Opened Ground (17 page)

I dreamt and drifted. All seemed to run to waste

As down a swirl of mucky, glittering flood

Strange polyp floated like a huge corrupt

Magnolia bloom, surreal as a shed breast,

My softly awash and blanching self-disgust.

And I cried among night waters, ‘I repent

My unweaned life that kept me competent

To sleepwalk with connivance and mistrust.’

Then, like a pistil growing from the polyp,

A lighted candle rose and steadied up

Until the whole bright-masted thing retrieved

A course and the currents it had gone with

Were what it rode and showed. No more adrift,

My feet touched bottom and my heart revived.

Then something round and clear

And mildly turbulent, like a bubbleskin

Or a moon in smoothly rippled lough water

Rose in a cobwebbed space: the molten

Inside-sheen of an instrument

Revolved its polished convexes full

Upon me, so close and brilliant

I seemed to pitch back in a headlong fall.

And then it was the clarity of waking

To sunlight and a bell and gushing taps

In the next cubicle. Still there for the taking!

The old brass trumpet with its valves and stops

I found once in loft thatch, a mystery

I shied from then for I thought such trove beyond me.

‘I hate how quick I was to know my place.

I hate where I was born, hate everything

That made me biddable and unforthcoming,’

I mouthed at my half-composed face

In the shaving mirror, like somebody

Drunk in the bathroom during a party,

Lulled and repelled by his own reflection.

As if the cairnstone could defy the cairn.

As if the eddy could reform the pool.

As if a stone swirled under a cascade,

Eroded and eroding in its bed,

Could grind itself down to a different core.

Then I thought of the tribe whose dances never fail

For they keep dancing till they sight the deer.

Morning stir in the hostel. A pot

hooked on forged links. Soot flakes. Plumping water.

The open door brilliant with sunlight.

Hearthsmoke rambling and a thud of earthenware

drumming me back until I saw the mug

beyond my reach on its high shelf, the one

patterned with blue cornflowers, sprig after sprig

repeating round it, as quiet as a milestone …

When had it not been there? There was one night

when fit-up actors used it for a prop

and I sat in the dark hall estranged from it

as a couple vowed and called it their loving cup

and held it in our gaze until the curtain

jerked shut with an ordinary noise.

Dipped and glamoured then by this translation,

it was restored to its old haircracked doze

on the mantelpiece, its parchment glazes fast –

as the otter surfaced once with Ronan’s psalter

miraculously unharmed, that had been lost

a day and a night under the lough water.

And so the saint praised God on the lough shore

for that dazzle of impossibility

I credited again in the sun-filled door,

so absolutely light it could put out fire.

As if the prisms of the kaleidoscope

I plunged once in a butt of muddied water

surfaced like a marvellous lightship

and out of its silted crystals a monk’s face

that had spoken years ago from behind a grille

spoke again about the need and chance

to salvage everything, to re-envisage

the zenith and glimpsed jewels of any gift

mistakenly abased …

What came to nothing could always be replenished.

‘Read poems as prayers,’ he said, ‘and for your penance

translate me something by Juan de la Cruz.’

Returned from Spain to our chapped wilderness,

his consonants aspirate, his forehead shining,

he had made me feel there was nothing to confess.

Now his sandalled passage stirred me on to this:

How well I know that fountain, filling, running,

       although it is the night.

That eternal fountain, hidden away,

I know its haven and its secrecy

       although it is the night.

But not its source because it does not have one,

which is all sources’ source and origin

       although it is the night.

No other thing can be so beautiful.

Here the earth and heaven drink their fill

       although it is the night.

So pellucid it never can be muddied,

and I know that all light radiates from it

       although it is the night.

I know no sounding-line can find its bottom,

nobody ford or plumb its deepest fathom

       although it is the night.

And its current so in flood it overspills

to water hell and heaven and all peoples

       although it is the night.

And the current that is generated there,

as far as it wills to, it can flow that far

       although it is the night.

And from these two a third current proceeds

which neither of these two, I know, precedes

       although it is the night.

This eternal fountain hides and splashes

within this living bread that is life to us

       although it is the night.

Hear it calling out to every creature.

And they drink these waters, although it is dark here

       because it is the night.

I am repining for this living fountain.

Within this bread of life I see it plain

       although it is the night.

       Like a convalescent, I took the hand

       stretched down from the jetty, sensed again

       an alien comfort as I stepped on ground

to find the helping hand still gripping mine,

fish-cold and bony, but whether to guide

or to be guided I could not be certain

for the tall man in step at my side

seemed blind, though he walked straight as a rush

upon his ashplant, his eyes fixed straight ahead.

Then I knew him in the flesh

out there on the tarmac among the cars,

wintered hard and sharp as a blackthorn bush.

His voice eddying with the vowels of all rivers

came back to me, though he did not speak yet,

a voice like a prosecutor’s or a singer’s,

cunning, narcotic, mimic, definite

as a steel nib’s downstroke, quick and clean,

and suddenly he hit a litter basket

with his stick, saying, ‘Your obligation

is not discharged by any common rite.

What you do you must do on your own.

The main thing is to write

for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust

that imagines its haven like your hands at night

dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.

You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.

Take off from here. And don’t be so earnest,

so ready for the sackcloth and the ashes.

Let go, let fly, forget.

You’ve listened long enough. Now strike your note.’

It was as if I had stepped free into space

alone with nothing that I had not known

already. Raindrops blew in my face

as I came to and heard the harangue and jeers

going on and on. ‘The English language

belongs to us. You are raking at dead fires,

rehearsing the old whinges at your age.

That subject people stuff is a cod’s game,

infantile, like this peasant pilgrimage.

You lose more of yourself than you redeem

doing the decent thing. Keep at a tangent.

When they make the circle wide, it’s time to swim

out on your own and fill the element

with signatures on your own frequency,

echo-soundings, searches, probes, allurements,

elver-gleams in the dark of the whole sea.’

The shower broke in a cloudburst, the tarmac

fumed and sizzled. As he moved off quickly

the downpour loosed its screens round his straight walk. 

Take hold of the shaft of the pen.

Subscribe to the first step taken

from a justified line

into the margin.

I stirred wet sand and gathered myself

to climb the steep-flanked mound,

my head like a ball of wet twine

dense with soakage, but beginning

to unwind.

                     Another smell

was blowing off the river, bitter

as night airs in a scutch mill.

The old trees were nowhere,

the hedges thin as penwork

and the whole enclosure lost

under hard paths and sharp-ridged houses.

And there I was, incredible to myself,

among people far too eager to believe me

and my story, even if it happened to be true.

I was a lookout posted and forgotten.

On one side under me, the concrete road.

On the other, the bullocks’ covert,

the breath and plaster of a drinking place

where the school-leaver discovered peace

to touch himself in the reek of churned-up mud.

And the tree itself a strangeness and a comfort,

as much a column as a bole. The very ivy

puzzled its milk-tooth frills and tapers

over the grain: was it bark or masonry?

I watched the red-brick chimney rear

its stamen, course by course,

and the steeplejacks up there at their antics

like flies against the mountain.

I felt the tanks’ advance beginning

at the cynosure of the growth rings,

then winced at their imperium refreshed

in each powdered bolt-mark on the concrete.

And the pilot with his goggles back came in

so low I could see the cockpit rivets.

My hidebound boundary tree. My tree of knowledge.

My thick-tapped, soft-fledged, airy listening post.

The royal roads were cow paths.

The queen mother hunkered on a stool

and played the harpstrings of milk

into a wooden pail.

With seasoned sticks the nobles

lorded it over the hindquarters of cattle.

Units of measurement were pondered

by the cartful, barrowful and bucketful.

Time was a backward rote of names and mishaps,

bad harvests, fires, unfair settlements,

deaths in floods, murders and miscarriages.

And if my rights to it all came only

by their acclamation, what was it worth?

I blew hot and blew cold.

They were two-faced and accommodating.

And seed, breed and generation still

they are holding on, every bit

as pious and exacting and demeaned.

It was more sleepwalk than spasm

yet that was a time when the times

were also in spasm –

the ties and the knots running through us

split open

down the lines of the grain.

As I drew close to pebbles and berries,

the smell of wild garlic, relearning

the acoustic of frost

and the meaning of woodnote,

my shadow over the field

was only a spin-off,

my empty place an excuse

for shifts in the camp, old rehearsals

of debts and betrayal.

Singly they came to the tree

with a stone in each pocket

to whistle and bill me back in

and I would collide and cascade

through leaves when they left,

my point of repose knocked askew.

I was mired in attachment

until they began to pronounce me

a feeder off battlefields

so I mastered new rungs of the air

to survey out of reach

their bonfires on hills, their hosting

and fasting, the levies from Scotland

as always, and the people of art

diverting their rhythmical chants

to fend off the onslaught of winds

I would welcome and climb

at the top of my bent.

The guttersnipe and the albatross

gliding for days without a single wingbeat

were equally beyond me.

I yearned for the gannet’s strike,

the unbegrudging concentration

of the heron.

In the camaraderie of rookeries,

in the spiteful vigilance of colonies

I was at home.

I learned to distrust

the allure of the cuckoo

and the gossip of starlings,

kept faith with doughty bullfinches,

levelled my wit too often

to the small-minded wren

and too often caved in

to the pathos of waterhens

and panicky corncrakes.

I gave much credence to stragglers,

overrated the composure of blackbirds

and the folklore of magpies.

But when goldfinch or kingfisher rent

the veil of the usual,

pinions whispered and braced

as I stooped, unwieldy

and brimming,

my spurs at the ready.