Opened Ground Read online

  Damson

  Gules and cement dust. A matte tacky blood

  On the bricklayer’s knuckles, like the damson stain

  That seeped through his packed lunch.

  A full hod stood

  Against the mortared wall, his big bright trowel

  In his left hand (for once) was pointing down

  As he marvelled at his right, held high and raw:

  King of the castle, scaffold-stepper, shown

  Bleeding to the world.

  Wound that I saw

  In glutinous colour fifty years ago –

  Damson as omen, weird, a dream to read –

  Is weeping with the held-at-arm’s-length dead

  From everywhere and nowhere, here and now.

  *

  Over and over, the slur, the scrape and mix

  As he trowelled and retrowelled and laid down

  Courses of glum mortar. Then the bricks

  Jiggled and settled, tocked and tapped in line.

  I loved especially the trowel’s shine,

  Its edge and apex always coming clean

  And brightening itself by mucking in.

  It looked light but felt heavy as a weapon,

  Yet when he lifted it there was no strain.

  It was all point and skim and float and glisten

  Until he washed and lapped it tight in sacking

  Like a cult blade that had to be kept hidden.

  *

  Ghosts with their tongues out for a lick of blood

  Are crowding up the ladder, all unhealed,

  And some of them still rigged in bloody gear.

  Drive them back to the doorstep or the road

  Where they lay in their own blood once, in the hot

  Nausea and last gasp of dear life.

  Trowel-wielder, woundie, drive them off

  Like Odysseus in Hades lashing out

  With his sword that dug the trench and cut the throat

  Of the sacrificial lamb.

  But not like him –

  Builder, not sacker, your shield the mortar board –

  Drive them back to the wine-dark taste of home,

  The smell of damsons simmering in a pot,

  Jam ladled thick and steaming down the sunlight.

  Weighing In

  The 56 lb weight. A solid iron Unit of negation. Stamped and cast

  With an inset, rung-thick, moulded, short crossbar

  For a handle. Squared-off and harmless-looking

  Until you tried to lift it, then a socket-ripping,

  Life-belittling force –

  Gravity’s black box, the immovable

  Stamp and squat and square-root of dead weight.

  Yet balance it

  Against another one placed on a weighbridge –

  On a well-adjusted, freshly greased weighbridge –

  And everything trembled, flowed with give and take.

  *

  And this is all the good tidings amount to:

  This principle of bearing, bearing up

  And bearing out, just having to

  Balance the intolerable in others

  Against our own, having to abide

  Whatever we settled for and settled into

  Against our better judgement. Passive

  Suffering makes the world go round.

  Peace on earth, men of good will, all that

  Holds good only as long as the balance holds,

  The scales ride steady and the angels’ strain

  Prolongs itself at an unearthly pitch.

  *

  To refuse the other cheek. To cast the stone.

  Not to do so some time, not to break with

  The obedient one you hurt yourself into

  Is to fail the hurt, the self, the ingrown rule.

  Prophesy who struck thee! When soldiers mocked

  Blindfolded Jesus and he didn’t strike back

  They were neither shamed nor edified, although

  Something was made manifest – the power

  Of power not exercised, of hope inferred

  By the powerless forever. Still, for Jesus’ sake,

  Do me a favour, would you, just this once?

  Prophesy, give scandal, cast the stone.

  *

  Two sides to every question, yes, yes, yes …

  But every now and then, just weighing in

  Is what it must come down to, and without

  Any self-exculpation or self-pity.

  Alas, one night when follow-through was called for

  And a quick hit would have fairly rankled,

  You countered that it was my narrowness

  That kept me keen, so got a first submission.

  I held back when I should have drawn blood

  And that way (mea culpa) lost an edge.

  A deep mistaken chivalry, old friend.

  At this stage only foul play cleans the slate.

  St Kevin and the Blackbird

  And then there was St Kevin and the blackbird. The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside

  His cell, but the cell is narrow, so

  One turned-up palm is out the window, stiff

  As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands

  And lays in it and settles down to nest.

  Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked

  Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked

  Into the network of eternal life,

  Is moved to pity: now he must hold his hand

  Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks

  Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.

  *

  And since the whole thing’s imagined anyhow,

  Imagine being Kevin. Which is he?

  Self-forgetful or in agony all the time

  From the neck on out down through his hurting forearms?

  Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees?

  Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth

  Crept up through him? Is there distance in his head?

  Alone and mirrored clear in love’s deep river,

  ‘To labour and not to seek reward,’ he prays,

  A prayer his body makes entirely

  For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird

  And on the riverbank forgotten the river’s name.

  from The Flight Path

  IV

  The following for the record, in the light

  Of everything before and since:

  One bright May morning, nineteen seventy-nine,

  Just off the red-eye special from New York,

  I’m on the train for Belfast. Plain, simple

  Exhilaration at being back: the sea

  At Skerries, the nuptial hawthorn bloom,

  The trip north taking sweet hold like a chain

  On every bodily sprocket.

  Enter then –

  As if he were some film noir border guard –

  Enter this one I’d last met in a dream,

  More grimfaced now than in the dream itself

  When he’d flagged me down at the side of a mountain road,

  Come up and leant his elbow on the roof

  And explained through the open window of the car

  That all I’d have to do was drive a van

  Carefully in to the next customs post

  At Pettigo, switch off, get out as if

  I were on my way with dockets to the office –

  But then instead I’d walk ten yards more down

  Towards the main street and get in with – here

  Another schoolfriend’s name, a wink and smile,

  I’d know him all right, he’d be in a Ford

  And I’d be home in three hours’ time, as safe

  As houses …

  So he enters and sits down

  Opposite and goes for me head on.

  ‘When, for fuck’s sake, are you going to write

  Something for us? ‘If
I do write something,

  Whatever it is, I’ll be writing for myself.’

  And that was that. Or words to that effect.

  The jail walls all those months were smeared with shite.

  Out of Long Kesh after his dirty protest

  The red eyes were the eyes of Ciaran Nugent

  Like something out of Dante’s scurfy hell,

  Drilling their way through the rhymes and images

  Where I too walked behind the righteous Virgil,

  As safe as houses and translating freely:

  When he had said all this, his eyes rolled

  And his teeth, like a dog’s teeth clamping round a bone,

  Bit into the skull and again took hold.

  V

  When I answered that I came from ‘far away’,

  The policeman at the roadblock snapped, ‘Where’s that?’

  He’d only half-heard what I said and thought

  It was the name of some place up the country.

  And now it is – both where I have been living

  And where I left – a distance still to go

  Like starlight that is light years on the go

  From far away and takes light years arriving.

  Mycenae Lookout

  for Cynthia and Dimitri Hadzi

  The ox is on my tongue

  Aeschylus, Agamemnon

  1 The Watchman’s War

  Some people wept, and not for sorrow – joy

  That the king had armed and upped and sailed for Troy,

  But inside me like struck sound in a gong

  That killing-fest, the life-warp and world-wrong

  It brought to pass, still augured and endured.

  I’d dream of blood in bright webs in a ford,

  Of bodies raining down like tattered meat

  On top of me asleep – and me the lookout

  The queen’s command had posted and forgotten,

  The blind spot her farsightedness relied on.

  And then the ox would lurch against the gong

  And deaden it and I would feel my tongue

  Like the dropped gangplank of a cattle truck,

  Trampled and rattled, running piss and muck,

  All swimmy-trembly as the lick of fire,

  A victory beacon in an abattoir …

  Next thing then I would waken at a loss,

  For all the world a sheepdog stretched in grass,

  Exposed to what I knew, still honour-bound

  To concentrate attention out beyond

  The city and the border, on that line

  Where the blaze would leap the hills when Troy had fallen.

  My sentry work was fate, a home to go to,

  An in-between-times that I had to row through

  Year after year: when the mist would start

  To lift off fields and inlets, when morning light

  Would open like the grain of light being split,

  Day in, day out, I’d come alive again,

  Silent and sunned as an esker on a plain,

  Up on my elbows, gazing, biding time

  In my outpost on the roof … What was to come

  Out of that ten years’ wait that was the war

  Flawed the black mirror of my frozen stare.

  If a god of justice had reached down from heaven

  For a strong beam to hang his scale-pans on

  He would have found me tensed and ready-made.

  I balanced between destiny and dread

  And saw it coming, clouds bloodshot with the red

  Of victory fires, the raw wound of that dawn

  Igniting and erupting, bearing down

  Like lava on a fleeing population …

  Up on my elbows, head back, shutting out

  The agony of Clytemnestra’s love-shout

  That rose through the palace like the yell of troops

  Hurled by King Agamemnon from the ships.

  2 Cassandra

  No such thing

  as innocent

  bystanding.

  Her soiled vest,

  her little breasts,

  her clipped, devast-

  ated, scabbed

  punk head,

  the char-eyed

  famine gawk –

  she looked

  camp-fucked

  and simple.

  People

  could feel

  a missed

  trueness in them

  focus,

  a homecoming

  in her dropped-wing,

  half-calculating

  bewilderment.

  No such thing

  as innocent.

  Old King Cock-

  of-the-Walk

  was back,

  King Kill-

  the-Child-

  and-Take-

  What-Comes,

  King Agamem-

  non’s drum-

  balled, old buck’s

  stride was back.

  And then her Greek

  words came,

  a lamb

  at lambing time,

  bleat of clair-

  voyant dread,

  the gene-hammer

  and tread

  of the roused god.

  And the result-

  ant shock desire

  in bystanders

  to do it to her

  there and then.

  Little rent

  cunt of their guilt:

  in she went

  to the knife,

  to the killer wife,

  to the net over

  her and her slaver,

  the Troy reaver,

  saying, ‘A wipe

  of the sponge,

  that’s it.

  The shadow-hinge

  swings unpredict-

  ably and the light’s

  blanked out.’

  3 His Dawn Vision

  Cities of grass. Fort walls. The dumbstruck palace.

  I’d come to with the night wind on my face,

  Agog, alert again, but far, far less

  Focused on victory than I should have been –

  Still isolated in my old disdain

  Of claques who always needed to be seen

  And heard as the true Argives. Mouth athletes,

  Quoting the oracle and quoting dates,

  Petitioning, accusing, taking votes.

  No element that should have carried weight

  Out of the grievous distance would translate.

  Our war stalled in the pre-articulate.

  The little violets’ heads bowed on their sterns,

  The pre-dawn gossamers, all dew and scrim

  And star-lace, it was more through them

  I felt the beating of the huge time-wound

  We lived inside. My soul wept in my hand

  When I would touch them, my whole being rained

  Down on myself, I saw cities of grass,

  Valleys of longing, tombs, a windswept brightness,

  And far off, in a hilly, ominous place,

  Small crowds of people watching as a man

  Jumped a fresh earth-wall and another ran

  Amorously, it seemed, to strike him down.

  4 The Nights

  They both needed to talk,

  pretending what they needed

  was my advice. Behind backs

  each one of them confided

  it was sexual overload

  every time they did it –

  and indeed from the beginning

  (a child could have hardly missed it)

  their real life was the bed.

  The king should have been told,

  but who was there to tell him

  if not myself? I willed them

  to cease and break the hold

  of my cross-purposed silence

  but still kept on, all smiles

  to Aegisthus every morning,

  much favoured and self-loathing.

  The roof
was like an eardrum.

  The ox’s tons of dumb

  inertia stood, head-down

  and motionless as a herm.

  Atlas, watchmen’s patron,

  would come into my mind,

  the only other one

  up at all hours, ox-bowed

  under his yoke of cloud

  out there at the world’s end.

  The loft-floor where the gods

  and goddesses took lovers

  and made out endlessly

  successfully, those thuds

  and moans through the cloud cover

  were wholly on his shoulders.

  Sometimes I thought of us

  apotheosized to boulders

  called Aphrodite’s Pillars.

  High and low in those days

  hit their stride together.

  When the captains in the horse

  felt Helen’s hand caress

  its wooden boards and belly

  they nearly rode each other.

  But in the end Troy’s mothers

  bore their brunt in alley,

  bloodied cot and bed.

  The war put all men mad,

  horned, horsed or roof-posted,

  the boasting and the bested.

  My own mind was a bull-pen

  where horned King Agamemnon

  had stamped his weight in gold.

  But when hills broke into flame

  and the queen wailed on and came,

  it was the king I sold.

  I moved beyond bad faith: