Opened Ground (22 page)

Matutinal. Mother-of-pearl

Summer come early. Slashed carmines

And washed milky blues.

To be first on the road,

Up with the ground-mists and pheasants.

To be older and grateful

That this time you too were half-grateful

The pangs had begun – prepared

And clear-headed, foreknowing

The trauma, entering on it

With full consent of the will.

(The first time, dismayed and arrayed

In your cut-off white cotton gown,

You were more bride than earth-mother

Up on the stirrup-rigged bed,

Who were self-possessed now

To the point of a walk on the pier

Before you checked in.)

And then later on I half-fainted

When the little slapped palpable girl

Was handed to me; but as usual

Came to in two wide-open eyes

That had been dawned into farther

Than ever, and had outseen the last

Of all of those mornings of waiting

When your domed brow was one long held silence

And the dawn chorus anything but.

On the day of their excursion up the Thames

To Hampton Court, they were nearly sunstruck.

She with her neck bared in a page-boy cut,

He all dreamy anyhow, wild for her

But pretending to be a thousand miles away,

Studying the boat’s wake in the water.

And here are the photographs. Head to one side,

In her sleeveless blouse, one bare shoulder high

And one arm loose, a bird with a dropped wing

Surprised in cover. He looks at you straight,

Assailable, enamoured, full of vows,

Young dauphin in the once-upon-a-time.

And next the lowish red-brick Tudor frontage.

No more photographs, however, now

We are present there as the smell of grass

And suntan oil, standing like their sixth sense

Behind them at the entrance to the maze,

Heartbroken for no reason, willing them

To dare it to the centre they are lost for …

Instead, like reflections staggered through warped glass,

They reappear as in a black and white

Old grainy newsreel, where their pleasure-boat

Goes back spotlit across sunken bridges

And they alone are borne downstream unscathed,

Between mud banks where the wounded rave all night

At flameless blasts and echoless gunfire –

In all of which is ominously figured

Their free passage through historic times,

Like a silk train being brushed across a leper

Or the safe conduct of two royal favourites,

Unhindered and resented and bright-eyed.

So let them keep a tally of themselves

And be accountable when called upon

For although by every golden mean their lot

Is fair and due, pleas will be allowed

Against every right and title vested in them

(And in a court where mere innocuousness

Has never gained approval or acquittal.)

The first real grip I ever got on things

Was when I learned the art of pedalling

(By hand) a bike turned upside down, and drove

Its back wheel preternaturally fast.

I loved the disappearance of the spokes,

The way the space between the hub and rim

Hummed with transparency. If you threw

A potato into it, the hooped air

Spun mush and drizzle back into your face;

If you touched it with a straw, the straw frittered.

Something about the way those pedal treads

Worked very palpably at first against you

And then began to sweep your hand ahead

Into a new momentum – that all entered me

Like an access of free power, as if belief

Caught up and spun the objects of belief

In an orbit coterminous with longing.

But enough was not enough. Who ever saw

The limit in the given anyhow?

In fields beyond our house there was a well

(‘The well’ we called it. It was more a hole

With water in it, with small hawthorn trees

On one side, and a muddy, dungy ooze

On the other, all tramped through by cattle).

I loved that too. I loved the turbid smell,

The sump-life of the place like old chain oil.

And there, next thing, I brought my bicycle.

I stood its saddle and its handlebars

Into the soft bottom, I touched the tyres

To the water’s surface, then turned the pedals

Until like a mill-wheel pouring at the treadles

(But here reversed and lashing a mare’s tail)

The world-refreshing and immersed back wheel

Spun lace and dirt-suds there before my eyes

And showered me in my own regenerate clays.

For weeks I made a nimbus of old glit.

Then the hub jammed, rims rusted, the chain snapped.

     Nothing rose to the occasion after that

     Until, in a circus ring, drumrolled and spotlit,

     Cowgirls wheeled in, each one immaculate

     At the still centre of a lariat.

    
Perpetuum
mobile.
Sheer pirouette.

     Tumblers. Jongleurs. Ring-a-rosies.
Stet!

At school I loved one picture’s heavy greenness –

Horizons rigged with windmills’ arms and sails.

The millhouses’ still outlines. Their in-placeness

Still more in place when mirrored in canals.

I can’t remember not ever having known

The immanent hydraulics of a land

Of
glar
and
glit
and floods at
dailigone.

My silting hope. My lowlands of the mind.

Heaviness of being. And poetry

Sluggish in the doldrums of what happens.

Me waiting until I was nearly fifty

To credit marvels. Like the tree-clock of tin cans

The tinkers made. So long for air to brighten,

Time to be dazzled and the heart to lighten.

Shifting brilliancies. Then winter light

In a doorway, and on the stone doorstep

A beggar shivering in silhouette.

So the particular judgement might be set:

Bare wallstead and a cold hearth rained into –

Bright puddle where the soul-free cloud-life roams.

And after the commanded journey, what?

Nothing magnificent, nothing unknown.

A gazing out from far away, alone.

And it is not particular at all,

Just old truth dawning: there is no next-time-round.

Unroofed scope. Knowledge-freshening wind.

Roof it again. Batten down. Dig in.

Drink out of tin. Know the scullery cold,

A latch, a door-bar, forged tongs and a grate.

Touch the crossbeam, drive iron in a wall,

Hang a line to verify the plumb

From lintel, coping-stone and chimney-breast.

Relocate the bedrock in the threshold.

Take squarings from the recessed gable pane.

Make your study the unregarded floor.

Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure

The bastion of sensation. Do not waver

Into language. Do not waver in it.

Squarings? In the game of marbles, squarings

Were all those anglings, aimings, feints and squints

You were allowed before you’d shoot, all those

Hunkerings, tensings, pressures of the thumb,

Test-outs and pull-backs, re-envisagings,

All the ways your arms kept hoping towards

Blind certainties that were going to prevail

Beyond the one-off moment of the pitch.

A million million accuracies passed

Between your muscles’ outreach and that space

Marked with three round holes and a drawn line.

You squinted out from a skylight of the world.

Three marble holes thumbed in the concrete road

Before the concrete hardened still remained

Three decades after the marble-player vanished

Into Australia. Three stops to play

The music of the arbitrary on.

Blow on them now and hear an undersong

Your levelled breath made once going over

The empty bottle. Improvise. Make free

Like old hay in its flimsy afterlife

High on a windblown hedge. Ocarina earth.

Three listening posts up on some hard-baked tier

Above the resonating amphorae.

Once, as a child, out in a field of sheep,

Thomas Hardy pretended to be dead

And lay down flat among their dainty shins.

In that sniffed-at, bleated-into, grassy space

He experimented with infinity.

His small cool brow was like an anvil waiting

For sky to make it sing the perfect pitch

Of his dumb being, and that stir he caused

In the fleece-hustle was the original

Of a ripple that would travel eighty years

Outward from there, to be the same ripple

Inside him at its last circumference.

(I misremembered. He went down on all fours,

Florence Emily says, crossing a ewe-leaze.

Hardy sought the creatures face to face,

Their witless eyes and liability

To panic made him feel less alone,

Made proleptic sorrow stand a moment

Over him, perfectly known and sure.

And then the flock’s dismay went swimming on

Into the blinks and murmurs and deflections

He’d know at parties in renowned old age

When sometimes he imagined himself a ghost

And circulated with that new perspective.)

The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise

Were all at prayers inside the oratory

A ship appeared above them in the air.

The anchor dragged along behind so deep

It hooked itself into the altar rails

And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,

A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope

And struggled to release it. But in vain.

‘This man can’t bear our life here and will drown,’

The abbot said, ‘unless we help him.’ So

They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back

Out of the marvellous as he had known it.

A boat that did not rock or wobble once

Sat in long grass one Sunday afternoon

In nineteen forty-one or two. The heat

Out on Lough Neagh and in where cattle stood

Jostling and skittering near the hedge

Grew redolent of the tweed skirt and tweed sleeve

I nursed on. I remember little treble

Timber-notes their smart heels struck from planks,

Me cradled in an elbow like a secret

Open now as the eye of heaven was then

Above three sisters talking, talking steady

In a boat the ground still falls and falls from under.

Overhang of grass and seedling birch

On the quarry face. Rock-hob where you watched

All that cargoed brightness travelling

Above and beyond and sumptuously across

The water in its clear deep dangerous holes

On the quarry floor. Ultimate

Fathomableness, ultimate

Stony up-againstness: could you reconcile

What was diaphanous there with what was massive?

Were you equal to or were you opposite

To build-ups so promiscuous and weightless?

Shield your eyes, look up and face the music.

And lightening? One meaning of that

Beyond the usual sense of alleviation,

Illumination, and so on, is this:

A phenomenal instant when the spirit flares

With pure exhilaration before death –

The good thief in us harking to the promise!

So paint him on Christ’s right hand, on a promontory

Scanning empty space, so body-racked he seems

Untranslatable into the bliss

Ached for at the moon-rim of his forehead,

By nail-craters on the dark side of his brain:

This
day
thou
shalt
be
with
Me
in
Paradise.

Hazel stealth. A trickle in the culvert.

Athletic sealight on the doorstep slab,

On the sea itself, on silent roofs and gables.

Whitewashed suntraps. Hedges hot as chimneys.

Chairs on all fours. A plate-rack braced and laden.

The fossil poetry of hob and slate.

Desire within its moat, dozing at ease –

Like a gorged cormorant on the rock at noon,

Exiled and in tune with the big glitter.

Re-enter this as the adult of solitude,

The silence-forder and the definite

Presence you sensed withdrawing first time round.

One afternoon I was seraph on gold leaf.

I stood on the railway sleepers hearing larks,

Grasshoppers, cuckoos, dog-barks, trainer planes

Cutting and modulating and drawing off.

Heat wavered on the immaculate line

And shine of the cogged rails. On either side,

Dog daisies stood like vestals, the hot stones

Were clover-meshed and streaked with engine oil.

Air spanned, passage waited, the balance rode,

Nothing prevailed, whatever was in store

Witnessed itself already taking place

In a time marked by assent and by hiatus.

And strike this scene in gold too, in relief,

So that a greedy eye cannot exhaust it:

Stable straw, Rembrandt-gleam and burnish

Where my father bends to a tea-chest packed with salt,

The hurricane lamp held up at eye-level

In his bunched left fist, his right hand foraging

For the unbleeding, vivid-fleshed bacon,

Home-cured hocks pulled up into the light

For pondering a while and putting back.

That night I owned the piled grain of Egypt.

I watched the sentry’s torchlight on the hoard.

I stood in the door, unseen and blazed upon.

Memory as a building or a city,

Well lighted, well laid out, appointed with

Tableaux
vivants
and costumed effigies –

Statues in purple cloaks, or painted red,

Ones wearing crowns, ones smeared with mud or blood:

So that the mind’s eye could haunt itself

With fixed associations and learn to read

Its own contents in meaningful order,

Ancient textbooks recommended that

Familiar places be linked deliberately

With a code of images. You knew the portent

In each setting, you blinked and concentrated.

Where does spirit live? Inside or outside

Things remembered, made things, things unmade?

What came first, the seabird’s cry or the soul

Imagined in the dawn cold when it cried?

Where does it roost at last? On dungy sticks

In a jackdaw’s nest up in the old stone tower

Or a marble bust commanding the parterre?

How habitable is perfected form?

And how inhabited the windy light?

What’s the use of a held note or held line

That cannot be assailed for reassurance?

(Set questions for the ghost of W.B.)

Deserted harbour stillness. Every stone

Clarified and dormant under water,

The harbour wall a masonry of silence.

Fullness. Shimmer. Laden high Atlantic

The moorings barely stirred in, very slight

Clucking of the swell against boat boards.

Perfected vision: cockle minarets

Consigned down there with green-slicked bottle glass,

Shell-debris and a reddened bud of sandstone.

Air and ocean known as antecedents

Of each other. In apposition with

Omnipresence, equilibrium, brim.