Opened Ground Read online

  for Michael McLaverty

  ‘Description is revelation!’ Royal

  Avenue, Belfast, 1962,

  A Saturday afternoon, glad to meet

  Me, newly cubbed in language, he gripped

  My elbow. ‘Listen. Go your own way.

  Do your own work. Remember

  Katherine Mansfield – I will tell

  How the laundry basket squeaked … that note of exile.’

  But to hell with overstating it:

  ‘Don’t have the veins bulging in your Biro.’

  And then, ‘Poor Hopkins!’ I have the Journals

  He gave me, underlined, his buckled self

  Obeisant to their pain. He discerned

  The lineaments of patience everywhere

  And fostered me and sent me out, with words

  Imposing on my tongue like obols.

  6 Exposure

  It is December in Wicklow:

  Alders dripping, birches

  Inheriting the last light,

  The ash tree cold to look at.

  A comet that was lost

  Should be visible at sunset,

  Those million tons of light

  Like a glimmer of haws and rose-hips,

  And I sometimes see a falling star.

  If I could come on meteorite!

  Instead I walk through damp leaves,

  Husks, the spent flukes of autumn,

  Imagining a hero

  On some muddy compound,

  His gift like a slingstone

  Whirled for the desperate.

  How did I end up like this?

  I often think of my friends’

  Beautiful prismatic counselling

  And the anvil brains of some who hate me

  As I sit weighing and weighing

  My responsible tristia.

  For what? For the ear? For the people?

  For what is said behind-backs?

  Rain comes down through the alders,

  Its low conducive voices

  Mutter about let-downs and erosions

  And yet each drop recalls

  The diamond absolutes.

  I am neither internee nor informer;

  An inner émigré, grown long-haired

  And thoughtful; a wood-kerne

  Escaped from the massacre,

  Taking protective colouring

  From bole and bark, feeling

  Every wind that blows;

  Who, blowing up these sparks

  For their meagre heat, have missed

  The once-in-a-lifetime portent,

  The comet’s pulsing rose.

  from FIELD WORK (1979)

  Oysters

  Our shells clacked on the plates.

  My tongue was a filling estuary,

  My palate hung with starlight:

  As I tasted the salty Pleiades

  Orion dipped his foot into the water.

  Alive and violated

  They lay on their beds of ice:

  Bivalves: the split bulb

  And philandering sigh of ocean.

  Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered.

  We had driven to that coast

  Through flowers and limestone

  And there we were, toasting friendship,

  Laying down a perfect memory

  In the cool of thatch and crockery.

  Over the Alps, packed deep in hay and snow,

  The Romans hauled their oysters south to Rome:

  I saw damp panniers disgorge

  The frond-lipped, brine-stung

  Glut of privilege

  And was angry that my trust could not repose

  In the clear light, like poetry or freedom

  Leaning in from sea. I ate the day

  Deliberately, that its tang

  Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.

  Triptych

  I After a Killing

  There they were, as if our memory hatched them,

  As if the unquiet founders walked again:

  Two young men with rifles on the hill,

  Profane and bracing as their instruments.

  Who’s sorry for our trouble?

  Who dreamt that we might dwell among ourselves

  In rain and scoured light and wind-dried stones?

  Basalt, blood, water, headstones, leeches.

  In that neuter original loneliness

  From Brandon to Dunseverick

  I think of small-eyed survivor flowers,

  The pined-for, unmolested orchid.

  I see a stone house by a pier.

  Elbow room. Broad window light.

  The heart lifts. You walk twenty yards

  To the boats and buy mackerel.

  And today a girl walks in home to us

  Carrying a basket full of new potatoes,

  Three tight green cabbages, and carrots

  With the tops and mould still fresh on them.

  II Sibyl

  My tongue moved, a swung relaxing hinge.

  I said to her, ‘What will become of us?’

  And as forgotten water in a well might shake

  At an explosion under morning

  Or a crack run up a gable,

  She began to speak.

  ‘I think our very form is bound to change.

  Dogs in a siege. Saurian relapses. Pismires.

  Unless forgiveness finds its nerve and voice,

  Unless the helmeted and bleeding tree

  Can green and open buds like infants’ fists

  And the fouled magma incubate

  Bright nymphs … My people think money

  And talk weather. Oil-rigs lull their future

  On single acquisitive stems. Silence

  Has shoaled into the trawlers’ echo-sounders.

  The ground we kept our ear to for so long

  Is flayed or calloused, and its entrails

  Tented by an impious augury.

  Our island is full of comfortless noises.’

  III At the Water’s Edge

  On Devenish I heard a snipe

  And the keeper’s recital of elegies

  Under the tower. Carved monastic heads

  Were crumbling like bread on water.

  On Boa the god-eyed, sex-mouthed stone

  Socketed between graves, two-faced, trepanned,

  Answered my silence with silence.

  A stoup for rain water. Anathema.

  From a cold hearthstone on Horse Island

  I watched the sky beyond the open chimney

  And listened to the thick rotations

  Of an army helicopter patrolling.

  A hammer and a cracked jug full of cobwebs

  Lay on the window-sill. Everything in me

  Wanted to bow down, to offer up,

  To go barefoot, foetal and penitential,

  And pray at the water’s edge.

  How we crept before we walked! I remembered

  The helicopter shadowing our march at Newry,

  The scared, irrevocable steps.

  The Toome Road

  One morning early I met armoured cars

  In convoy, warbling along on powerful tyres,

  All camouflaged with broken alder branches,

  And headphoned soldiers standing up in turrets.

  How long were they approaching down my roads

  As if they owned them? The whole country was sleeping.

  I had rights-of-way, fields, cattle in my keeping,

  Tractors hitched to buckrakes in open sheds,

  Silos, chill gates, wet slates, the greens and reds

  Of outhouse roofs. Whom should I run to tell

  Among all of those with their back doors on the latch

  For the bringer of bad news, that small-hours visitant

  Who, by being expected, might be kept distant?

  Sowers of seed, erectors of headstones …

  O charioteers, above your dormant guns,

  It stands here
still, stands vibrant as you pass,

  The invisible, untoppled omphalos.

  A Drink of Water

  She came every morning to draw water

  Like an old bat staggering up the field:

  The pump’s whooping cough, the bucket’s clatter

  And slow diminuendo as it filled,

  Announced her. I recall

  Her grey apron, the pocked white enamel

  Of the brimming bucket, and the treble

  Creak of her voice like the pump’s handle.

  Nights when a full moon lifted past her gable

  It fell back through her window and would lie

  Into the water set out on the table.

  Where I have dipped to drink again, to be

  Faithful to the admonishment on her cup,

  Remember the Giver, fading off the lip.

  The Strand at Lough Beg

  in memory of Colum McCartney

  All round this little island, on the strand

  Far down below there, where the breakers strive,

  Grow the tall rushes from the oozy sand.

  Dante, Purgatorio, I, 100–103

  Leaving the white glow of filling stations

  And a few lonely streetlamps among fields

  You climbed the hills towards Newtownhamilton

  Past the Fews Forest, out beneath the stars –

  Along that road, a high, bare pilgrim’s track

  Where Sweeney fled before the bloodied heads,

  Goat-beards and dogs’ eyes in a demon pack

  Blazing out of the ground, snapping and squealing.

  What blazed ahead of you? A faked roadblock?

  The red lamp swung, the sudden brakes and stalling

  Engine, voices, heads hooded and the cold-nosed gun?

  Or in your driving mirror, tailing headlights

  That pulled out suddenly and flagged you down

  Where you weren’t known and far from what you knew:

  The lowland clays and waters of Lough Beg,

  Church Island’s spire, its soft treeline of yew.

  There you once heard guns fired behind the house

  Long before rising time, when duck shooters

  Haunted the marigolds and bulrushes,

  But still were scared to find spent cartridges,

  Acrid, brassy, genital, ejected,

  On your way across the strand to fetch the cows.

  For you and yours and yours and mine fought shy,

  Spoke an old language of conspirators

  And could not crack the whip or seize the day:

  Big-voiced scullions, herders, feelers round

  Haycocks and hindquarters, talkers in byres,

  Slow arbitrators of the burial ground.

  Across that strand of yours the cattle graze

  Up to their bellies in an early mist

  And now they turn their unbewildered gaze

  To where we work our way through squeaking sedge

  Drowning in dew. Like a dull blade with its edge

  Honed bright, Lough Beg half-shines under the haze.

  I turn because the sweeping of your feet

  Has stopped behind me, to find you on your knees

  With blood and roadside muck in your hair and eyes,

  Then kneel in front of you in brimming grass

  And gather up cold handfuls of the dew

  To wash you, cousin. I dab you clean with moss

  Fine as the drizzle out of a low cloud.

  I lift you under the arms and lay you flat.

  With rushes that shoot green again, I plait

  Green scapulars to wear over your shroud.

  Casualty

  I

  He would drink by himself

  And raise a weathered thumb

  Towards the high shelf,

  Calling another rum

  And blackcurrant, without

  Having to raise his voice,

  Or order a quick stout

  By a lifting of the eyes

  And a discreet dumb-show

  Of pulling off the top;

  At closing time would go

  In waders and peaked cap

  Into the showery dark,

  A dole-kept breadwinner

  But a natural for work.

  I loved his whole manner,

  Sure-footed but too sly,

  His deadpan sidling tact,

  His fisherman’s quick eye

  And turned, observant back.

  Incomprehensible

  To him, my other life.

  Sometimes, on his high stool,

  Too busy with his knife

  At a tobacco plug

  And not meeting my eye,

  In the pause after a slug

  He mentioned poetry.

  We would be on our own

  And, always politic

  And shy of condescension,

  I would manage by some trick

  To switch the talk to eels

  Or lore of the horse and cart

  Or the Provisionals.

  But my tentative art

  His turned back watches too:

  He was blown to bits

  Out drinking in a curfew

  Others obeyed, three nights

  After they shot dead

  The thirteen men in Derry.

  PARAS THIRTEEN, the walls said,

  BOGSIDE NIL. That Wednesday

  Everybody held

  Their breath and trembled.

  II

  It was a day of cold

  Raw silence, windblown

  Surplice and soutane:

  Rained-on, flower-laden

  Coffin after coffin

  Seemed to float from the door

  Of the packed cathedral

  Like blossoms on slow water.

  The common funeral

  Unrolled its swaddling band,

  Lapping, tightening

  Till we were braced and bound

  Like brothers in a ring.

  But he would not be held

  At home by his own crowd

  Whatever threats were phoned,

  Whatever black flags waved.

  I see him as he turned

  In that bombed offending place,

  Remorse fused with terror

  In his still knowable face,

  His cornered outfaced stare

  Blinding in the flash.

  He had gone miles away

  For he drank like a fish

  Nightly, naturally

  Swimming towards the lure

  Of warm lit-up places,

  The blurred mesh and murmur

  Drifting among glasses

  In the gregarious smoke.

  How culpable was he

  That last night when he broke

  Our tribe’s complicity?

  ‘Now you’re supposed to be

  An educated man,’

  I hear him say. ‘Puzzle me

  The right answer to that one.’

  III

  I missed his funeral,

  Those quiet walkers

  And sideways talkers

  Shoaling out of his lane

  To the respectable

  Purring of the hearse …

  They move in equal pace

  With the habitual

  Slow consolation

  Of a dawdling engine,

  The line lifted, hand

  Over fist, cold sunshine

  On the water, the land

  Banked under fog: that morning

  When he took me in his boat,

  The screw purling, turning

  Indolent fathoms white,

  I tasted freedom with him.

  To get out early, haul

  Steadily off the bottom,

  Dispraise the catch, and smile

  As you find a rhythm

  Working you, slow mile by mile,

  Into your proper haunt

  Somewhere, well out, beyond …
>
  Dawn-sniffing revenant,

  Plodder through midnight rain,

  Question me again.

  Badgers

  When the badger glimmered away

  into another garden

  you stood, half-lit with whiskey,

  sensing you had disturbed

  some soft returning.

  The murdered dead,

  you thought.

  But could it not have been

  some violent shattered boy

  nosing out what got mislaid

  between the cradle and the explosion,

  evenings when windows stood open

  and the compost smoked down the backs?

  Visitations are taken for signs.

  At a second house I listened

  for duntings under the laurels

  and heard intimations whispered

  about being vaguely honoured.

  And to read even by carcasses

  the badgers have come back.

  One that grew notorious

  lay untouched in the roadside.

  Last night one had me braking

  but more in fear than in honour.

  Cool from the sett and redolent

  of his runs under the night,

  the bogey of fern country

  broke cover in me

  for what he is:

  pig family

  and not at all what he’s painted.

  How perilous is it to choose

  not to love the life we’re shown?

  His sturdy dirty body

  and interloping grovel.

  The intelligence in his bone.

  The unquestionable houseboy’s shoulders

  that could have been my own.

  The Singer’s House

  When they said Carrickfergus I could hear

  the frosty echo of saltminers’ picks.

  I imagined it, chambered and glinting,

  a township built of light.