Opened Ground Read online

  And territorial, still sure of their ground,

  Still interested, not knowing how far

  The country of the shades has been pushed back,

  How long the lark has stopped outside these fields

  And only seems unstoppable to them

  Caught like a far hill in a freak of sunshine.

  xliii

  Choose one set of tracks and track a hare

  Until the prints stop, just like that, in snow.

  End of the line. Smooth drifts. Where did she go?

  Back on her tracks, of course, then took a spring

  Yards off to the side; clean break; no scent or sign.

  She landed in her form and ate the snow.

  Consider too the ancient hieroglyph

  Of ‘hare and zig-zag’, which meant ‘to exist’,

  To be on the qui vive, weaving and dodging

  Like our friend who sprang (goodbye) beyond our ken

  And missed a round at last (but of course he’d stood it):

  The shake-the-heart, the dew-hammer, the far-eyed.

  xliv

  All gone into the world of light? Perhaps

  As we read the line sheer forms do crowd

  The starry vestibule. Otherwise

  They do not. What lucency survives

  Is blanched as worms on nightlines I would lift,

  Ungratified if always well prepared

  For the nothing there – which was only what had been there.

  Although in fact it is more like a caught line snapping,

  That moment of admission of All gone,

  When the rod butt loses touch and the tip drools

  And eddies swirl a dead leaf past in silence

  Swifter (it seems) than the water’s passage.

  xlv

  For certain ones what was written may come true:

  They shall live on in the distance

  At the mouths of rivers.

  For our ones, no. They will re-enter

  Dryness that was heaven on earth to them,

  Happy to eat the scones baked out of clay.

  For some, perhaps, the delta’s reed-beds

  And cold bright-footed seabirds always wheeling.

  For our ones, snuff

  And hob-soot and the heat off ashes.

  And a judge who comes between them and the sun

  In a pillar of radiant house-dust.

  xlvi

  Mountain air from the mountain up behind;

  Out front, the end-of-summer, stone-walled fields;

  And in a slated house the fiddle going

  Like a flat stone skimmed at sunset

  Or the irrevocable slipstream of flat earth

  Still fleeing behind space.

  Was music once a proof of God’s existence?

  As long as it admits things beyond measure,

  That supposition stands.

  So let the ear attend like a farmhouse window

  In placid light, where the extravagant

  Passed once under full sail into the longed-for.

  xlvii

  The visible sea at a distance from the shore

  Or beyond the anchoring grounds

  Was called the offing.

  The emptier it stood, the more compelled

  The eye that scanned it.

  But once you turned your back on it, your back

  Was suddenly all eyes like Argus’s.

  Then, when you’d look again, the offing felt

  Untrespassed still, and yet somehow vacated

  As if a lambent troop that exercised

  On the borders of your vision had withdrawn

  Behind the skyline to manoeuvre and regroup.

  xlviii

  Strange how things in the offing, once they’re sensed,

  Convert to things foreknown;

  And how what’s come upon is manifest

  Only in light of what has been gone through.

  Seventh heaven may be

  The whole truth of a sixth sense come to pass.

  At any rate, when light breaks over me

  The way it did on the road beyond Coleraine

  Where wind got saltier, the sky more hurried

  And silver lamé shivered on the Bann

  Out in mid-channel between the painted poles,

  That day I’ll be in step with what escaped me.

  A Transgression

  The teacher let some big boys out at two

  To gather sticks

  (In scanty nineteen forty-six)

  And even though I never was supposed to

  I wanted out as well. One afternoon

  I raised my hand

  With those free livers off the land

  And found myself at large an hour too soon

  Under a raggedy, hurrying sky

  On the road home.

  If ever I felt ‘heaven’s dome’

  Was what I lived beneath, it was that day

  I lied myself into my own desire,

  Displaced, afraid

  At what I’d dared to be ahead

  Of time. The black spot where the gypsies’ fire

  Had charred the roadside grass, the rags that blew

  On the stripped hedge,

  The cold – it put me all on edge.

  Escape-joy died, one magpie rose and flew

  And left an emptiness I walked on through

  To come down to earth

  In my parents’ gaze, the whole question of worth,

  And their knowledge that loved on without ado.

  (1994)

  from THE SPIRIT LEVEL (1995)

  The Rain Stick

  for Beth and Rand

  Up-end the rain stick and what happens next

  Is a music that you never would have known

  To listen for. In a cactus stalk

  Downpour, sluice-rush, spillage and backwash

  Come flowing through. You stand there like a pipe

  Being played by water, you shake it again lightly

  And diminuendo runs through all its scales

  Like a gutter stopping trickling. And now here comes

  A sprinkle of drops out of the freshened leaves,

  Then subtle little wets off grass and daisies;

  Then glitter-drizzle, almost-breaths of air.

  Up-end the stick again. What happens next

  Is undiminished for having happened once,

  Twice, ten, a thousand times before.

  Who cares if all the music that transpires

  Is the fall of grit or dry seeds through a cactus?

  You are like a rich man entering heaven

  Through the ear of a raindrop. Listen now again.

  Mint

  It looked like a clump of small dusty nettles

  Growing wild at the gable of the house

  Beyond where we dumped our refuse and old bottles:

  Unverdant ever, almost beneath notice.

  But, to be fair, it also spelled promise

  And newness in the back yard of our life

  As if something callow yet tenacious

  Sauntered in green alleys and grew rife.

  The snip of scissor blades, the light of Sunday

  Mornings when the mint was cut and loved:

  My last things will be first things slipping from me.

  Yet let all things go free that have survived.

  Let the smells of mint go heady and defenceless

  Like inmates liberated in that yard.

  Like the disregarded ones we turned against

  Because we’d failed them by our disregard.

  A Sofa in the Forties

  All of us on the sofa in a line, kneeling

  Behind each other, eldest down to youngest,

  Elbows going like pistons, for this was a train

  And between the jamb-wall and the bedroom door

  Our speed and distance were inestimable.

  First we shunted, then we whistled, then
<
br />   Somebody collected the invisible

  For tickets and very gravely punched it

  As carnage after carnage under us

  Moved faster, chooka-chook, the sofa legs

  Went giddy and the unreachable ones

  Far out on the kitchen floor began to wave.

  *

  Ghost-train? Death-gondola? The carved, curved ends,

  Black leatherette and ornate gauntness of it

  Made it seem the sofa had achieved

  Flotation. Its castors on tiptoe,

  Its braid and fluent backboard gave it airs

  Of superannuated pageantry:

  When visitors endured it, straight-backed,

  When it stood off in its own remoteness,

  When the insufficient toys appeared on it

  On Christmas mornings, it held out as itself,

  Potentially heavenbound, earthbound for sure,

  Among things that might add up or let you down.

  *

  We entered history and ignorance

  Under the wireless shelf. Yippee-i-ay,

  Sang ‘The Riders of the Range’. HERE IS THE NEWS,

  Said the absolute speaker. Between him and us

  A great gulf was fixed where pronunciation

  Reigned tyrannically. The aerial wire

  Swept from a treetop down in through a hole

  Bored in the windowframe. When it moved in wind,

  The sway of language and its furtherings

  Swept and swayed in us like nets in water

  Or the abstract, lonely curve of distant trains

  As we entered history and ignorance.

  *

  We occupied our seats with all our might,

  Fit for the uncomfortableness.

  Constancy was its own reward already.

  Out in front, on the big upholstered arm,

  Somebody craned to the side, driver or

  Fireman, wiping his dry brow with the air

  Of one who had run the gauntlet. We were

  The last thing on his mind, it seemed; we sensed

  A tunnel coming up where we’d pour through

  Like unlit carriages through fields at night,

  Our only job to sit, eyes straight ahead,

  And be transported and make engine noise.

  Keeping Going

  for Hugh

  The piper coming from far away is you

  With a whitewash brush for a sporran

  Wobbling round you, a kitchen chair

  Upside down on your shoulder, your right arm

  Pretending to tuck the bag beneath your elbow,

  Your pop-eyes and big cheeks nearly bursting

  With laughter, but keeping the drone going on

  Interminably, between catches of breath.

  *

  The whitewash brush. An old blanched skirted thing

  On the back of the byre door, biding its time

  Until spring airs spelled lime in a work-bucket

  And a potstick to mix it in with water.

  Those smells brought tears to the eyes, we inhaled

  A kind of greeny burning and thought of brimstone.

  But the slop of the actual job

  Of brushing walls, the watery grey

  Being lashed on in broad swatches, then drying out

  Whiter and whiter, all that worked like magic.

  Where had we come from, what was this kingdom

  We knew we’d been restored to? Our shadows

  Moved on the wall and a tar border glittered

  The full length of the house, a black divide

  Like a freshly opened, pungent, reeking trench.

  *

  Piss at the gable, the dead will congregate.

  But separately. The women after dark,

  Hunkering there a moment before bedtime,

  The only time the soul was let alone,

  The only time that face and body calmed

  In the eye of heaven.

  Buttermilk and urine,

  The pantry, the housed beasts, the listening bedroom.

  We were all together there in a foretime,

  In a knowledge that might not translate beyond

  Those wind-heaved midnights we still cannot be sure

  Happened or not. It smelled of hill-fort clay

  And cattle dung. When the thorn tree was cut down

  You broke your arm. I shared the dread

  When a strange bird perched for days on the byre roof.

  *

  That scene, with Macbeth helpless and desperate

  In his nightmare – when he meets the hags again

  And sees the apparitions in the pot –

  I felt at home with that one all right. Hearth,

  Steam and ululation, the smoky hair

  Curtaining a cheek. ‘Don’t go near bad boys

  In that college that you’re bound for. Do you hear me?

  Do you hear me speaking to you? Don’t forget!’

  And then the potstick quickening the gruel,

  The steam crown swirled, everything intimate

  And fear-swathed brightening for a moment,

  Then going dull and fatal and away.

  *

  Grey matter like gruel flecked with blood

  In spatters on the whitewash. A clean spot

  Where his head had been, other stains subsumed

  In the parched wall he leant his back against

  That morning like any other morning,

  Part-time reservist, toting his lunch-box.

  A car came slow down Castle Street, made the halt,

  Crossed the Diamond, slowed again and stopped

  Level with him, although it was not his lift.

  And then he saw an ordinary face

  For what it was and a gun in his own face.

  His right leg was hooked back, his sole and heel

  Against the wall, his right knee propped up steady,

  So he never moved, just pushed with all his might

  Against himself, then fell past the tarred strip,

  Feeding the gutter with his copious blood.

  *

  My dear brother, you have good stamina.

  You stay on where it happens. Your big tractor

  Pulls up at the Diamond, you wave at people,

  You shout and laugh above the revs, you keep

  Old roads open by driving on the new ones.

  You called the piper’s sporrans whitewash brushes

  And then dressed up and marched us through the kitchen.

  But you cannot make the dead walk or right wrong.

  I see you at the end of your tether sometimes,

  In the milking parlour, holding yourself up

  Between two cows until your turn goes past,

  Then coming to in the smell of dung again

  And wondering, is this all? As it was

  In the beginning, is now and shall be?

  Then rubbing your eyes and seeing our old brush

  Up on the byre door, and keeping going.

  Two Lorries

  It’s raining on black coal and warm wet ashes.

  There are tyre-marks in the yard, Agnew’s old lorry

  Has all its cribs down and Agnew the coalman

  With his Belfast accent’s sweet-talking my mother.

  Would she ever go to a film in Magherafelt?

  But it’s raining and he still has half the load

  To deliver farther on. This time the lode

  Our coal came from was silk-black, so the ashes

  Will be the silkiest white. The Magherafelt

  (Via Toomebridge) bus goes by. The half-stripped lorry

  With its emptied, folded coal-bags moves my mother:

  The tasty ways of a leather-aproned coalman!

  And films no less! The conceit of a coalman …

  She goes back in and gets out the black lead

  And emery paper, this nineteen-forties mother,
>
  All business round her stove, half-wiping ashes

  With a backhand from her cheek as the bolted lorry

  Gets revved and turned and heads for Magherafelt

  And the last delivery. Oh, Magherafelt!

  Oh, dream of red plush and a city coalman

  As time fastforwards and a different lorry

  Groans into shot, up Broad Street, with a payload

  That will blow the bus station to dust and ashes …

  After that happened, I’d a vision of my mother,

  A revenant on the bench where I would meet her

  In that cold-floored waiting-room in Magherafelt,

  Her shopping bags full up with shovelled ashes.

  Death walked out past her like a dust-faced coalman

  Refolding body-bags, plying his load

  Empty upon empty, in a flurry

  Of motes and engine-revs, but which lorry

  Was it now? Young Agnew’s or that other,

  Heavier, deadlier one, set to explode

  In a time beyond her time in Magherafelt …

  So tally bags and sweet-talk darkness, coalman.

  Listen to the rain spit in new ashes

  As you heft a load of dust that was Magherafelt,

  Then reappear from your lorry as my mother’s

  Dreamboat coalman filmed in silk-white ashes.