Opened Ground Read online

  slabbering past the gable,

  the Moyola harping on

  its gravel beds:

  all spouts by daylight

  brimmed with their own airs

  and overflowed each barrel

  in long tresses.

  I cock my ear

  at an absence –

  in the shared calling of blood

  arrives my need

  for antediluvian lore.

  Soft voices of the dead

  are whispering by the shore

  that I would question

  (and for my children’s sake)

  about crops rotted, river mud

  glazing the baked clay floor.

  IV

  The tawny guttural water

  spells itself: Moyola

  is its own score and consort,

  bedding the locale

  in the utterance,

  reed music, an old chanter

  breathing its mists

  through vowels and history.

  A swollen river,

  a mating call of sound

  rises to pleasure me, Dives,

  hoarder of common ground.

  Toome

  My mouth holds round

  the soft blastings,

  Toome, Toome,

  as under the dislodged

  slab of the tongue

  I push into a souterrain

  prospecting what new

  in a hundred centuries’

  loam, flints, musket-balls,

  fragmented ware,

  torcs and fish-bones,

  till I am sleeved in

  alluvial mud that shelves

  suddenly under

  bogwater and tributaries,

  and elvers tail my hair.

  Broagh

  Riverback, the long rigs

  ending in broad docken

  and a canopied pad

  down to the ford.

  The garden mould

  bruised easily, the shower

  gathering in your heelmark

  was the black O

  in Broagh,

  its low tattoo

  among the windy boortrees

  and rhubarb-blades

  ended almost

  suddenly, like that last

  gh the strangers found

  difficult to manage.

  Oracle

  Hide in the hollow trunk

  of the willow tree,

  its listening familiar,

  until, as usual, they

  cuckoo your name

  across the fields.

  You can hear them

  draw the poles of stiles

  as they approach

  calling you out:

  small mouth and ear

  in a woody cleft,

  lobe and larynx

  of the mossy places.

  The Backward Look

  A stagger in air

  as if a language

  failed, a sleight

  of wing.

  A snipe’s bleat is fleeing

  its nesting-ground

  into dialect,

  into variants,

  transliterations whirr

  on the nature reserves –

  little goat of the air,

  of the evening,

  little goat of the frost.

  It is his tail-feathers

  drumming elegies

  in the slipstream

  of wild goose

  and yellow bittern

  as he corkscrews away

  into the vaults

  that we live off, his flight

  through the sniper’s eyrie,

  over twilit earthworks

  and wallsteads,

  disappearing among

  gleanings and leavings

  in the combs

  of a fieldworker’s archive.

  A New Song

  I met a girl from Derrygarve

  And the name, a lost potent musk,

  Recalled the river’s long swerve,

  A kingfisher’s blue bolt at dusk

  And stepping stones like black molars

  Sunk in the ford, the shifty glaze

  Of the whirlpool, the Moyola

  Pleasuring beneath alder trees.

  And Derrygarve, I thought, was just:

  Vanished music, twilit water –

  A smooth libation of the past

  Poured by this chance vestal daughter.

  But now our river tongues must rise

  From licking deep in native haunts

  To flood, with vowelling embrace,

  Demesnes staked out in consonants.

  And Castledawson we’ll enlist

  And Upperlands, each planted bawn –

  Like bleaching-greens resumed by grass –

  A vocable, as rath and bullaun.

  The Other Side

  I

  Thigh-deep in sedge and marigolds,

  a neighbour laid his shadow

  on the stream, vouching

  ‘It’s as poor as Lazarus, that ground,’

  and brushed away

  among the shaken leafage.

  I lay where his lea sloped

  to meet our fallow,

  nested on moss and rushes,

  my ear swallowing

  his fabulous, biblical dismissal,

  that tongue of chosen people.

  When he would stand like that

  on the other side, white-haired,

  swinging his blackthorn

  at the marsh weeds,

  he prophesied above our scraggy acres,

  then turned away

  towards his promised furrows

  on the hill, a wake of pollen

  drifting to our bank, next season’s tares.

  II

  For days we would rehearse

  each patriarchal dictum:

  Lazarus, the Pharaoh, Solomon

  and David and Goliath rolled

  magnificently, like loads of hay

  too big for our small lanes,

  or faltered on a rut –

  ‘Your side of the house, I believe,

  hardly rule by the Book at all.’

  His brain was a whitewashed kitchen

  hung with texts, swept tidy

  as the body o’ the kirk.

  III

  Then sometimes when the rosary was dragging

  mournfully on in the kitchen

  we would hear his step round the gable

  though not until after the litany

  would the knock come to the door

  and the casual whistle strike up

  on the doorstep. ‘A right-looking night,’

  he might say, ‘I was dandering by

  and says I, I might as well call.’

  But now I stand behind him

  in the dark yard, in the moan of prayers.

  He puts a hand in a pocket

  or taps a little tune with the blackthorn

  shyly, as if he were party to

  lovemaking or a stranger’s weeping.

  Should I slip away, I wonder,

  or go up and touch his shoulder

  and talk about the weather

  or the price of grass-seed?

  Tinder

  (from A Northern Hoard)

  We picked flints,

  Pale and dirt-veined,

  So small finger and thumb

  Ached around them;

  Cold beads of history and home

  We fingered, a cave-mouth flame

  Of leaf and stick

  Trembling at the mind’s wick.

  We clicked stone on stone

  That sparked a weak flame-pollen

  And failed, our knuckle joints

  Striking as often as the flints.

  What did we know then

  Of tinder, charred linen and iron,

  Huddled at dusk in a ring,

  Our fists shut, our hope shrunken?

  What could strike
a blaze

  From our dead igneous days?

  Now we squat on cold cinder,

  Red-eyed, after the flames’ soft thunder

  And our thoughts settle like ash.

  We face the tundra’s whistling brush

  With new history, flint and iron,

  Cast-offs, scraps, nail, canine.

  The Tollund Man

  I

  Some day I will go to Aarhus

  To see his peat-brown head,

  The mild pods of his eyelids,

  His pointed skin cap.

  In the flat country nearby

  Where they dug him out,

  His last gruel of winter seeds

  Caked in his stomach,

  Naked except for

  The cap, noose and girdle,

  I will stand a long time.

  Bridegroom to the goddess,

  She tightened her torc on him

  And opened her fen,

  Those dark juices working

  Him to a saint’s kept body,

  Trove of the turfcutters’

  Honeycombed workings.

  Now his stained face

  Reposes at Aarhus.

  II

  I could risk blasphemy,

  Consecrate the cauldron bog

  Our holy ground and pray

  Him to make germinate

  The scattered, ambushed

  Flesh of labourers,

  Stockinged corpses

  Laid out in the farmyards,

  Tell-tale skin and teeth

  Flecking the sleepers

  Of four young brothers, trailed

  For miles along the lines.

  III

  Something of his sad freedom

  As he rode the tumbril

  Should come to me, driving,

  Saying the names

  Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard,

  Watching the pointing hands

  Of country people,

  Not knowing their tongue.

  Out there in Jutland

  In the old man-killing parishes

  I will feel lost,

  Unhappy and at home.

  Nerthus

  For beauty, say an ash-fork staked in peat,

  Its long grains gathering to the gouged split;

  A seasoned, unsleeved taker of the weather

  Where kesh and loaning finger out to heather.

  Wedding Day

  I am afraid.

  Sound has stopped in the day

  And the images reel over

  And over. Why all those tears,

  The wild grief on his face

  Outside the taxi? The sap

  Of mourning rises

  In our waving guests.

  You sing behind the tall cake

  Like a deserted bride

  Who persists, demented,

  And goes through the ritual.

  When I went to the Gents

  There was a skewered heart

  And a legend of love. Let me

  Sleep on your breast to the airport.

  Mother of the Groom

  What she remembers

  Is his glistening back

  In the bath, his small boots

  In the ring of boots at her feet.

  Hands in her voided lap,

  She hears a daughter welcomed.

  It’s as if he kicked when lifted

  And slipped her soapy hold.

  Once soap would ease off

  The wedding ring

  That’s bedded forever now

  In her clapping hand.

  Summer Home

  I

  Was it wind off the dumps

  or something in heat

  dogging us, the summer gone sour,

  a fouled nest incubating somewhere?

  Whose fault, I wondered, inquisitor

  of the possessed air.

  To realize suddenly,

  whip off the mat

  that was larval, moving –

  and scald, scald, scald.

  II

  Bushing the door, my arms full

  of wild cherry and rhododendron,

  I hear her small lost weeping

  through the hall, that bells and hoarsens

  on my name, my name.

  O love, here is the blame.

  The loosened flowers between us

  gather in, compose

  for a May altar of sorts.

  These frank and falling blooms

  soon taint to a sweet chrism.

  Attend. Anoint the wound.

  III

  Oh we tented our wound all right

  under the homely sheet

  and lay as if the cold flat of a blade

  had winded us.

  More and more I postulate

  thick healings, like now

  as you bend in the shower

  water lives down the tilting stoups of your breasts.

  IV

  With a final

  unmusical drive

  long grains begin

  to open and split

  ahead and once more

  we sap

  the white, trodden

  path to the heart.

  V

  My children weep out the hot foreign night.

  We walk the floor, my foul mouth takes it out

  On you and we lie stiff till dawn

  Attends the pillow, and the maize, and vine

  That holds its filling burden to the light.

  Yesterday rocks sang when we tapped

  Stalactites in the cave’s old, dripping dark –

  Our love calls tiny as a tuning fork.

  Serenades

  The Irish nightingale

  Is a sedge-warbler,

  A little bird with a big voice

  Kicking up a racket all night.

  Not what you’d expect

  From the musical nation.

  I haven’t even heard one –

  Nor an owl, for that matter.

  My serenades have been

  The broken voice of a crow

  In a draught or a dream,

  The wheeze of bats

  Or the ack-ack

  Of the tramp corncrake

  Lost in a no-man’s-land

  Between combines and chemicals.

  So fill the bottles, love,

  Leave them inside their cots,

  And if they do wake us, well,

  So would the sedge-warbler.

  Shore Woman

  Man to the hills, woman to the shore.

  Gaelic proverb

  I have crossed the dunes with their whistling bent

  Where dry loose sand was riddling round the air

  And I’m walking the firm margin. White pocks

  Of cockle, blanched roofs of clam and oyster

  Hoard the moonlight, woven and unwoven

  Off the bay. At the far rocks

  A pale sud comes and goes.

  Under boards the mackerel slapped to death

  Yet still we took them in at every cast,

  Stiff flails of cold convulsed with their first breath.

  My line plumbed certainly the undertow,

  Loaded against me once I went to draw

  And flashed and fattened up towards the light.

  He was all business in the stern. I called

  ‘This is so easy that it’s hardly right,’

  But he unhooked and coped with frantic fish

  Without speaking. Then suddenly it lulled,

  We’d crossed where they were running, the line rose

  Like a let-down and I was conscious

  How far we’d drifted out beyond the head.

  ‘Count them up at your end,’ was all he said

  Before I saw the porpoises’ thick backs

  Cartwheeling like the flywheels of the tide,

  Soapy and shining. To have seen a hill

  Splitting the water could not have numbed me more

  Than t
he close irruption of that school,

  Tight viscous muscle, hooped from tail to snout,

  Each one revealed complete as it bowled out

  And under.

  They will attack a boat.

  I knew it and I asked him to put in

  But he would not, declared it was a yarn

  My people had been fooled by far too long

  And he would prove it now and settle it.

  Maybe he shrank when those sloped oily backs

  Propelled towards us: I lay and screamed

  Under splashed brine in an open rocking boat,

  Feeling each dunt and slither through the timber,

  Sick at their huge pleasures in the water.

  I sometimes walk this strand for thanksgiving

  Or maybe it’s to get away from him

  Skittering his spit across the stove. Here

  Is the taste of safety, the shelving sand