Opened Ground Read online

for his bullion bars, his bonus

  was a rope-net and a bloodbath.

  And the peace had come upon us.

  5 His Reverie of Water

  At Troy, at Athens, what I most clearly

  see and nearly smell

  is the fresh water.

  A filled bath, still unentered

  and unstained, waiting behind housewalls

  that the far cries of the butchered on the plain

  keep dying into, until the hero comes

  surging in incomprehensibly

  to be attended to and be alone,

  stripped to the skin, blood-plastered, moaning

  and rocking, splashing, dozing off,

  accommodated as if he were a stranger.

  And the well at Athens too.

  Or rather that old lifeline leading up

  and down from the Acropolis

  to the well itself, a set of timber steps

  slatted in between the sheer cliff face

  and a free-standing, covering spur of rock,

  secret staircase the defenders knew

  and the invaders found, where what was to be

  Greek met Greek,

  the ladder of the future

  and the past, besieger and besieged,

  the treadmill of assault

  turned waterwheel, the rungs of stealth

  and habit all the one

  bare foot extended, searching.

  And then this ladder of our own that ran

  deep into a well-shaft being sunk

  in broad daylight, men puddling at the source

  through tawny mud, then coming back up

  deeper in themselves for having been there,

  like discharged soldiers testing the safe ground,

  finders, keepers, seers of fresh water

  in the bountiful round mouths of iron pumps

  and gushing taps.

  The Gravel Walks

  River gravel. In the beginning, that. High summer, and the angler’s motorbike

  Deep in roadside flowers, like a fallen knight

  Whose ghost we’d lately questioned: ‘Any luck?’

  As the engines of the world prepared, green nuts

  Dangled and clustered closer to the whirlpool.

  The trees dipped down. The flints and sandstone-bits

  Worked themselves smooth and smaller in a sparkle

  Of shallow, hurrying barley-sugar water

  Where minnows schooled that we scared when we played –

  An eternity that ended once a tractor

  Dropped its link-box in the gravel bed

  And cement mixers began to come to life

  And men in dungarees, like captive shades,

  Mixed concrete, loaded, wheeled, turned, wheeled, as if

  The Pharaoh’s brickyards burned inside their heads.

  *

  Hoard and praise the verity of gravel.

  Gems for the undeluded. Milt of earth.

  Its plain, champing song against the shovel

  Soundtests and sandblasts words like ‘honest worth’.

  Beautiful in or out of the river,

  The kingdom of gravel was inside you too –

  Deep down, far back, clear water running over

  Pebbles of caramel, hailstone, mackerel-blue.

  But the actual washed stuff kept you slow and steady

  As you went stooping with your barrow full

  Into an absolution of the body,

  The shriven life tired bones and marrow feel.

  So walk on air against your better judgement

  Establishing yourself somewhere in between

  Those solid batches mixed with grey cement

  And a tune called ‘The Gravel Walks’ that conjures green.

  Whitby-sur-Moyola

  Caedmon too I was lucky to have known,

  Back in situ there with his full bucket

  And armfuls of clean straw, the perfect yardman,

  Unabsorbed in what he had to do

  But doing it perfectly, and watching you.

  He had worked his angel stint. He was hard as nails

  And all that time he’d been poeting with the harp

  His real gift was the big ignorant roar

  He could still let out of him, just bogging in

  As if the sacred subjects were a herd

  That had broken out and needed rounding up.

  I never saw him once with his hands joined

  Unless it was a case of eyes to heaven

  And the quick sniff and test of fingertips

  After he’d passed them through a sick beast’s water.

  Oh, Caedmon was the real thing all right.

  ‘Poet’s Chair’

  for Carolyn Mulholland

  Leonardo said: the sun has never

  Seen a shadow. Now watch the sculptor move

  Full circle round her next work, like a lover

  In the sphere of shifting angles and fixed love.

  I

  Angling shadows of itself are what

  Your ‘Poet’s Chair’ stands to and rises out of

  In its sun-stalked inner-city courtyard.

  On the qui vive all the time, its four legs land

  On their feet – cat’s-foot, goat-foot, big soft splay-foot too;

  Its straight back sprouts two bronze and leafy saplings.

  Every flibbertigibbet in the town,

  Old birds and boozers, late-night pissers, kissers,

  All have a go at sitting on it some time.

  It’s the way the air behind them’s winged and full,

  The way a graft has seized their shoulder-blades

  That makes them happy. Once out of nature,

  They’re going to come back in leaf and bloom

  And angel step. Or something like that. Leaves

  On a bloody chair! Would you believe it?

  II

  Next thing I see the chair in a white prison

  With Socrates sitting on it, bald as a coot,

  Discoursing in bright sunlight with his friends.

  His time is short. The day his trial began

  A verdant boat sailed for Apollo’s shrine

  In Delos, for the annual rite

  Of commemoration. Until its wreathed

  And creepered rigging re-enters Athens

  Harbour, the city’s life is holy.

  No executions. No hemlock bowl. No tears

  And none now as the poison does its work

  And the expert jailer talks the company through

  The stages of the numbness. Socrates

  At the centre of the city and the day

  Has proved the soul immortal. The bronze leaves

  Cannot believe their ears, it is so silent.

  Soon Crito will have to close his eyes and mouth,

  But for the moment everything’s an ache

  Deferred, foreknown, imagined and most real.

  III

  My father’s ploughing one, two, three, four sides

  Of the lea ground where I sit all-seeing

  At centre field, my back to the thorn tree

  They never cut. The horses are all hoof

  And burnished flank, I am all foreknowledge.

  Of the poem as a ploughshare that turns time

  Up and over. Of the chair in leaf

  The fairy thorn is entering for the future.

  Of being here for good in every sense.

  The Swing

  Fingertips just tipping you would send you

  Every bit as far – once you got going –

  As a big push in the back.

  Sooner or later,

  We all learned one by one to go sky high,

  Backward and forward in the open shed,

  Toeing and rowing and jack-knifing through air.

  *

  Not Fragonard. Nor Brueghel. It was more

  Hans Memling’s light of heaven off green grass,

  Light over
fields and hedges, the shed-mouth

  Sunstruck and expectant, the bedding-straw

  Piled to one side, like a Nativity

  Foreground and background waiting for the figures.

  And then, in the middle ground, the swing itself

  With an old lopsided sack in the loop of it,

  Perfectly still, hanging like pulley-slack,

  A lure let down to tempt the soul to rise.

  *

  Even so, we favoured the earthbound. She

  Sat there as majestic as an empress

  Steeping her swollen feet one at a time

  In the enamel basin, feeding it

  Every now and again with an opulent

  Steaming arc from a kettle on the floor

  Beside her. The plout of that was music

  To our ears, her smile a mitigation.

  Whatever light the goddess had once shone

  Around her favourite coming from the bath

  Was what was needed then: there should have been

  Fresh linen, ministrations by attendants,

  Procession and amazement. Instead, she took

  Each rolled elastic stocking and drew it on

  Like the life she would not fail and was not

  Meant for. And once, when she’d scoured the basin,

  She came and sat to please us on the swing,

  Neither out of place nor in her element,

  Just tempted by it for a moment only,

  Half-retrieving something half-confounded.

  Instinctively we knew to let her be.

  *

  To start up by yourself, you hitched the rope

  Against your backside and backed on into it

  Until it tautened, then tiptoed and drove off

  As hard as possible. You hurled a gathered thing

  From the small of your own back into the air.

  Your head swept low, you heard the whole shed creak.

  *

  We all learned one by one to go sky high.

  Then townlands vanished into aerodromes,

  Hiroshima made light of human bones,

  Concorde’s neb migrated towards the future.

  So who were we to want to hang back there

  In spite of all?

  In spite of all, we sailed

  Beyond ourselves and over and above

  The rafters aching in our shoulderblades,

  The give and take of branches in our arms.

  Two Stick Drawings

  I

  Claire O’Reilly used her granny’s stick –

  A crook-necked one – to snare the highest briars

  That always grew the ripest blackberries.

  When it came to gathering, Persephone

  Was in the halfpenny place compared to Claire.

  She’d trespass and climb gates and walk the railway

  Where sootflakes blew into convolvulus

  And the train tore past with the stoker yelling

  Like a balked king from his iron chariot.

  II

  With its drover’s canes and blackthorns and ashplants,

  The ledge of the back seat of my father’s car

  Had turned into a kind of stick-shop window,

  But the only one who ever window-shopped

  Was Jim of the hanging jaw, for Jim was simple

  And rain or shine he’d make his desperate rounds

  From windscreen to back window, hands held up

  To both sides of his face, peering and groaning.

  So every now and then the sticks would be

  Brought out for him and stood up one by one

  Against the front mudguard; and one by one

  Jim would take the measure of them, sight

  And wield and slice and poke and parry

  The unhindering air; until he found

  The true extension of himself in one

  That made him jubilant. He’d run and crow,

  Stooped forward, with his right elbow stuck out

  And the stick held horizontal to the ground,

  Angled across in front of him, as if

  He were leashed to it and it drew him on

  Like a harness rod of the inexorable.

  A Call

  ‘Hold on,’ she said, ‘I’ll just run out and get him. The weather here’s so good, he took the chance

  To do a bit of weeding.’

  So I saw him

  Down on his hands and knees beside the leek rig,

  Touching, inspecting, separating one

  Stalk from the other, gently pulling up

  Everything not tapered, frail and leafless,

  Pleased to feel each little weed-root break,

  But rueful also …

  Then found myself listening to

  The amplified grave ticking of hall clocks

  Where the phone lay unattended in a calm

  Of mirror glass and sunstruck pendulums …

  And found myself then thinking: if it were nowadays, This is how Death would summon Everyman.

  Next thing he spoke and I nearly said I loved him.

  The Errand

  ‘On you go now! Run, son, like the devil And tell your mother to try

  To find me a bubble for the spirit level

  And a new knot for this tie.’

  But still he was glad, I know, when I stood my ground,

  Putting it up to him

  With a smile that trumped his smile and his fool’s errand,

  Waiting for the next move in the game.

  A Dog Was Crying Tonight in Wicklow Also

  in memory of Donatus Nwoga

  When human beings found out about death

  They sent the dog to Chukwu with a message:

  They wanted to be let back to the house of life.

  They didn’t want to end up lost forever

  Like burnt wood disappearing into smoke

  Or ashes that get blown away to nothing.

  Instead, they saw their souls in a flock at twilight

  Cawing and headed back for the same old roosts

  And the same bright airs and wing-stretchings each morning.

  Death would be like a night spent in the wood:

  At first light they’d be back in the house of life.

  (The dog was meant to tell all this to Chukwu).

  But death and human beings took second place

  When he trotted off the path and started barking

  At another dog in broad daylight just barking

  Back at him from the far bank of a river.

  And that is how the toad reached Chukwu first,

  The toad who’d overheard in the beginning

  What the dog was meant to tell. ‘Human beings,’ he said

  (And here the toad was trusted absolutely),

  ‘Human beings want death to last forever.’

  Then Chukwu saw the people’s souls in birds

  Coming towards him like black spots off the sunset

  To a place where there would be neither roosts nor trees

  Nor any way back to the house of life.

  And his mind reddened and darkened all at once

  And nothing that the dog would tell him later

  Could change that vision. Great chiefs and great loves

  In obliterated light, the toad in mud,

  The dog crying out all night behind the corpse house.

  The Strand

  The dotted line my father’s ashplant made

  On Sandymount Strand

  Is something else the tide won’t wash away.

  The Walk

  Glamoured the road, the day, and him and her

  And everywhere they took me. When we stepped out

  Cobbles were riverbed, the Sunday air

  A high stream-roof that moved in silence over

  Rhododendrons in full bloom, foxgloves

  And hemlock, robin-run-the-hedge, the hedge

  With its deckled ivy and thick shadows –
/>   Until the riverbed itself appeared,

  Gravelly, shallowy, summery with pools,

  And made a world rim that was not for crossing.

  Love brought me that far by the hand, without

  The slightest doubt or irony, dry-eyed

  And knowledgeable, contrary as be damned;

  Then just kept standing there, not letting go.

  *

  So here is another longshot. Black and white.

  A negative this time, in dazzle-dark,

  Smudge and pallor where we make out you and me,

  The selves we struggled with and struggled out of,

  Two shades who have consumed each other’s fire,

  Two flames in sunlight that can sear and singe,

  But seem like wisps of enervated air,

  After-wavers, feathery ether-shifts …

  Yet apt still to rekindle suddenly

  If we find along the way charred grass and sticks

  And an old fire-fragrance lingering on,

  Erotic woodsmoke, witchery, intrigue,

  Leaving us none the wiser, just better primed

  To speed the plough again and feed the flame.

  At the Wellhead

  Your songs, when you sing them with your two eyes closed

  As you always do, are like a local road

  We’ve known every turn of in the past –

  That midge-veiled, high-hedged side-road where you stood

  Looking and listening until a car

  Would come and go and leave you lonelier

  Than you had been to begin with. So, sing on,