Opened Ground (23 page)

Everything flows. Even a solid man,

A pillar to himself and to his trade,

All yellow boots and stick and soft felt hat,

Can sprout wings at the ankle and grow fleet

As the god of fair days, stone posts, roads and crossroads,

Guardian of travellers and psychopomp.

‘Look for a man with an ashplant on the boat,’

My father told his sister setting out

For London, ‘and stay near him all night

And you’ll be safe.’ Flow on, flow on

The journey of the soul with its soul guide

And the mysteries of dealing-men with sticks!

Scissor-and-slap abruptness of a latch.

Its coldness to the thumb. Its see-saw lift

And drop and innocent harshness.

Which is a music of binding and of loosing

Unheard in this generation, but there to be

Called up or called down at a touch renewed.

Once the latch pronounces, roof

Is original again, threshold fatal,

The sanction powerful as the foreboding.

Your footstep is already known, so bow

Just a little, raise your right hand,

Make impulse one with wilfulness, and enter.

On St Brigid’s Day the new life could be entered

By going through her girdle of straw rope:

The proper way for men was right leg first,

Then right arm and right shoulder, head, then left

Shoulder, arm and leg. Women drew it down

Over the body and stepped out of it.

The open they came into by these moves

Stood opener, hoops came off the world,

They could feel the February air

Still soft above their heads and imagine

The limp rope fray and flare like wind-borne gleanings

Or an unhindered goldfinch over ploughland.

Running water never disappointed.

Crossing water always furthered something.

Stepping stones were stations of the soul.

A kesh could mean the track some called a
causey

Raised above the wetness of the bog,

Or the causey where it bridged old drains and streams.

It steadies me to tell these things. Also

I cannot mention keshes or the ford

Without my father’s shade appearing to me

On a path towards sunset, eyeing spades and clothes

That turf-cutters stowed perhaps or souls cast off

Before they crossed the log that spans the burn.

Be literal a moment. Recollect

Walking out on what had been emptied out

After he died, turning your back and leaving.

That morning tiles were harder, windows colder,

The raindrops on the pane more scourged, the grass

Barer to the sky, more wind-harrowed,

Or so it seemed. The house that he had planned

‘Plain, big, straight, ordinary, you know’,

A paradigm of rigour and correction,

Rebuke to fanciness and shrine to limit,

Stood firmer than ever for its own idea

Like a printed X-ray for the X-rayed body.

Yeats said,
To
those
who
see
spirits,
human
skin

For
a
long
time
afterwards
appears
most
coarse.

The face I see that all falls short of since

Passes down an aisle: I share the bus

From San Francisco Airport into Berkeley

With one other passenger, who’s dropped

At the Treasure Island military base

Half-way across Bay Bridge. Vietnam-bound,

He could have been one of the newly dead come back,

Unsurprisable but still disappointed,

Having to bear his farm-boy self again,

His shaving cuts, his otherworldly brow.

And yes, my friend, we too walked through a valley.

Once. In darkness. With all the streetlamps off.

As danger gathered and the march dispersed.

Scene from Dante, made more memorable

By one of his head-clearing similes –

Fireflies, say, since the policemen’s torches

Clustered and flicked and tempted us to trust

Their unpredictable, attractive light.

We were like herded shades who had to cross

And did cross, in a panic, to the car

Parked as we’d left it, that gave when we got in

Like Charon’s boat under the faring poets.

In famous poems by the sage Han Shan,

Cold Mountain is a place that can also mean

A state of mind. Or different states of mind

At different times, for the poems seem

One-off, impulsive, the kind of thing that starts

I have
sat
here
facing
the
Cold
Mountain

For
twenty-nine
years,
or
There
is
no
path

That
goes
all
the
way
– enviable stuff,

Unfussy and believable.

Talking about it isn’t good enough

But quoting from it at least demonstrates

The virtue of an art that knows its mind.

We climbed the Capitol by moonlight, felt

The transports of temptation on the heights:

We were privileged and belated and we knew it.

Then something in me moved to prophesy

Against the beloved stand-offishness of marble

And all emulation of stone-cut verses.

‘Down with form triumphant, long live,’ (said I)

‘Form mendicant and convalescent. We attend

The come-back of pure water and the prayer-wheel.’

To which a voice replied, ‘Of course we do.

But the others are in the Forum Café waiting,

Wondering where we are. What’ll you have?’

When you sat, far-eyed and cold, in the basalt throne

Of ‘the wishing chair’ at Giant’s Causeway,

The small of your back made very solid sense.

Like a papoose at sap-time strapped to a maple tree,

You gathered force out of the world-tree’s hardness.

If you stretched your hand forth, things might turn to stone.

But you were only goose-fleshed skin and bone,

The rocks and wonder of the world were only

Lava crystallized, salts of the earth

The wishing chair gave a savour to, its kelp

And ozone freshening your outlook

Beyond the range you thought you’d settled for.

I was four but I turned four hundred maybe

Encountering the ancient dampish feel

Of a clay floor. Maybe four thousand even.

Anyhow, there it was. Milk poured for cats

In a rank puddle-place, splash-darkened mould

Around the terracotta water-crock.

Ground of being. Body’s deep obedience

To all its shifting tenses. A half-door

Opening directly into starlight.

Out of that earth house I inherited

A stack of singular, cold memory-weights

To load me, hand and foot, in the scale of things.

Sand-bed, they said. And gravel-bed. Before

I knew river shallows or river pleasures

I knew the ore of longing in those words.

The places I go back to have not failed

But will not last. Waist-deep in cow-parsley,

I re-enter the swim, riding or quelling

The very currents memory is composed of,

Everything accumulated ever

As I took squarings from the tops of bridges

Or the banks of self at evening.

Lick of fear. Sweet transience. Flirt and splash.

Crumpled flow the sky-dipped willows trailed in.

Heather and kesh and turf stacks reappear

Summer by summer still, grasshoppers and all,

The same yet rarer: fields of the nearly blessed

Where gaunt ones in their shirtsleeves stooped and dug

Or stood alone at dusk surveying bog-banks –

Apparitions now, yet active still

And territorial, still sure of their ground,

Still interested, not knowing how far

The country of the shades has been pushed back,

How long the lark has stopped outside these fields

And only seems unstoppable to them

Caught like a far hill in a freak of sunshine.

Choose one set of tracks and track a hare

Until the prints stop, just like that, in snow.

End of the line. Smooth drifts. Where did she go?

Back on her tracks, of course, then took a spring

Yards off to the side; clean break; no scent or sign.

She landed in her form and ate the snow.

Consider too the ancient hieroglyph

Of ‘hare and zig-zag’, which meant ‘to exist’,

To be on the
qui
vive,
weaving and dodging

Like our friend who sprang (goodbye) beyond our ken

And missed a round at last (but of course he’d stood it):

The
shake-the-heart,
the
dew-hammer,
the
far-eyed.

All
gone
into
the
world
of
light?
Perhaps

As we read the line sheer forms do crowd

The starry vestibule. Otherwise

They do not. What lucency survives

Is blanched as worms on nightlines I would lift,

Ungratified if always well prepared

For the nothing there – which was only what had been there.

Although in fact it is more like a caught line snapping,

That moment of admission of
All
gone,

When the rod butt loses touch and the tip drools

And eddies swirl a dead leaf past in silence

Swifter (it seems) than the water’s passage.

For certain ones what was written may come true:

They shall live on in the distance

At the mouths of rivers.

For our ones, no. They will re-enter

Dryness that was heaven on earth to them,

Happy to eat the scones baked out of clay.

For some, perhaps, the delta’s reed-beds

And cold bright-footed seabirds always wheeling.

For our ones, snuff

And hob-soot and the heat off ashes.

And a judge who comes between them and the sun

In a pillar of radiant house-dust.

Mountain air from the mountain up behind;

Out front, the end-of-summer, stone-walled fields;

And in a slated house the fiddle going

Like a flat stone skimmed at sunset

Or the irrevocable slipstream of flat earth

Still fleeing behind space.

Was music once a proof of God’s existence?

As long as it admits things beyond measure,

That supposition stands.

So let the ear attend like a farmhouse window

In placid light, where the extravagant

Passed once under full sail into the longed-for.

The visible sea at a distance from the shore

Or beyond the anchoring grounds

Was called the offing.

The emptier it stood, the more compelled

The eye that scanned it.

But once you turned your back on it, your back

Was suddenly all eyes like Argus’s.

Then, when you’d look again, the offing felt

Untrespassed still, and yet somehow vacated

As if a lambent troop that exercised

On the borders of your vision had withdrawn

Behind the skyline to manoeuvre and regroup.

Strange how things in the offing, once they’re sensed,

Convert to things foreknown;

And how what’s come upon is manifest

Only in light of what has been gone through.

Seventh heaven may be

The whole truth of a sixth sense come to pass.

At any rate, when light breaks over me

The way it did on the road beyond Coleraine

Where wind got saltier, the sky more hurried

And silver lamé shivered on the Bann

Out in mid-channel between the painted poles,

That day I’ll be in step with what escaped me. 

The teacher let some big boys out at two

          To gather sticks

   (In scanty nineteen forty-six)

And even though I never was supposed to

I wanted out as well. One afternoon

          I raised my hand

   With those free livers off the land

And found myself at large an hour too soon

Under a raggedy, hurrying sky

          On the road home.

   If ever I felt ‘heaven’s dome’

Was what I lived beneath, it was that day

I lied myself into my own desire,

          Displaced, afraid

   At what I’d dared to be ahead

Of time. The black spot where the gypsies’ fire

Had charred the roadside grass, the rags that blew

          On the stripped hedge,

   The cold – it put me all on edge.

Escape-joy died, one magpie rose and flew

And left an emptiness I walked on through

          To come down to earth

   In my parents’ gaze, the whole question of worth,

And their knowledge that loved on without ado.

(1994)