more scourged, the grass

  Barer to the sky, more wind-harrowed,

  Or so it seemed. The house that he had planned

  ‘Plain, big, straight, ordinary, you know’,

  A paradigm of rigour and correction,

  Rebuke to fanciness and shrine to limit,

  Stood firmer than ever for its own idea

  Like a printed X-ray for the X-rayed body.

  xxxiv

  Yeats said, To those who see spirits, human skin

  For a long time afterwards appears most coarse.

  The face I see that all falls short of since

  Passes down an aisle: I share the bus

  From San Francisco Airport into Berkeley

  With one other passenger, who’s dropped

  At the Treasure Island military base

  Half-way across Bay Bridge. Vietnam-bound,

  He could have been one of the newly dead come back,

  Unsurprisable but still disappointed,

  Having to bear his farm-boy self again,

  His shaving cuts, his otherworldly brow.

  xxxvi

  And yes, my friend, we too walked through a valley.

  Once. In darkness. With all the streetlamps off.

  As danger gathered and the march dispersed.

  Scene from Dante, made more memorable

  By one of his head-clearing similes –

  Fireflies, say, since the policemen’s torches

  Clustered and flicked and tempted us to trust

  Their unpredictable, attractive light.

  We were like herded shades who had to cross

  And did cross, in a panic, to the car

  Parked as we’d left it, that gave when we got in

  Like Charon’s boat under the faring poets.

  Squarings

  xxxvii

  In famous poems by the sage Han Shan,

  Cold Mountain is a place that can also mean

  A state of mind. Or different states of mind

  At different times, for the poems seem

  One-off, impulsive, the kind of thing that starts

  I have sat here facing the Cold Mountain

  For twenty-nine years, or There is no path

  That goes all the way – enviable stuff,

  Unfussy and believable.

  Talking about it isn’t good enough

  But quoting from it at least demonstrates

  The virtue of an art that knows its mind.

  xxxviii

  We climbed the Capitol by moonlight, felt

  The transports of temptation on the heights:

  We were privileged and belated and we knew it.

  Then something in me moved to prophesy

  Against the beloved stand-offishness of marble

  And all emulation of stone-cut verses.

  ‘Down with form triumphant, long live,’ (said I)

  ‘Form mendicant and convalescent. We attend

  The come-back of pure water and the prayer-wheel.’

  To which a voice replied, ‘Of course we do.

  But the others are in the Forum Café waiting,

  Wondering where we are. What’ll you have?’

  xxxix

  When you sat, far-eyed and cold, in the basalt throne

  Of ‘the wishing chair’ at Giant’s Causeway,

  The small of your back made very solid sense.

  Like a papoose at sap-time strapped to a maple tree,

  You gathered force out of the world-tree’s hardness.

  If you stretched your hand forth, things might turn to stone.

  But you were only goose-fleshed skin and bone,

  The rocks and wonder of the world were only

  Lava crystallized, salts of the earth

  The wishing chair gave a savour to, its kelp

  And ozone freshening your outlook

  Beyond the range you thought you’d settled for.

  xl

  I was four but I turned four hundred maybe

  Encountering the ancient dampish feel

  Of a clay floor. Maybe four thousand even.

  Anyhow, there it was. Milk poured for cats

  In a rank puddle-place, splash-darkened mould

  Around the terracotta water-crock.

  Ground of being. Body’s deep obedience

  To all its shifting tenses. A half-door

  Opening directly into starlight.

  Out of that earth house I inherited

  A stack of singular, cold memory-weights

  To load me, hand and foot, in the scale of things.

  xli

  Sand-bed, they said. And gravel-bed. Before

  I knew river shallows
or river pleasures

  I knew the ore of longing in those words.

  The places I go back to have not failed

  But will not last. Waist-deep in cow-parsley,

  I re-enter the swim, riding or quelling

  The very currents memory is composed of,

  Everything accumulated ever

  As I took squarings from the tops of bridges

  Or the banks of self at evening.

  Lick of fear. Sweet transience. Flirt and splash.

  Crumpled flow the sky-dipped willows trailed in.

  xlii

  Heather and kesh and turf stacks reappear

  Summer by summer still, grasshoppers and all,

  The same yet rarer: fields of the nearly blessed

  Where gaunt ones in their shirtsleeves stooped and dug

  Or stood alone at dusk surveying bog-banks –

  Apparitions now, yet active still