Opened Ground (10 page)

When they said
Carrickfergus
I could hear

the frosty echo of saltminers' picks.

I imagined it, chambered and glinting,

a township built of light.

What do we say any more

to conjure the salt of our earth?

So much comes and is gone

that should be crystal and kept,

and amicable weathers

that bring up the grain of things,

their tang of season and store,

are all the packing we'll get.

So I say to myself
Gweebarra

and its music hits off the place

like water hitting off granite.

I see the glittering sound

framed in your window,

knives and forks set on oilcloth,

and the seals' heads, suddenly outlined,

scanning everything.

People here used to believe

that drowned souls lived in the seals.

At spring tides they might change shape.

They loved music and swam in for a singer

who might stand at the end of summer

in the mouth of a whitewashed turf-shed,

his shoulder to the jamb, his song

a rowboat far out in evening.

When I came here first you were always singing,

a hint of the clip of the pick

in your winnowing climb and attack.

Raise it again, man. We still believe what we hear.

Late summer, and at midnight

I smelt the heat of the day:

At my window over the hotel car park

I breathed the muddied night airs off the lake

And watched a young crowd leave the discotheque.

Their voices rose up thick and comforting

As oily bubbles the feeding tench sent up

That evening at dusk – the slimy tench

Once called the ‘doctor fish’ because his slime

Was said to heal the wounds of fish that touched it.

A girl in a white dress

Was being courted out among the cars:

As her voice swarmed and puddled into laughs

I felt like some old pike all badged with sores

Wanting to swim in touch with soft-mouthed life.

Vowels ploughed into other: opened ground.

The mildest February for twenty years

Is mist bands over furrows, a deep no sound

Vulnerable to distant gargling tractors.

Our road is steaming, the turned-up acres breathe.

Now the good life could be to cross a field

And art a paradigm of earth new from the lathe

Of ploughs. My lea is deeply tilled.

Old plough-socks gorge the subsoil of each sense

And I am quickened with a redolence

Of farmland as a dark unblown rose.

Wait then … Breasting the mist, in sowers’ aprons,

My ghosts come striding into their spring stations.

The dream grain whirls like freakish Easter snows.

Sensings, mountings from the hiding places,

Words entering almost the sense of touch,

Ferreting themselves out of their dark hutch –

‘These things are not secrets but mysteries,’

Oisin Kelly told me years ago

In Belfast, hankering after stone

That connived with the chisel, as if the grain

Remembered what the mallet tapped to know.

Then I landed in the hedge-school of Glanmore

And from the backs of ditches hoped to raise

A voice caught back off slug-horn and slow chanter

That might continue, hold, dispel, appease:

Vowels ploughed into other, opened ground,

Each verse returning like the plough turned round.

This evening the cuckoo and the corncrake

(So much, too much) consorted at twilight.

It was all crepuscular and iambic.

Out on the field a baby rabbit

Took his bearings, and I knew the deer

(I’ve seen them too from the window of the house,

Like connoisseurs, inquisitive of air)

Were careful under larch and May-green spruce.

I had said earlier, ‘I won’t relapse

From this strange loneliness I’ve brought us to.

Dorothy and William – ’ She interrupts:

‘You’re not going to compare us two… ?’

Outside a rustling and twig-combing breeze

Refreshes and relents. Is cadences.

I used to lie with an ear to the line

For that way, they said, there should come a sound

Escaping ahead, an iron tune

Of flange and piston pitched along the ground,

But I never heard that. Always, instead,

Struck couplings and shuntings two miles away

Lifted over the woods. The head

Of a horse swirled back from a gate, a grey

Turnover of haunch and mane, and I’d look

Up to the cutting where she’d soon appear.

Two fields back, in the house, small ripples shook

Silently across our drinking water

(As they are shaking now across my heart)

And vanished into where they seemed to start.

Soft corrugations in the boortree’s trunk,

Its green young shoots, its rods like freckled solder:

It was our bower as children, a greenish, dank

And snapping memory as I get older.

And elderberry I have learned to call it.

I love its blooms like saucers brimmed with meal,

Its berries a swart caviar of shot,

A buoyant spawn, a light bruised out of purple.

Elderberry? It is shires dreaming wine.

Boortree is bower tree, where I played ‘touching tongues’

And felt another’s texture quick on mine.

So, etymologist of roots and graftings,

I fall back to my tree-house and would crouch

Where small buds shoot and flourish in the hush.

He lived there in the unsayable lights.

He saw the fuchsia in a drizzling noon,

The elderflower at dusk like a risen moon

And green fields greying on the windswept heights.

‘I will break through,’ he said, ‘what I glazed over

With perfect mist and peaceful absences’ –

Sudden and sure as the man who dared the ice

And raced his bike across the Moyola River.

A man we never saw. But in that winter

Of nineteen forty-seven, when the snow

Kept the country bright as a studio,

In a cold where things might crystallize or founder,

His story quickened us, a wild white goose

Heard after dark above the drifted house.

Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Irish Sea:

Green, swift upsurges, North Atlantic flux

Conjured by that strong gale-warning voice,

Collapse into a sibilant penumbra.

Midnight and closedown. Sirens of the tundra,

Of eel-road, seal-road, keel-road, whale-road, raise

Their wind-compounded keen behind the baize

And drive the trawlers to the lee of Wicklow.

L’Etoile,
Le
Guillemot,
La
Belle
Hélène

Nursed their bright names this morning in the bay

That toiled like mortar. It was marvellous

And actual, I said out loud, ‘A haven,’

The word deepening, clearing, like the sky

Elsewhere on Minches, Cromarty, The Faroes.

Thunderlight on the split logs: big raindrops

At body heat and lush with omen

Spattering dark on the hatchet iron.

This morning when a magpie with jerky steps

Inspected a horse asleep beside the wood

I thought of dew on armour and carrion.

What would I meet, blood-boltered, on the road?

How deep into the woodpile sat the toad?

What welters through this dark hush on the crops?

Do you remember that
pension
in Les Landes

Where the old one rocked and rocked and rocked

A mongol in her lap, to little songs?

Come to me quick, I am upstairs shaking.

My all of you birchwood in lightning.

Outside the kitchen window a black rat

Sways on the briar like infected fruit:

‘It looked me through, it stared me out, I’m not

Imagining things. Go you out to it.’

Did we come to the wilderness for this?

We have our burnished bay tree at the gate,

Classical, hung with the reek of silage

From the next farm, tart-leafed as inwit.

Blood on a pitchfork, blood on chaff and hay,

Rats speared in the sweat and dust of threshing –

What is my apology for poetry?

The empty briar is swishing

When I come down, and beyond, inside, your face

Haunts like a new moon glimpsed through tangled glass.

I dreamt we slept in a moss in Donegal

On turf banks under blankets, with our faces

Exposed all night in a wetting drizzle,

Pallid as the dripping sapling birches.

Lorenzo and Jessica in a cold climate.

Diarmuid and Grainne waiting to be found.

Darkly asperged and censed, we were laid out

Like breathing effigies on a raised ground.

And in that dream I dreamt – how like you this?–

Our first night years ago in that hotel

When you came with your deliberate kiss

To raise us towards the lovely and painful

Covenants of flesh; our separateness;

The respite in our dewy dreaming faces.

She would plunge all poets in the ninth circle

And fix them, tooth in skull, tonguing for brain;

For backbiting in life she’d make their hell

A rabid egotistical daisy-chain.

Unyielding, spurred, ambitious, unblunted,

Lockjawed, mantrapped, each a fastened badger

Jockeying for position, hasped and mounted

Like Ugolino on Archbishop Roger.

And when she’d make her circuit of the ice,

Aided and abetted by Virgil’s wife,

I would cry out, ‘My sweet, who wears the bays

In our green land above, whose is the life

Most dedicated and exemplary?’

And she: ‘I have closed my widowed ears

To the sulphurous news of poets and poetry.

Why could you not have, oftener, in our years

Unclenched, and come down laughing from your room

And walked the twilight with me and your children –

Like that one evening of elder bloom

And hay, when the wild roses were fading?’

And (as some maker gaffs me in the neck)

‘You weren’t the worst. You aspired to a kind,

Indifferent, faults-on-both-sides tact.

You left us first, and then those books, behind.’

When you plunged

The light of Tuscany wavered

And swung through the pool

From top to bottom.

I loved your wet head and smashing crawl,

Your fine swimmer’s back and shoulders

Surfacing and surfacing again

This year and every year since.

I sat dry-throated on the warm stones.

You were beyond me.

The mellowed clarities, the grape-deep air

Thinned and disappointed.

Thank God for the slow loadening,

When I hold you now

We are close and deep

As the atmosphere on water.

My two hands are plumbed water.

You are my palpable, lithe

Otter of memory

In the pool of the moment,

Turning to swim on your back,

Each silent, thigh-shaking kick

Retilting the light,

Heaving the cool at your neck.

And suddenly you’re out,

Back again, intent as ever,

Heavy and frisky in your freshened pelt,

Printing the stones.

Up, black, striped and damasked like the chasuble

At a funeral Mass, the skunk’s tail

Paraded the skunk. Night after night

I expected her like a visitor.

The refrigerator whinnied into silence.

My desk light softened beyond the verandah.

Small oranges loomed in the orange tree.

I began to be tense as a voyeur.

After eleven years I was composing

Love-letters again, broaching the word ‘wife’

Like a stored cask, as if its slender vowel

Had mutated into the night earth and air

Of California. The beautiful, useless

Tang of eucalyptus spelt your absence.

The aftermath of a mouthful of wine

Was like inhaling you off a cold pillow.

And there she was, the intent and glamorous,

Ordinary, mysterious skunk,

Mythologized, demythologized,

Snuffing the boards five feet beyond me.

It all came back to me last night, stirred

By the sootfall of your things at bedtime,

Your head-down, tail-up hunt in a bottom drawer

For the black plunge-line nightdress.