Opened Ground (11 page)

Walking with you and another lady

In wooded parkland, the whispering grass

Ran its fingers through our guessing silence

And the trees opened into a shady

Unexpected clearing where we sat down.

I think the candour of the light dismayed us.

We talked about desire and being jealous,

Our conversation a loose single gown

Or a white picnic tablecloth spread out

Like a book of manners in the wilderness.

‘Show me,’ I said to our companion, ‘what

I have much coveted, your breast’s mauve star.’

And she consented. Oh neither these verses

Nor my prudence, love, can heal your wounded stare.

Where the sally tree went pale in every breeze,

where the perfect eye of the nesting blackbird watched,

where one fern was always green

I was standing watching you

take the pad from the gatehouse at the crossing

and reach to lift a white wash off the whins.

I could see the vaccination mark

stretched on your upper arm, and smell the coal smell

of the train that comes between us, a slow goods,

waggon after waggon full of big-eyed cattle.

          But your vaccination mark is on your thigh,

          an O that’s healed into the bark.

          Except a dryad’s not a woman

          you are my wounded dryad

          in a mothering smell of wet

          and ring-wormed chestnuts.

          Our moon was small and far,

          was a coin long gazed at

brilliant on the
Pequod’
s
mast

across Atlantic and Pacific waters.

Not the mud slick,

not the black weedy water

full of alder cones and pock-marked leaves.

Not the cow parsley in winter

with its old whitened shins and wrists,

its sibilance, its shaking.

Not even the tart green shade of summer

thick with butterflies

and fungus plump as a leather saddle.

No. But in a still corner,

braced to its pebble-dashed wall,

heavy, earth-drawn, all mouth and eye,

the sunflower, dreaming umber.

          Catspiss smell,

          the pink bloom open:

          I press a leaf

          of the flowering currant

          on the back of your hand

          for the tight slow burn

          of its sticky juice

          to prime your skin,

          and your veins to be crossed

          criss-cross with leaf-veins.

          I lick my thumb

          and dip it in mould,

          I anoint the anointed

          leaf-shape. Mould

          blooms and pigments

          the back of your hand

          like a birthmark –

          my umber one,

          you are stained, stained

          to perfection.

A rowan like a lipsticked girl.

Between the by-road and the main road

Alder trees at a wet and dripping distance

Stand off among the rushes.

There are the mud-flowers of dialect

And the immortelles of perfect pitch

And that moment when the bird sings very close

To the music of what happens.

A soft whoosh, the sunset blaze

of straw on blackened stubble,

a thatch-deep, freshening

barbarous crimson burn –

I rode down England

as they fired the crop

that was the leavings of a crop,

the smashed tow-coloured barley,

down from Ely’s Lady Chapel,

the sweet tenor Latin

forever banished,

the sumptuous windows

threshed clear by Thomas Cromwell.

Which circle does he tread,

scalding on cobbles,

each one a broken statue’s head?

After midnight, after summer,

to walk in a sparking field,

to smell dew and ashes

and start Will Brangwen’s ghost

from the hot soot –

a breaking sheaf of light,

abroad in the hiss

and clash of stooking.

As you plaited the harvest bow

You implicated the mellowed silence in you

In wheat that does not rust

But brightens as it tightens twist by twist

Into a knowable corona,

A throwaway love-knot of straw.

Hands that aged round ashplants and cane sticks

And lapped the spurs on a lifetime of gamecocks

Harked to their gift and worked with fine intent

Until your fingers moved somnambulant:

I tell and finger it like braille,

Gleaning the unsaid off the palpable,

And if I spy into its golden loops

I see us walk between the railway slopes

Into an evening of long grass and midges,

Blue smoke straight up, old beds and ploughs in hedges,

An auction notice on an outhouse wall –

You with a harvest bow in your lapel,

Me with the fishing rod, already homesick

For the big lift of these evenings, as your stick

Whacking the tips off weeds and bushes

Beats out of time, and beats, but flushes

Nothing: that original townland

Still tongue-tied in the straw tied by your hand.

The
end
of
art
is
peace

Could be the motto of this frail device

That I have pinned up on our deal dresser –

Like a drawn snare

Slipped lately by the spirit of the corn

Yet burnished by its passage, and still warm.

The bronze soldier hitches a bronze cape

That crumples stiffly in imagined wind

No matter how the real winds buff and sweep

His sudden hunkering run, forever craned

Over Flanders. Helmet and haversack,

The gun’s firm slope from butt to bayonet,

The loyal, fallen names on the embossed plaque –

It all meant little to the worried pet

I was in nineteen forty-six or seven,

Gripping my Aunt Mary by the hand

Along the Portstewart prom, then round the crescent

To thread the Castle Walk out to the strand.

The pilot from Coleraine sailed to the coal-boat.

Courting couples rose out of the scooped dunes.

A farmer stripped to his studs and shiny waistcoat

Rolled the trousers down on his timid shins.

Francis Ledwidge, you courted at the seaside

Beyond Drogheda one Sunday afternoon.

Literary, sweet-talking, countrified,

You pedalled out the leafy road from Slane

Where you belonged, among the dolorous

And lovely: the May altar of wild flowers,

Easter water sprinkled in outhouses,

Mass-rocks and hill-top raths and raftered byres.

I think of you in your Tommy’s uniform,

A haunted Catholic face, pallid and brave,

Ghosting the trenches like a bloom of hawthorn

Or silence cored from a Boyne passage-grave.

It’s summer, nineteen-fifteen. I see the girl

My aunt was then, herding on the long acre.

Behind a low bush in the Dardanelles

You suck stones to make your dry mouth water.

It’s nineteen-seventeen. She still herds cows

But a big strafe puts the candles out in Y pres:

‘My soul is by the Boyne, cutting new meadows …

My country wears her confirmation dress.’

‘To be called a British soldier while my country

Has no place among nations …’ You were rent

By shrapnel six weeks later. ‘I am sorry

That party politics should divide our tents.’

In you, our dead enigma, all the strains

Criss-cross in useless equilibrium

And as the wind tunes through this vigilant bronze

I hear again the sure confusing drum

You followed from Boyne water to the Balkans

But miss the twilit note your flute should sound.

You were not keyed or pitched like these true-blue ones

Though all of you consort now underground.

We had already left him. I walked the ice

And saw two soldered in a frozen hole

On top of other, one’s skull capping the other’s,

Gnawing at him where the neck and head

Are grafted to the sweet fruit of the brain,

Like a famine victim at a loaf of bread.

So the berserk Tydeus gnashed and fed

Upon the severed head of Menalippus

As if it were some spattered carnal melon.

‘You,’ I shouted, ‘you on top, what hate

Makes you so ravenous and insatiable?

What keeps you so monstrously at rut?

Is there any story I can tell

For you, in the world above, against him?

If my tongue by then’s not withered in my throat

I will report the truth and clear your name.’

That sinner eased his mouth up off his meal

To answer me, and wiped it with the hair

Left growing on his victim’s ravaged skull,

Then said, ‘Even before I speak

The thought of having to relive all that

Desperate time makes my heart sick;

Yet while I weep to say them, I would sow

My words like curses – that they might increase

And multiply upon this head I gnaw.

I know you come from Florence by your accent

But I have no idea who you are

Nor how you ever managed your descent.

Still, you should know my name, for I was Count

Ugolino, this was Archbishop Roger,

And why I act the jockey to his mount

Is surely common knowledge; how my good faith

Was easy prey to his malignancy,

How I was taken, held, and put to death.

But you must hear something you cannot know

If you’re to judge him – the cruelty

Of my death at his hands. So listen now.

Others will pine as I pined in that jail

Which is called Hunger after me, and watch

As I watched through a narrow hole

Moon after moon, bright and somnambulant,

Pass overhead, until that night I dreamt

The bad dream and my future’s veil was rent.

I saw a wolf-hunt: this man rode the hill

Between Pisa and Lucca, hounding down

The wolf and wolf-cubs. He was lordly and masterful,

His pack in keen condition, his company

Deployed ahead of him, Gualandi

And Sismundi as well, and Lanfranchi,

Who soon wore down wolf-father and wolf-sons

And my hallucination

Was all sharp teeth and bleeding flanks ripped open.

When I awoke before the dawn, my head

Swam with cries of my sons who slept in tears

Beside me there, crying out for bread.

(If your sympathy has not already started

At all that my heart was foresuffering

And if you are not crying, you are hardhearted.) 

They were awake now, it was near the time

For food to be brought in as usual,

Each one of them disturbed after his dream,

When I heard the door being nailed and hammered

Shut, far down in the nightmare tower.

I stared in my sons’ faces and spoke no word.

My eyes were dry and my heart was stony.

They cried and my little Anselm said,

“What’s wrong? Why are you staring, Daddy?”

But I shed no tears, I made no reply

All through that day, all through the night that followed

Until another sun blushed in the sky

And sent a small beam probing the distress

Inside those prison walls. Then when I saw

The image of my face in their four faces

I bit on my two hands in desperation

And they, since they thought hunger drove me to it,

Rose up suddenly in agitation

Saying, “Father, it will greatly ease our pain

If you eat us instead, and you who dressed us

In this sad flesh undress us here again.”

So then I calmed myself to keep them calm.

We hushed. That day and the next stole past us

And earth seemed hardened against me and them.

For four days we let the silence gather.

Then, throwing himself flat in front of me,

Gaddo said, “Why don’t you help me, Father?”

He died like that, and surely as you see

Me here, one by one I saw my three

Drop dead during the fifth day and the sixth day

Until I saw no more. Searching, blinded,

For two days I groped over them and called them.

Then hunger killed where grief had only wounded.’ 

When he had said all this, his eyes rolled

And his teeth, like a dog’s teeth clamping round a bone,

Bit into the skull and again took hold.

Pisa! Pisa, your sounds are like a hiss

Sizzling in our country’s grassy language.

And since the neighbour states have been remiss

In your extermination, let a huge

Dyke of islands bar the Arno’s mouth, let

Capraia and Gorgona dam and deluge

You and your population. For the sins

Of Ugolino, who betrayed your forts,

Should never have been visited on his sons.

Your atrocity was Theban. They were young

And innocent: Hugh and Brigata

And the other two whose names are in my song.