Opened Ground (14 page)

There we were in the vaulted tunnel running,

You in your going-away coat speeding ahead

And me, me then like a fleet god gaining

Upon you before you turned to a reed

Or some new white flower japped with crimson

As the coat flapped wild and button after button

Sprang off and fell in a trail

Between the Underground and the Albert Hall.

Honeymooning, mooning around, late for the Proms,

Our echoes die in that corridor and now

I come as Hansel came on the moonlit stones

Retracing the path back, lifting the buttons

To end up in a draughty lamplit station

After the trains have gone, the wet track

Bared and tensed as I am, all attention

For your step following and damned if I look back.

The clear weather of juniper

darkened into winter.

She fed gin to sloes

and sealed the glass container.

When I unscrewed it

I smelled the disturbed

tart stillness of a bush

rising through the pantry.

When I poured it

it had a cutting edge

and flamed

like Betelgeuse.

I drink to you

in smoke-mirled, blue-

black sloes, bitter

and dependable.

So, he would pay his ‘debt to medicine’.

But first he drank cognac by the ocean

With his back to all he had travelled there to face.

His head was swimming free as the troikas

Of Tyumen, he looked down from the rail

Of his thirty years and saw a mile

Into himself as if he were clear water:

Lake Baikal from the deckrail of the steamer.

So far away, Moscow was like lost youth.

And who was he, to savour in his mouth

Fine spirits that the puzzled literati

Packed off with him to a penal colony –

Him, born, you may say, under the counter?

At least that meant he knew its worth. No cantor

In full throat by the iconostasis

Got holier joy than he got from that glass

That shone and warmed like diamonds warming

On some pert young cleavage in a salon,

Inviolable and affronting.

He felt the glass go cold in the midnight sun.

When he staggered up and smashed it on the stones

It rang as clearly as the convicts’ chains

That haunted him. All through the months to come

It rang on like the burden of his freedom

To try for the right tone – not tract, not thesis –

And walk away from floggings. He who thought to squeeze

His slave’s blood out and waken the free man

Shadowed a convict guide through Sakhalin.

It is a kind of chalky russet

solidified gourd, sedimentary

and so reliably dense and bricky

I often clasp it and throw it from hand to hand.

It was ruddier, with an underwater

hint of contusion, when I lifted it,

wading a shingle beach on Inishowen.

Across the estuary light after light

came on silently round the perimeter

of the camp. A stone from Phlegethon,

bloodied on the bed of hell’s hot river?

Evening frost and the salt water

made my hand smoke, as if I’d plucked the heart

that damned Guy de Montfort to the boiling flood –

but not really, though I remembered

his victim’s heart in its casket, long venerated.

Anyhow, there I was with the wet red stone

in my hand, staring across at the watch-towers

from my free state of image and allusion,

swooped on, then dropped by trained binoculars:

a silhouette not worth bothering about,

out for the evening in scarf and waders

and not about to set times wrong or right,

stooping along, one of the venerators.

Houndstooth stone. Aberdeen of the mind.

Saying
An
union
in
the
cup
I’ll
throw

I have hurt my hand, pressing it hard around

this bit hammered off Joyce’s Martello

Tower, this flecked insoluble brilliant

I keep but feel little in common with –

a kind of stone-age circumcising knife,

a Calvin edge in my complaisant pith.

Granite is jaggy, salty, punitive

and exacting.
Come
to
me,
it says

all
you
who
labour
and
are
burdened,
I

will
not
refresh
you.
And it adds,
Seize

the
day.
And,
You
can
take
me
or
leave
me.

Often I watched her lift it

from where its compact wedge

rode the back of the stove

like a tug at anchor.

To test its heat she’d stare

and spit in its iron face

or hold it up next her cheek

to divine the stored danger.

Soft thumps on the ironing board.

Her dimpled angled elbow

and intent stoop

as she aimed the smoothing iron

like a plane into linen,

like the resentment of women.

To work, her dumb lunge says,

is to move a certain mass

through a certain distance,

is to pull your weight and feel

exact and equal to it.

Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.

To be carried back to the shrine some dawn

when the sea spreads its far sun-crops to the south

and I make a morning offering again:

that
I
may
escape
the
miasma
of
spilled
blood,

govern
the
tongue,
fear
hybris,
fear
the
god

until
he
speaks
in
my
untrammelled
mouth.

I stood between them,

the one with his travelled intelligence

and tawny containment,

his speech like the twang of a bowstring,

and another, unshorn and bewildered

in the tubs of his Wellingtons,

smiling at me for help,

faced with this stranger I’d brought him.

Then a cunning middle voice

came out of the field across the road

saying, ‘Be adept and be dialect,

tell of this wind coming past the zinc hut,

call me sweetbriar after the rain

or snowberries cooled in the fog.

But love the cut of this travelled one

and call me also the cornfield of Boaz.

Go beyond what’s reliable

in all that keeps pleading and pleading,

these eyes and puddles and stones,

and recollect how bold you were

when I visited you first

with departures you cannot go back on.’

A chaffinch flicked from an ash and next thing

I found myself driving the stranger

through my own country, adept

at dialect, reciting my pride

in all that I knew, that began to make strange

at that same recitation.

As you came with me in silence

to the pump in the long grass

I heard much that you could not hear:

the bite of the spade that sank it,

the slithering and grumble

as the mason mixed his mortar,

and women coming with white buckets

like flashes on their ruffled wings.

The cast-iron rims of the lid

clinked as I uncovered it,

something stirred in its mouth.

I had a bird’s eye view of a bird,

finch-green, speckly white,

nesting on dry leaves, flattened, still,

suffering the light.

So I roofed the citadel

as gently as I could, and told you

and you gently unroofed it

but where was the bird now?

There was a single egg, pebbly white,

and in the rusted bend of the spout

tail feathers splayed and sat tight.

So tender, I said, ‘Remember this.

It will be good for you to retrace this path

when you have grown away and stand at last

at the very centre of the empty city.’

A batlike soul waking to consciousness of itself in darkness and secrecy and loneliness.

You would hoist an old hat on the tines of a fork

and trawl the mouth of the bridge for the slight

bat-thump and flutter. Skinny downy webs,

babynails clawing the sweatband … But don’t

bring it down, don’t break its flight again,

don’t deny it; this time let it go free.

Follow its bat-flap under the stone bridge,

under the Midland and Scottish Railway

and lose it there in the dark.

Next thing it shadows moonslicked laurels

or skims the lapped net on a tennis court.

Next thing it’s ahead of you in the road.

What are you after? You keep swerving off,

flying blind over ashpits and netting wire;

invited by the brush of a word like
peignoir,

rustles and glimpses, shot silk, the stealth of floods

So
close
to
me
I
could
hear
her
breathing

and there by the lighted window behind trees

it hangs in creepers matting the brickwork

and now it’s a wet leaf blowing in the drive,

now soft-deckled, shadow-convolvulus

by the White Gates. Who would have thought it? At the White Gates

She
let
them
do
whatever
they
liked.
Cling there

as long as you want. There is nothing to hide.