Opened Ground (19 page)

           When I hoked there, I would find

          An acorn and a rusted bolt.

          If I lifted my eyes, a factory chimney

          And a dormant mountain.

          If I listened, an engine shunting

          And a trotting horse.

          Is it any wonder when I thought

          I would have second thoughts?

When they spoke of the prudent squirrel’s hoard

It shone like gifts at a nativity.

When they spoke of the mammon of iniquity

The coins in my pockets reddened like stove-lids.

I was the march drain and the march drain’s banks

Suffering the limit of each claim.

          Two buckets were easier carried than one.

          I grew up in between.

          My left hand placed the standard iron weight.

          My right tilted a last grain in the balance.

          Baronies, parishes met where I was born.

          When I stood on the central stepping stone

          I was the last earl on horseback in midstream

          Still parleying, in earshot of his peers.

The tightness and the nilness round that space

when the car stops in the road, the troops inspect

its make and number and, as one bends his face

towards your window, you catch sight of more

on a hill beyond, eyeing with intent

down cradled guns that hold you under cover,

and everything is pure interrogation

until a rifle motions and you move

with guarded unconcerned acceleration –

a little emptier, a little spent

as always by that quiver in the self,

subjugated, yes, and obedient.

So you drive on to the frontier of writing

where it happens again. The guns on tripods;

the sergeant with his on-off mike repeating

data about you, waiting for the squawk

of clearance; the marksman training down

out of the sun upon you like a hawk.

And suddenly you’re through, arraigned yet freed,

as if you’d passed from behind a waterfall

on the black current of a tarmac road

past armour-plated vehicles, out between

the posted soldiers flowing and receding

like tree shadows into the polished windscreen.

The wintry haw is burning out of season,

crab of the thorn, a small light for small people,

wanting no more from them but that they keep

the wick of self-respect from dying out,

not having to blind them with illumination.

But sometimes when your breath plumes in the frost

it takes the roaming shape of Diogenes

with his lantern, seeking one just man;

so you end up scrutinized from behind the haw

he holds up at eye-level on its twig,

and you flinch before its bonded pith and stone,

its blood-prick that you wish would test and clear you,

its pecked-at ripeness that scans you, then moves on.

     When I landed in the republic of conscience

     it was so noiseless when the engines stopped

     I could hear a curlew high above the runway.

     At immigration, the clerk was an old man

     who produced a wallet from his homespun coat

     and showed me a photograph of my grandfather.

     The woman in customs asked me to declare

     the words of our traditional cures and charms

     to heal dumbness and avert the evil eye.

     No porters. No interpreter. No taxi.

     You carried your own burden and very soon

     your symptoms of creeping privilege disappeared. 

     Fog is a dreaded omen there but lightning

     spells universal good and parents hang

     swaddled infants in trees during thunderstorms.

     Salt is their precious mineral. And seashells

     are held to the ear during births and funerals.

     The base of all inks and pigments is seawater.

     Their sacred symbol is a stylized boat.

     The sail is an ear, the mast a sloping pen,

     the hull a mouth-shape, the keel an open eye.

     At their inauguration, public leaders

     must swear to uphold unwritten law and weep

     to atone for their presumption to hold office –

     and to affirm their faith that all life sprang

     from salt in tears which the sky-god wept

     after he dreamt his solitude was endless.

I came back from that frugal republic

with my two arms the one length, the customs woman

having insisted my allowance was myself.

The old man rose and gazed into my face

and said that was official recognition

that I was now a dual citizen.

He therefore desired me when I got home

to consider myself a representative

and to speak on their behalf in my own tongue.

Their embassies, he said, were everywhere

but operated independently

and no ambassador would ever be relieved.

My cheek was hit and hit:

sudden hailstones

pelted and bounced on the road.

When it cleared again

something whipped and knowledgeable

had withdrawn

and left me there with my chances.

I made a small hard ball

of burning water running from my hand

just as I make this now

out of the melt of the real thing

smarting into its absence.

To be reckoned with, all the same,

those brats of showers.

The way they refused permission,

rattling the classroom window

like a ruler across the knuckles,

the way they were perfect first

and then in no time dirty slush.

Thomas Traherne had his orient wheat

for proof and wonder

but for us, it was the sting of hailstones

and the unstingable hands of Eddie Diamond

foraging in the nettles. 

    Nipple and hive, bite-lumps,

    small acorns of the almost pleasurable

    intimated and disallowed

    when the shower ended

    and everything said
wait.

    For what? For forty years

    to say there, there you had

    the truest foretaste of your aftermath –

    in that dilation

    when the light opened in silence

    and a car with wipers going still

    laid perfect tracks in the slush.

When he stands in the judgement place

With his stick in his hand and the broad hat

Still on his head, maimed by self-doubt

And an old disdain of sweet talk and excuses,

It will be no justice if the sentence is blabbed out.

He will expect more than words in the ultimate court

He relied on through a lifetime’s speechlessness.

Let it be like the judgement of Hermes,

God of the stone heap, where the stones were verdicts

Cast solidly at his feet, piling up around him

Until he stood waist-deep in the cairn

Of his absolution: maybe a gate-pillar

Or a tumbled wallstead where hogweed earths the silence

Somebody will break at last to say, ‘Here

His spirit lingers,’ and will have said too much.

So a new similitude is given us

And we say: The soul may be compared

Unto a spoonbait that a child discovers

Beneath the sliding lid of a pencil case,

Glimpsed once and imagined for a lifetime

Risen and free and spooling out of nowhere –

A shooting star going back up the darkness.

It flees him and it burns him all at once

Like the single drop that Dives implored

Falling and falling into a great gulf.

Then exit, the polished helmet of a hero

Laid out amidships above scudding water.

Exit, alternatively, a toy of light

Reeled through him upstream, snagging on nothing.

She
taught
me
what
her
uncle
once
taught
her:

How
easily
the
biggest
coal
block
split

If
you
got
the
grain
and
hammer
angled
right.

The
sound
of
that
relaxed
alluring
blow,

Its
co-opted
and
obliterated
echo,

Taught
me
to
hit,
taught
me
to
loosen,

Taught
me
between
the
hammer
and
the
block

To
face
the
music.
Teach
me
now
to
listen,

To
strike
it
rich
behind
the
linear
black.

A cobble thrown a hundred years ago

Keeps coming at me, the first stone

Aimed at a great-grandmother’s turncoat brow.

The pony jerks and the riot’s on.

She’s crouched low in the trap

Running the gauntlet that first Sunday

Down the brae to Mass at a panicked gallop.

He whips on through the town to cries of ‘Lundy!’

Call her ‘The Convert’. ‘The Exogamous Bride’.

Anyhow, it is a genre piece

Inherited on my mother’s side

And mine to dispose with now she’s gone.

Instead of silver and Victorian lace,

The exonerating, exonerated stone.

Polished linoleum shone there. Brass taps shone.

The china cups were very white and big –

An unchipped set with sugar bowl and jug.

The kettle whistled. Sandwich and tea scone

Were present and correct. In case it run,

The butter must be kept out of the sun.

And don’t be dropping crumbs. Don’t tilt your chair.

Don’t reach. Don’t point. Don’t make noise when you stir.

It is Number 5, New Row, Land of the Dead,

Where grandfather is rising from his place

With spectacles pushed back on a clean bald head

To welcome a bewildered homing daughter

Before she even knocks. ‘What’s this? What’s this?’

And they sit down in the shining room together.

When all the others were away at Mass

I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.

They broke the silence, let fall one by one

Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:

Cold comforts set between us, things to share

Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.

And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes

From each other’s work would bring us to our senses.

So while the parish priest at her bedside

Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying

And some were responding and some crying

I remembered her head bent towards my head,

Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives –

Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

Fear of affectation made her affect

Inadequacy whenever it came to

Pronouncing words ‘beyond her’.
Bertold
Brek.

She’d manage something hampered and askew

Every time, as if she might betray

The hampered and inadequate by too

Well-adjusted a vocabulary.

With more challenge than pride, she’d tell me, ‘You

Know all them things.’ So I governed my tongue

In front of her, a genuinely well-

Adjusted adequate betrayal

Of what I knew better. I’d
naw
and
aye

And decently relapse into the wrong

Grammar which kept us allied and at bay.

The cool that came off sheets just off the line

Made me think the damp must still be in them

But when I took my corners of the linen

And pulled against her, first straight down the hem

And then diagonally, then flapped and shook

The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind,

They made a dried-out undulating thwack.

So we’d stretch and fold and end up hand to hand

For a split second as if nothing had happened

For nothing had that had not always happened

Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go,

Coming close again by holding back

In moves where I was X and she was O

Inscribed in sheets she’d sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.

In the first flush of the Easter holidays

The ceremonies during Holy Week

Were highpoints of our
Sons
and
Lovers
phase.

The midnight fire. The paschal candlestick.

Elbow to elbow, glad to be kneeling next

To each other up there near the front

Of the packed church, we would follow the text

And rubrics for the blessing of the font.

As
the
hind
longs
for
the
streams,
so
my
soul
…

Dippings. Towellings. The water breathed on.

The water mixed with chrism and with oil.

Cruet tinkle. Formal incensation

And the psalmist’s outcry taken up with pride:

Day
and
night
my
tears
have
been
my
bread.

In the last minutes he said more to her

Almost than in all their life together.

‘You’ll be in New Row on Monday night

And I’ll come up for you and you’ll be glad

When I walk in the door … Isn’t that right?’

His head was bent down to her propped-up head.

She could not hear but we were overjoyed.

He called her good and girl. Then she was dead,

The searching for a pulsebeat was abandoned

And we all knew one thing by being there.

The space we stood around had been emptied

Into us to keep, it penetrated

Clearances that suddenly stood open.

High cries were felled and a pure change happened.

I thought of walking round and round a space

Utterly empty, utterly a source

Where the decked chestnut tree had lost its place

In our front hedge above the wallflowers.

The white chips jumped and jumped and skited high.

I heard the hatchet’s differentiated

Accurate cut, the crack, the sigh

And collapse of what luxuriated

Through the shocked tips and wreckage of it all.

Deep-planted and long gone, my coeval

Chestnut from a jam jar in a hole,

Its heft and hush become a bright nowhere,

A soul ramifying and forever

Silent, beyond silence listened for.