Opened Ground (15 page)

The living mother-of-pearl of a salmon

just out of the water

is gone just like that, but your stick

is kept salmon-silver.

Seasoned and bendy,

it convinces the hand

that what you have you hold

to play with and pose with

and lay about with.

But then too it points back to cattle

and spatter and beating

the bars of a gate –

the very stick we might cut

from your family tree.

The living cobalt of an afternoon

dragonfly drew my eye to it first

and the evening I trimmed it for you

you saw your first glow-worm –

all of us stood round in silence, even you

gigantic enough to darken the sky

for a glow-worm.

And when I poked open the grass

a tiny brightening den lit the eye

in the blunt pared end of your stick.

All through that Sunday afternoon

a kite flew above Sunday,

a tightened drumhead, a flitter of blown chaff.

I’d seen it grey and slippy in the making,

I’d tapped it when it dried out white and stiff,

I’d tied the bows of newspaper

along its six-foot tail.

But now it was far up like a small black lark

and now it dragged as if the bellied string

were a wet rope hauled upon

to lift a shoal.

My friend says that the human soul

is about the weight of a snipe,

yet the soul at anchor there,

the string that sags and ascends,

weighs like a furrow assumed into the heavens.

Before the kite plunges down into the wood

and this line goes useless

take in your two hands, boys, and feel

the strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief.

You were born fit for it.

Stand in here in front of me

and take the strain.

When we climbed the slopes of the cutting

We were eye-level with the white cups

Of the telegraph poles and the sizzling wires.

Like lovely freehand they curved for miles

East and miles west beyond us, sagging

Under their burden of swallows.

We were small and thought we knew nothing

Worth knowing. We thought words travelled the wires

In the shiny pouches of raindrops,

Each one seeded full with the light

Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves

So infinitesimally scaled

We could stream through the eye of a needle.

It had been badly shot.

While he was plucking it

he found, he says, the voice box –

like a flute stop

in the broken windpipe –

and blew upon it

unexpectedly

his own small widgeon cries.

We look up at her

hunkered into her angle

under the eaves.

She bears the whole stone burden

on the small of her back and shoulders

and pinioned elbows,

the astute mouth, the gripping fingers

saying push, push hard,

push harder.

As the hips go high

her big tadpole forehead

is rounded out in sunlight.

And here beside her are two birds,

a rabbit’s head, a ram’s,

a mouth devouring heads.

Her hands holding herself

are like hands in an old barn

holding a bag open.

I was outside looking in

at its lapped and supple mouth

running grain.

I looked up under the thatch

at the dark mouth and eye

of a bird’s nest or a rat hole,

smelling the rose on the wall,

mildew, an earthen floor,

the warm depth of the eaves.

And then one night in the yard

I stood still under heavy rain

wearing the bag like a caul.

We look up to her,

her ring-fort eyes,

her little slippy shoulders,

her nose incised and flat,

and feel light-headed looking up.

She is twig-boned, saddle-sexed,

grown-up, grown ordinary,

seeming to say,

‘Yes, look at me to your heart’s content

but look at every other thing.’

And here is a leaper in a kilt,

two figures kissing,

a mouth with sprigs,

a running hart, two fishes,

a damaged beast with an instrument.

Big voices in the womanless kitchen.

They never lit a lamp in the summertime

but took the twilight as it came

like solemn trees. They sat on in the dark

with their pipes red in their mouths, the talk come down

to
Aye
and
Aye
again and, when the dog shifted,

a curt
There
boy!

                           I closed my eyes

to make the light motes stream behind them

and my head went airy, my chair rode

high and low among branches and the wind

stirred up a rookery in the next long
Aye.

                          As if a trespasser

                          unbolted a forgotten gate

                          and ripped the growth

                          tangling its lower bars –

                          just beyond the hedge

                          he has opened a dark morse

                          along the bank,

                          a crooked wounding

                          of silent, cobwebbed

                          grass. If I stop

                          he stops

                          like the moon.

                          He lives in his feet

                          and ears, weather-eyed,

                          all pad and listening,

                          a denless mover.

                          Under the bridge

                          his reflection shifts

                          sideways to the current,

                          mothy, alluring.

                          I am haunted

                          by his stealthy rustling,

                          the unexpected spoor,

                          the pollen settling.

When I was taken aside that day

I had the sense of election:

they dressed my head in a fishnet

and plaited leafy twigs through meshes

so my vision was a bird’s

at the heart of a thicket

and I spoke as I moved

like a voice from a shaking bush.

King of the ditchbacks,

I went with them obediently

to the edge of a pigeon wood –

deciduous canopy, screened wain of evening

we lay beneath in silence.

No birds came, but I waited

among briars and stones, or whispered

or broke the watery gossamers

if I moved a muscle.

‘Come back to us,’ they said, ‘in harvest,

when we hide in the stooked corn,

when the gundogs can hardly retrieve

what’s brought down.’ And I saw myself

rising to move in that dissimulation,

top-knotted, masked in sheaves, noting

the fall of birds: a rich young man

leaving everything he had

for a migrant solitude.

                     A hurry of bell-notes

                     flew over morning hush

                     and water-blistered cornfields,

                     an escaped ringing

                     that stopped as quickly

                     as it started.
Sunday,

                     the silence breathed

                     and could not settle back

                     for a man had appeared

                     at the side of the field

                     with a bow-saw, held

                     stiffly up like a lyre.

                     He moved and stopped to gaze

                     up into hazel bushes,

                     angled his saw in,

                     pulled back to gaze again

                     and move on to the next.

                     ‘I know you, Simon Sweeney,

                     for an old Sabbath-breaker

                     who has been dead for years.’

                     ‘Damn all you know,’ he said,

                     his eye still on the hedge

                     and not turning his head.

                     ‘I was your mystery man

                     and am again this morning.

                     Through gaps in the bushes,

                     your First Communion face

                     would watch me cutting timber.

                     When cut or broken limbs

                     of trees went yellow, when

                     woodsmoke sharpened air

                     or ditches rustled

                     you sensed my trail there

                     as if it had been sprayed.

                     It left you half afraid.

                     When they bade you listen

                     in the bedroom dark

                     to wind and rain in the trees

                     and think of tinkers camped

                     under a heeled-up cart

                     you shut your eyes and saw

                     a wet axle and spokes

                     in moonlight, and me

                     streaming from the shower,

                     headed for your door.’

                     Sunlight broke in the hazels,

                     the quick bell-notes began

                     a second time. I turned

                     at another sound:

                     a crowd of shawled women

                     were wading the young corn,

                     their skirts brushing softly.

                     Their motion saddened morning.

                     It whispered to the silence,

                     ‘Pray for us, pray for us,’

                     it conjured through the air

                     until the field was full

                     of half-remembered faces,

                     a loosed congregation

                     that straggled past and on.

                     As I drew behind them

                     I was a fasted pilgrim,

                     light-headed, leaving home

                     to face into my station.

                     ‘Stay clear of all processions!’

                     Sweeney shouted at me,

                     but the murmur of the crowd

                     and their feet slushing through

                     the tender, bladed growth

                     had opened a drugged path

                     I was set upon.

                     I trailed those early-risers

                     fallen into step

                     before the smokes were up.

                     The quick bell rang again.

I was parked on a high road, listening

to peewits and wind blowing round the car

when something came to life in the driving mirror,

someone walking fast in an overcoat

and boots, bareheaded, big, determined

in his sure haste along the crown of the road

so that I felt myself the challenged one.

The car door slammed. I was suddenly out

face to face with an aggravated man

raving on about nights spent listening for

gun butts to come cracking on the door,

yeomen on the rampage, and his neighbour

among them, hammering home the shape of things.

‘Round about here you overtook the women,’

I said, as the thing came clear. ‘Your
Lough
Derg
Pilgrim

haunts me every time I cross this mountain –

as if I am being followed, or following.

I’m on my road there now to do the station.’

‘O holy Jesus Christ, does nothing change?’

His head jerked sharply side to side and up

like a diver’s surfacing after a plunge,

then with a look that said,
Who
is
this
cub

anyhow,
he took cognizance again

of where he was: the road, the mountain top,

and the air, softened by a shower of rain,

worked on his anger visibly until:

‘It is a road you travel on your own.

I who learned to read in the reek of flax

and smelled hanged bodies rotting on their gibbets

and saw their looped slime gleaming from the sacks –

hard-mouthed Ribbonmen and Orange bigots

made me into the old fork-tongued turncoat

who mucked the byre of their politics.

If times were hard, I could be hard too.

I made the traitor in me sink the knife.

And maybe there’s a lesson there for you,

whoever you are, wherever you come out of,

for though there’s something natural in your smile

there’s something in it strikes me as defensive.’

‘The angry role was never my vocation,’

I said. ‘I come from County Derry,

where the last marching bands of Ribbonmen

on Patrick’s Day still played their “Hymn to Mary”.

Obedient strains like theirs tuned me first

and not that harp of unforgiving iron

the Fenians strung. A lot of what you wrote

I heard and did: this Lough Derg station,

flax-pullings, dances, fair-days, crossroads chat

and the shaky local voice of education.

All that. And always, Orange drums.

And neighbours on the roads at night with guns.’

‘I know, I know, I know, I know,’ he said,

‘but you have to try to make sense of what comes.

Remember everything and keep your head.’

‘The alders in the hedge,’ I said, ‘mushrooms,

dark-clumped grass where cows or horses dunged,

the cluck when pith-lined chestnut shells split open

in your hand, the melt of shells corrupting,

old jam pots in a drain clogged up with mud –’

But now Carleton was interrupting:

‘All this is like a trout kept in a spring

or maggots sown in wounds for desperate ointment –

another life that cleans our element.

We are earthworms of the earth, and all that

has gone through us is what will be our trace.’

He turned on his heel when he was saying this

and headed up the road at the same hard pace.

I knelt. Hiatus. Habit’s afterlife …

I was back among bead clicks and the murmurs

from inside confessionals, side altars

where candles died insinuating slight

intimate smells of wax at body heat.

There was an active, wind-stilled hush, as if

in a shell the listened-for ocean stopped

and a tide rested and sustained the roof.

A seaside trinket floated then and idled

in vision, like phosphorescent weed,

a toy grotto with seedling mussel shells

and cockles glued in patterns over it,

pearls condensed from a child invalid’s breath

into a shimmering ark, my house of gold

that housed the snowdrop weather of her death

long ago. I would stow away in the hold

of our big oak sideboard and forage for it

laid past in its tissue paper for good.

It was like touching birds’ eggs, robbing the nest

of the word
wreath
, as kept and dry and secret

as her name, which they hardly ever spoke

but was a white bird trapped inside me

beating scared wings when
Health
of
the
Sick

fluttered its
pray
for
us
in the litany.

A cold draught blew under the kneeling boards.

I thought of walking round

and round a space utterly empty,

utterly a source, like the idea of sound

or like the absence sensed in swamp-fed air

above a ring of walked-down grass and rushes

where we once found the bad carcass and scrags of hair

of our dog that had disappeared weeks before.

Blurred swimmings as I faced the sun, my back

to the stone pillar and the iron cross,

ready to say the dream words I
renounce
…

Blurred oval prints of newly ordained faces,

‘Father’ pronounced with a fawning relish,

the sunlit tears of parents being blessed.

I saw a young priest, glossy as a blackbird,

as if he had stepped from his anointing

a moment ago: his purple stole and cord

or cincture loosely tied, his polished shoes

unexpectedly secular beneath

a pleated, lace-hemmed alb of linen cloth.

His name had lain undisturbed for years

like an old bicycle wheel in a ditch

ripped at last from under jungling briars,

wet and perished. My arms were open wide

but I could not say the words. ‘The rain forest,’ he said,

‘you’ve never seen the like of it. I lasted

only a couple of years. Bare-breasted

women and rat-ribbed men. Everything wasted.

I rotted like a pear. I sweated Masses …’

His breath came short and shorter. ‘In long houses

I raised the chalice above headdresses.

In
hoc
signo
… On that abandoned

mission compound, my vocation

is a steam off the drenched creepers.’

I had broken off from my renunciation

while he was speaking, so as to clear the way

for other pilgrims queueing to get started.

‘I’m older now than you when you went away,’

I ventured, feeling a strange reversal.

‘I never could see you on the foreign missions.

I could only see you on a bicycle,

a clerical student home for the summer,

doomed to the decent thing. Visiting neighbours.

Drinking tea and praising home-made bread.

Something in them would be ratified

when they saw you at the door in your black suit,

arriving like some sort of holy mascot.

You gave too much relief, you raised a siege

the world had laid against their kitchen grottoes

hung with holy pictures and crucifixes.’

‘And you,’ he faltered, ‘what are you doing here

but the same thing? What possessed you?

I at least was young and unaware

that what I thought was chosen was convention.

But all this you were clear of you walked into

over again. And the god has, as they say, withdrawn.

What are you doing, going through these motions?

Unless … Unless …’ Again he was short of breath

and his whole fevered body yellowed and shook.

‘Unless you are here taking the last look.’

Then where he stood was empty as the roads

we both grew up beside, where the sick man

had taken his last look one drizzly evening

when the tarmac steamed with the first breath of spring,

a knee-deep mist I waded silently

behind him, on his circuits, visiting.

An old man’s hands, like soft paws rowing forward,

groped for and warded off the air ahead.

Barney Murphy shuffled on the concrete.

Master
Murphy.
I heard the weakened voice

bulling in sudden rage all over again

and fell in behind, my eyes fixed on his heels

like a man lifting swathes at a mower’s heels.

His sockless feet were like the dried broad bean

that split its stitches in the display jar

high on a window in the old classroom,

white as shy faces in the classroom door.

‘Master,’ those elders whispered, ‘I wonder, master …’

rustling envelopes, proffering them, withdrawing,

waiting for him to sign beside their mark,

and ‘Master’ I repeated to myself

so that he stopped but did not turn or move,

gone quiet in the shoulders, his small head

vigilant in the cold gusts off the lough.

I moved ahead and faced him, shook his hand.

Above the winged collar, his mottled face

went distant in a smile as the voice

readied itself and husked and scraped, ‘Good man,

good man yourself,’ then lapsed again

into the limbo and dry urn of the larynx.

The Adam’s apple in its weathered sac

worked like the plunger of a pump in drought

but yielded nothing to help the helpless smile.

Morning field smells came past on the wind,

the sex-cut of sweetbriar after rain,

new meadow hay, birds’ nests filled with leaves.