Opened Ground (16 page)

‘You’d have thought that Anahorish School

was purgatory enough for any man,’

I said. ‘You have done your station.’

Then a little trembling happened and his breath

rushed the air softly as scythes in his lost meadows.

‘Birch trees have overgrown Leitrim Moss,

dairy herds are grazing where the school was

and the school garden’s loose black mould is grass.’

He was gone with that and I was faced wrong way

into more pilgrims absorbed in this exercise.

As I stood among their whispers and bare feet

the mists of all the mornings I’d set out

for Latin classes with him, face to face,

refreshed me.
Mensa,
mensa,
mensam

sang on the air like a busy sharping-stone.

‘We’ll go some day to my uncle’s farm at Toome –’

Another master spoke.
‘For
what
is
the
great

moving
power
and
spring
of
verse?
Feeling,
and

in
particular,
love.
When I went last year

I drank three cups of water from the well.

It was very cold. It stung me in the ears.

You should have met him –’ Coming in as usual

with the rubbed quotation and his cocked bird’s eye

dabbing for detail.
When
you’re
on
the
road

give
lifts
to
people,
you’ll
always
learn
something.

There he went, in his belted gaberdine,

and after him, another fosterer,

slack-shouldered and clear-eyed: ‘Sure I might have known

once I had made the pad, you’d be after me

sooner or later. Forty-two years on

and you’ve got no farther! But after that again,

where else would you go? Iceland, maybe? Maybe the Dordogne?’

And then the parting shot. ‘In my own day

the odd one came here on the hunt for women.’

Freckle-face, fox-head, pod of the broom,

Catkin-pixie, little fern-swish:

Where did she arrive from?

Like a wish wished

And gone, her I chose at ‘secrets’

And whispered to. When we were playing houses.

I was sunstruck at the basilica door –

A stillness far away, a space, a dish,

A blackened tin and knocked-over stool –

Like a tramped neolithic floor

Uncovered among dunes where the bent grass

Whispers on like reeds about Midas’s

Secrets,
secrets.
I shut my ears to the bell.

Head hugged. Eyes shut. Leaf ears.
Don’t
tell.
Don’t
tell.

A stream of pilgrims answering the bell

Trailed up the steps as I went down them

Towards the bottle-green, still

Shade of an oak. Shades of the Sabine farm

On the beds of St Patrick’s Purgatory.

Late summer, country distance, not an air:

Loosen the toga for wine and poetry

Till
Phoebus
returning
routs
the
morning
star.

As a somnolent hymn to Mary rose

I felt an old pang that packed bags of grain

And the sloped shafts of forks and hoes

Once mocked me with, at my own long virgin

Fasts and thirsts, my nightly shadow feasts,

Haunting the granaries of words like
breasts.

As if I knelt for years at a keyhole

Mad for it, and all that ever opened

Was the breathed-on grille of a confessional

Until that night I saw her honey-skinned

Shoulderblades and the wheatlands of her back

Through the wide keyhole of her keyhole dress

And a window facing the deep south of luck

Opened and I inhaled the land of kindness.

As
little
flowers
that
were
all
bowed
and
shut

By
the
night
chills
rise
on
their
stems
and
open

As
soon
as
they
have
felt
the
touch
of
sunlight,

So
I
revived
in
my
own
wilting
powers

And
my
heart
flushed,
like
somebody
set
free.

Translated, given, under the oak tree.

I had come to the edge of the water,

soothed by just looking, idling over it

as if it were a clear barometer

or a mirror, when his reflection

did not appear but I sensed a presence

entering into my concentration

on not being concentrated as he spoke

my name. And though I was reluctant

I turned to meet his face and the shock

is still in me at what I saw. His brow

was blown open above the eye and blood

had dried on his neck and cheek. ‘Easy now,’

he said, ‘it’s only me. You’ve seen men as raw

after a football match … What time it was

when I was wakened up I still don’t know

but I heard this knocking, knocking, and it

scared me, like the phone in the small hours,

so I had the sense not to put on the light

but looked out from behind the curtain.

I saw two customers on the doorstep

and an old Land Rover with the doors open

parked on the street, so I let the curtain drop;

but they must have been waiting for it to move

for they shouted to come down into the shop.

She started to cry then and roll round the bed,

lamenting and lamenting to herself,

not even asking who it was. “Is your head

astray, or what’s come over you?” I roared, more

to bring myself to my senses

than out of any real anger at her

for the knocking shook me, the way they kept it up,

and her whingeing and half-screeching made it worse.

All the time they were shouting, “Shop!

Shop!” so I pulled on my shoes and a sportscoat

and went back to the window and called out,

“What do you want? Could you quieten the racket

or I’ll not come down at all.” “There’s a child not well.

Open up and see what you have got – pills

or a powder or something in a bottle,”

one of them said. He stepped back off the footpath

so I could see his face in the streetlamp

and when the other moved I knew them both.

But bad and all as the knocking was, the quiet

hit me worse. She was quiet herself now,

lying dead still, whispering to watch out.

At the bedroom door I switched on the light.

“It’s odd they didn’t look for a chemist.

Who are they anyway at this hour of the night?”

she asked me, with the eyes standing in her head.

“I know them to see,” I said, but something

made me reach and squeeze her hand across the bed

before I went downstairs into the aisle

of the shop. I stood there, going weak

in the legs. I remember the stale smell

of cooked meat or something coming through

as I went to open up. From then on

you know as much about it as I do.’

‘Did they say nothing?’ ‘Nothing. What would they say?’

‘Were they in uniform? Not masked in any way?’

‘They were barefaced as they would be in the day,

shites thinking they were the be-all and the end-all.’

‘Not that it is any consolation

but they were caught,’ I told him, ‘and got jail.’

Big-limbed, decent, open-faced, he stood

forgetful of everything now except

whatever was welling up in his spoiled head,

beginning to smile. ‘You’ve put on a bit of weight

since you did your courting in that big Austin

you got the loan of on a Sunday night.’

Through life and death he had hardly aged.

There always was an athlete’s cleanliness

shining off him, and except for the ravaged

forehead and the blood, he was still that same

rangy midfielder in a blue jersey

and starched pants, the one stylist on the team,

the perfect, clean, unthinkable victim.

‘Forgive the way I have lived indifferent –

forgive my timid circumspect involvement,’

I surprised myself by saying. ‘Forgive

my eye,’ he said, ‘all that’s above my head.’

And then a stun of pain seemed to go through him

and he trembled like a heatwave and faded.

Black water. White waves. Furrows snowcapped.

A magpie flew from the basilica

and staggered in the granite airy space

I was staring into, on my knees

at the hard mouth of St Brigid’s Bed.

I came to and there at the bed’s stone hub

was my archaeologist, very like himself,

with his scribe’s face smiling its straight-lipped smile,

starting at the sight of me with the same old

pretence of amazement, so that the wing

of wood-kerne’s hair fanned down over his brow.

And then as if a shower were blackening

already blackened stubble, the dark weather

of his unspoken pain came over him.

A pilgrim bent and whispering on his rounds

inside the bed passed between us slowly.

‘Those dreamy stars that pulsed across the screen

beside you in the ward – your heartbeats, Tom, I mean –

scared me the way they stripped things naked.

My banter failed too early in that visit.

I could not take my eyes off the machine.

I had to head back straightaway to Dublin,

guilty and empty, feeling I had said nothing

and that, as usual, I had somehow broken

covenants, and failed an obligation.

I half-knew we would never meet again …

Did our long gaze and last handshake contain

nothing to appease that recognition?’

‘Nothing at all. But familiar stone

had me half-numbed to face the thing alone.

I loved my still-faced archaeology.

The small crab-apple physiognomies

on high crosses, carved heads in abbeys …

Why else dig in for years in that hard place

in a muck of bigotry under the walls

picking through shards and Williamite cannon balls?

But all that we just turned to banter too.

I felt that I should have seen far more of you

and maybe would have – but dead at thirty-two!

Ah poet, lucky poet, tell me why

what seemed deserved and promised passed me by?’

I could not speak. I saw a hoard of black

basalt axeheads, smooth as a beetle’s back,

a cairn of stone force that might detonate,

the eggs of danger. And then I saw a face

he had once given me, a plaster cast

of an abbess, done by the Gowran master,

mild-mouthed and cowled, a character of grace.

‘Your gift will be a candle in our house –’

But he had gone when I looked to meet his eyes

and hunkering instead there in his place

was a bleeding, pale-faced boy, plastered in mud.

‘The red-hot pokers blazed a lovely red

in Jerpoint the Sunday I was murdered,’

he said quietly. ‘Now do you remember?

You were there with poets when you got the word

and stayed there with them, while your own flesh and blood

was carted to Bellaghy from the Fews.

They showed more agitation at the news

than you did.’

                       ‘But they were getting crisis

first-hand, Colum, they had happened in on

live sectarian assassination.

I was dumb, encountering what was destined.’

And so I pleaded with my second cousin.

‘I kept seeing a grey stretch of Lough Beg

and the strand empty at daybreak.

I felt like the bottom of a dried-up lake.’

‘You saw that, and you wrote that – not the fact.

You confused evasion and artistic tact.

The Protestant who shot me through the head

I accuse directly, but indirectly, you

who now atone perhaps upon this bed

for the way you whitewashed ugliness and drew

the lovely blinds of the
Purgatorio

and saccharined my death with morning dew.’

Then I seemed to waken out of sleep

among more pilgrims whom I did not know

drifting to the hostel for the night.

‘My brain dried like spread turf, my stomach

Shrank to a cinder and tightened and cracked.

Often I was dogs on my own track

Of blood on wet grass that I could have licked.

Under the prison blanket, an ambush

Stillness I felt safe in settled round me.

Street lights came on in small towns, the bomb flash

Came before the sound, I saw country

I knew from Glenshane down to Toome

And heard a car I could make out years away

With me in the back of it like a white-faced groom,

A hit-man on the brink, emptied and deadly.

When the police yielded my coffin, I was light

As my head when I took aim.’

                                              This voice from blight

And hunger died through the black dorm:

There he was, laid out with a drift of Mass cards

At his shrouded feet. Then the firing party’s

Volley in the yard. I saw woodworm

In gate posts and door jambs, smelt mildew

From the byre loft where he had watched and hid

From fields that his draped coffin would raft through.

Unquiet soul, they should have buried you

In the bog where you threw your first grenade,

Where only helicopters and curlews

Make their maimed music, and sphagnum moss

Could teach you its medicinal repose

Until, when the weasel whistles on its tail,

No other weasel will obey its call.