Opened Ground Read online

ebb, current, rock, rapids,

  a muscled icicle

  that melts itself longer

  and fatter, he buries

  his arrival beyond

  light and tidal water,

  investing silt and sand

  with a sleek root. By day

  only the drainmaker’s

  spade or the mud paddler

  can make him abort. Dark

  delivers him hungering

  down each undulation.

  3 Bait

  Lamps dawdle in the field at midnight.

  Three men follow their nose in the grass,

  The lamp’s beam their prow and compass.

  The bucket’s handle better not clatter now:

  Silence and curious light gather bait.

  Nab him, but wait

  For the first shrinking, tacky on the thumb.

  Let him resettle backwards in his tunnel.

  Then draw steady and he’ll come.

  Among the millions whorling their mud coronas

  Under dewlapped leaf and bowed blades

  A few are bound to be rustled in these night raids,

  Innocent ventilators of the ground

  Making the globe a perfect fit,

  A few are bound to be cheated of it

  When lamps dawdle in the field at midnight,

  When fishers need a garland for the bay

  And have him, where he needs to come, out of the clay.

  4 Setting

  I

  A line goes out of sight and out of mind

  Down to the soft bottom of silt and sand

  Past the indifferent skill of the hunting hand.

  A bouquet of small hooks coiled in the stern

  Is being paid out, back to its true form,

  Until the bouquet’s hidden in the worm.

  The boat rides forward where the line slants back.

  The oars in their locks go round and round.

  The eel describes his arcs without a sound.

  II

  The gulls fly and umbrella overhead,

  Treading air as soon as the line runs out,

  Responsive acolytes above the boat.

  Not sensible of any kyrie,

  The fishers, who don’t know and never try,

  Pursue the work in hand as destiny.

  They clear the bucket of the last chopped worms,

  Pitching them high, good riddance, earthy shower.

  The gulls encompass them before the water.

  5 Lifting

  They’re busy in a high boat

  That stalks towards Antrim, the power cut.

  The line’s a filament of smut

  Drawn hand over fist

  Where every three yards a hook’s missed

  Or taken (and the smut thickens, wrist-

  Thick, a flail

  Lashed into the barrel

  With one swing). Each eel

  Comes aboard to this welcome:

  The hook left in gill or gum,

  It’s slapped into the barrel numb

  But knits itself, four-ply,

  With the furling, slippy

  Haul, a knot of back and pewter belly

  That stays continuously one

  For each catch they fling in

  Is sucked home like lubrication.

  And wakes are enwound as the catch

  On the morning water: which

  Boat was which?

  And when did this begin?

  This morning, last year, when the lough first spawned?

  The crews will answer, ‘Once the season’s in.’

  6 The Return

  In ponds, drains, dead canals

  she turns her head back,

  older now, following

  whim deliberately

  till she’s at sea in grass

  and damned if she’ll stop so

  it’s new trenches, sunk pipes,

  swamps, running streams, the lough,

  the river. Her stomach

  shrunk, she exhilarates

  in mid-water. Its throbbing

  is speed through days and weeks.

  Who knows now if she knows

  her depth or direction?

  She’s passed Malin and

  Tory, silent, wakeless,

  a wisp, a wick that is

  its own taper and light

  through the weltering dark.

  Where she’s lost once she lays

  ten thousand feet down in

  her origins. The current

  carries slicks of orphaned spawn.

  7 Vision

  Unless his hair was fine-combed

  The lice, they said, would gang up

  Into a mealy rope

  And drag him, small, dirty, doomed,

  Down to the water. He was

  Cautious then in riverbank

  Fields. Thick as a birch trunk,

  That cable flexed in the grass

  Every time the wind passed. Years

  Later in the same fields

  He stood at night when eels

  Moved through the grass like hatched fears

  Towards the water. To stand

  In one place as the field flowed

  Past, a jellied road,

  To watch the eels crossing land

  Re-wound his world’s live girdle.

  Phosphorescent, sinewed slime

  Continued at his feet. Time

  Confirmed the horrid cable.

  The Given Note

  On the most westerly Blasket

  In a dry-stone hut

  He got this air out of the night.

  Strange noises were heard

  By others who followed, bits of a tune

  Coming in on loud weather

  Though nothing like melody.

  He blamed their fingers and ear

  As unpractised, their fiddling easy

  For he had gone alone into the island

  And brought back the whole thing.

  The house throbbed like his full violin.

  So whether he calls it spirit music

  Or not, I don’t care. He took it

  Out of wind off mid-Atlantic.

  Still he maintains, from nowhere.

  It comes off the bow gravely,

  Rephrases itself into the air.

  Whinlands

  All year round the whin

  Can show a blossom or two

  But it’s in full bloom now.

  As if the small yolk stain

  From all the birds’ eggs in

  All the nests of the spring

  Were spiked and hung

  Everywhere on bushes to ripen.

  Hills oxidize gold.

  Above the smoulder of green shoot

  And dross of dead thorns underfoot

  The blossoms scald.

  Put a match under

  Whins, they go up of a sudden.

  They make no flame in the sun

  But a fierce heat tremor

  Yet incineration like that

  Only takes the thorn.

  The tough sticks don’t burn,

  Remain like bone, charred horn.

  Gilt, jaggy, springy, frilled

  This stunted, dry richness

  Persists on hills, near stone ditches,

  Over flintbed and battlefield.

  The Plantation

  Any point in that wood

  Was a centre, birch trunks

  Ghosting your bearings,

  Improvising charmed rings

  Wherever you stopped.

  Though you walked a straight line

  It might be a circle you travelled

  With toadstools and stumps

  Always repeating themselves.

  Or did you re-pass them?

  Here were bleyberries quilting the floor,

  The black char of a fire,

  And having found them once

  You were sure to find them again.

  Someone had always
been there

  Though always you were alone.

  Lovers, birdwatchers,

  Campers, gypsies and tramps

  Left some trace of their trades

  Or their excrement.

  Hedging the road so

  It invited all comers

  To the hush and the mush

  Of its whispering treadmill,

  Its limits defined,

  So they thought, from outside.

  They must have been thankful

  For the hum of the traffic

  If they ventured in

  Past the picnickers’ belt

  Or began to recall

  Tales of fog on the mountains.

  You had to come back

  To learn how to lose yourself,

  To be pilot and stray – witch,

  Hansel and Gretel in one.

  Bann Clay

  Labourers pedalling at ease

  Past the end of the lane

  Were white with it. Dungarees

  And boots wore its powdery stain.

  All day in open pits

  They loaded on to the bank

  Slabs like the squared-off clots

  Of a blue cream. Sunk

  For centuries under the grass,

  It baked white in the sun,

  Relieved its hoarded waters

  And began to ripen.

  It underruns the valley,

  The first slow residue

  Of a river finding its way.

  Above it, the webbed marsh is new,

  Even the clutch of Mesolithic

  Flints. Once, cleaning a drain

  I shovelled up livery slicks

  Till the water gradually ran

  Clear on its old floor.

  Under the humus and roots

  This smooth weight. I labour

  Towards it still. It holds and gluts.

  Bogland

  for T. P. Flanagan

  We have no prairies

  To slice a big sun at evening –

  Everywhere the eye concedes to

  Encroaching horizon,

  Is wooed into the cyclops’ eye

  Of a tarn. Our unfenced country

  Is bog that keeps crusting

  Between the sights of the sun.

  They’ve taken the skeleton

  Of the Great Irish Elk

  Out of the peat, set it up,

  An astounding crate full of air.

  Butter sunk under

  More than a hundred years

  Was recovered salty and white.

  The ground itself is kind, black butter

  Melting and opening underfoot,

  Missing its last definition

  By millions of years.

  They’ll never dig coal here,

  Only the waterlogged trunks

  Of great firs, soft as pulp.

  Our pioneers keep striking

  Inwards and downwards,

  Every layer they strip

  Seems camped on before.

  The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.

  The wet centre is bottomless.

  from WINTERING OUT (1972)

  Fodder

  Or, as we said,

  fother, I open

  my arms for it

  again. But first

  to draw from the tight

  vise of a stack

  the weathered eaves

  of the stack itself

  falling at your feet,

  last summer’s tumbled

  swathes of grass

  and meadowsweet

  multiple as loaves

  and fishes, a bundle

  tossed over half-doors

  or into mucky gaps.

  These long nights

  I would pull hay

  for comfort, anything

  to bed the stall.

  Bog Oak

  A carter’s trophy

  split for rafters,

  a cobwebbed, black,

  long-seasoned rib

  under the first thatch.

  I might tarry

  with the moustached

  dead, the creel-fillers,

  or eavesdrop on

  their hopeless wisdom

  as a blow-down of smoke

  struggles over the half-door

  and mizzling rain

  blurs the far end

  of the cart track.

  The softening ruts

  lead back to no

  ‘oak groves’, no

  cutters of mistletoe

  in the green clearings.

  Perhaps I just make out

  Edmund Spenser,

  dreaming sunlight,

  encroached upon by

  geniuses who creep

  ‘out of every corner

  of the woodes and glennes’

  towards watercress and carrion.

  Anahorish

  My ‘place of clear water’,

  the first hill in the world

  where springs washed into

  the shiny grass

  and darkened cobbles

  in the bed of the lane.

  Anahorish, soft gradient

  of consonant, vowel-meadow,

  after-image of lamps

  swung through the yards

  on winter evenings.

  With pails and barrows

  those mound-dwellers

  go waist-deep in mist

  to break the light ice

  at wells and dunghills.

  Servant Boy

  He is wintering out

  the back-end of a bad year,

  swinging a hurricane-lamp

  through some outhouse,

  a jobber among shadows.

  Old work-whore, slave-

  blood, who stepped fair-hills

  under each bidder’s eye

  and kept your patience

  and your counsel, how

  you draw me into

  your trail. Your trail

  broken from haggard to stable,

  a straggle of fodder

  stiffened on snow,

  comes first-footing

  the back doors of the little

  barons: resentful

  and impenitent,

  carrying the warm eggs.

  Land

  I

  I stepped it, perch by perch.

  Unbraiding rushes and grass

  I opened my right-of-way

  through old bottoms and sowed-out ground

  and gathered stones off the ploughing

  to raise a small cairn.

  Cleaned out the drains, faced the hedges,

  often got up at dawn

  to walk the outlying fields.

  I composed habits for those acres

  so that my last look would be

  neither gluttonous nor starved.

  I was ready to go anywhere.

  II

  This is in place of what I would leave,

  plaited and branchy,

  on a long slope of stubble:

  a woman of old wet leaves,

  rush-bands and thatcher’s scollops,

  stooked loosely, her breasts an open-work

  of new straw and harvest bows.

  Gazing out past

  the shifting hares.

  III

  I sense the pads

  unfurling under grass and clover:

  if I lie with my ear

  in this loop of silence

  long enough, thigh-bone

  and shoulder against the phantom ground,

  I expect to pick up

  a small drumming

  and must not be surprised

  in bursting air

  to find myself snared, swinging

  an ear-ring of sharp wire.

  Gifts of Rain

  I

  Cloudburst and steady downpour now

  for days.

  Still mammal,

  straw-footed on the mud,

  he
begins to sense weather

  by his skin.

  A nimble snout of flood

  licks over stepping stones

  and goes uprooting.

  He fords

  his life by sounding.

  Soundings.

  II

  A man wading lost fields

  breaks the pane of flood:

  a flower of mud-

  water blooms up to his reflection

  like a cut swaying

  its red spoors through a basin.

  His hands grub

  where the spade has uncastled

  sunken drills, an atlantis

  he depends on. So

  he is hooped to where he planted

  and sky and ground

  are running naturally among his arms

  that grope the cropping land.

  III

  When rains were gathering

  there would be an all-night

  roaring off the ford.

  Their world-schooled ear

  could monitor the usual

  confabulations, the race