Opened Ground (24 page)

Up-end the rain stick and what happens next

Is a music that you never would have known

To listen for. In a cactus stalk

Downpour, sluice-rush, spillage and backwash

Come flowing through. You stand there like a pipe

Being played by water, you shake it again lightly

And diminuendo runs through all its scales

Like a gutter stopping trickling. And now here comes

A sprinkle of drops out of the freshened leaves,

Then subtle little wets off grass and daisies;

Then glitter-drizzle, almost-breaths of air.

Up-end the stick again. What happens next

Is undiminished for having happened once,

Twice, ten, a thousand times before.

Who cares if all the music that transpires

Is the fall of grit or dry seeds through a cactus?

You are like a rich man entering heaven

Through the ear of a raindrop. Listen now again.

It looked like a clump of small dusty nettles

Growing wild at the gable of the house

Beyond where we dumped our refuse and old bottles:

Unverdant ever, almost beneath notice.

But, to be fair, it also spelled promise

And newness in the back yard of our life

As if something callow yet tenacious

Sauntered in green alleys and grew rife.

The snip of scissor blades, the light of Sunday

Mornings when the mint was cut and loved:

My last things will be first things slipping from me.

Yet let all things go free that have survived.

Let the smells of mint go heady and defenceless

Like inmates liberated in that yard.

Like the disregarded ones we turned against

Because we’d failed them by our disregard.

All of us on the sofa in a line, kneeling

Behind each other, eldest down to youngest,

Elbows going like pistons, for this was a train

And between the jamb-wall and the bedroom door

Our speed and distance were inestimable.

First we shunted, then we whistled, then

Somebody collected the invisible

For tickets and very gravely punched it

As carnage after carnage under us

Moved faster,
chooka-chook,
the sofa legs

Went giddy and the unreachable ones

Far out on the kitchen floor began to wave.

*

Ghost-train? Death-gondola? The carved, curved ends,

Black leatherette and ornate gauntness of it

Made it seem the sofa had achieved

Flotation. Its castors on tiptoe,

Its braid and fluent backboard gave it airs

Of superannuated pageantry:

When visitors endured it, straight-backed,

When it stood off in its own remoteness,

When the insufficient toys appeared on it

On Christmas mornings, it held out as itself,

Potentially heavenbound, earthbound for sure,

Among things that might add up or let you down.

*

We entered history and ignorance

Under the wireless shelf.
Yippee-i-ay,

Sang ‘The Riders of the Range’.
HERE IS THE NEWS
,

Said the absolute speaker. Between him and us

A great gulf was fixed where pronunciation

Reigned tyrannically. The aerial wire

Swept from a treetop down in through a hole

Bored in the windowframe. When it moved in wind,

The sway of language and its furtherings

Swept and swayed in us like nets in water

Or the abstract, lonely curve of distant trains

As we entered history and ignorance.

*

We occupied our seats with all our might,

Fit for the uncomfortableness.

Constancy was its own reward already.

Out in front, on the big upholstered arm,

Somebody craned to the side, driver or

Fireman, wiping his dry brow with the air

Of one who had run the gauntlet. We were

The last thing on his mind, it seemed; we sensed

A tunnel coming up where we’d pour through

Like unlit carriages through fields at night,

Our only job to sit, eyes straight ahead,

And be transported and make engine noise.

The piper coming from far away is you

With a whitewash brush for a sporran

Wobbling round you, a kitchen chair

Upside down on your shoulder, your right arm

Pretending to tuck the bag beneath your elbow,

Your pop-eyes and big cheeks nearly bursting

With laughter, but keeping the drone going on

Interminably, between catches of breath.

*

The whitewash brush. An old blanched skirted thing

On the back of the byre door, biding its time

Until spring airs spelled lime in a work-bucket

And a potstick to mix it in with water.

Those smells brought tears to the eyes, we inhaled

A kind of greeny burning and thought of brimstone.

But the slop of the actual job

Of brushing walls, the watery grey

Being lashed on in broad swatches, then drying out

Whiter and whiter, all that worked like magic.

Where had we come from, what was this kingdom

We knew we’d been restored to? Our shadows

Moved on the wall and a tar border glittered

The full length of the house, a black divide

Like a freshly opened, pungent, reeking trench.

*

Piss at the gable, the dead will congregate.

But separately. The women after dark,

Hunkering there a moment before bedtime,

The only time the soul was let alone,

The only time that face and body calmed

In the eye of heaven.

                                Buttermilk and urine,

The pantry, the housed beasts, the listening bedroom.

We were all together there in a foretime,

In a knowledge that might not translate beyond

Those wind-heaved midnights we still cannot be sure

Happened or not. It smelled of hill-fort clay

And cattle dung. When the thorn tree was cut down

You broke your arm. I shared the dread

When a strange bird perched for days on the byre roof.

*

That scene, with Macbeth helpless and desperate

In his nightmare – when he meets the hags again

And sees the apparitions in the pot –

I felt at home with that one all right. Hearth,

Steam and ululation, the smoky hair

Curtaining a cheek. ‘Don’t go near bad boys

In that college that you’re bound for. Do you hear me?

Do you hear me speaking to you? Don’t forget!’

And then the potstick quickening the gruel,

The steam crown swirled, everything intimate

And fear-swathed brightening for a moment,

Then going dull and fatal and away.

*

Grey matter like gruel flecked with blood

In spatters on the whitewash. A clean spot

Where his head had been, other stains subsumed

In the parched wall he leant his back against

That morning like any other morning,

Part-time reservist, toting his lunch-box.

A car came slow down Castle Street, made the halt,

Crossed the Diamond, slowed again and stopped

Level with him, although it was not his lift.

And then he saw an ordinary face

For what it was and a gun in his own face.

His right leg was hooked back, his sole and heel

Against the wall, his right knee propped up steady,

So he never moved, just pushed with all his might

Against himself, then fell past the tarred strip,

Feeding the gutter with his copious blood.

*

My dear brother, you have good stamina.

You stay on where it happens. Your big tractor

Pulls up at the Diamond, you wave at people,

You shout and laugh above the revs, you keep

Old roads open by driving on the new ones.

You called the piper’s sporrans whitewash brushes

And then dressed up and marched us through the kitchen.

But you cannot make the dead walk or right wrong.

I see you at the end of your tether sometimes,

In the milking parlour, holding yourself up

Between two cows until your turn goes past,

Then coming to in the smell of dung again

And wondering, is this all? As it was

In the beginning, is now and shall be?

Then rubbing your eyes and seeing our old brush

Up on the byre door, and keeping going.

It’s raining on black coal and warm wet ashes.

There are tyre-marks in the yard, Agnew’s old lorry

Has all its cribs down and Agnew the coalman

With his Belfast accent’s sweet-talking my mother.

Would she ever go to a film in Magherafelt?

But it’s raining and he still has half the load

To deliver farther on. This time the lode

Our coal came from was silk-black, so the ashes

Will be the silkiest white. The Magherafelt

(Via Toomebridge) bus goes by. The half-stripped lorry

With its emptied, folded coal-bags moves my mother:

The tasty ways of a leather-aproned coalman!

And films no less! The conceit of a coalman …

She goes back in and gets out the black lead

And emery paper, this nineteen-forties mother,

All business round her stove, half-wiping ashes

With a backhand from her cheek as the bolted lorry

Gets revved and turned and heads for Magherafelt

And the last delivery. Oh, Magherafelt!

Oh, dream of red plush and a city coalman

As time fastforwards and a different lorry

Groans into shot, up Broad Street, with a payload

That will blow the bus station to dust and ashes …

After that happened, I’d a vision of my mother,

A revenant on the bench where I would meet her

In that cold-floored waiting-room in Magherafelt,

Her shopping bags full up with shovelled ashes.

Death walked out past her like a dust-faced coalman

Refolding body-bags, plying his load

Empty upon empty, in a flurry

Of motes and engine-revs, but which lorry

Was it now? Young Agnew’s or that other,

Heavier, deadlier one, set to explode

In a time beyond her time in Magherafelt …

So tally bags and sweet-talk darkness, coalman.

Listen to the rain spit in new ashes

As you heft a load of dust that was Magherafelt,

Then reappear from your lorry as my mother’s

Dreamboat coalman filmed in silk-white ashes.

Gules and cement dust. A matte tacky blood

On the bricklayer’s knuckles, like the damson stain

That seeped through his packed lunch.

                                                                   A full hod stood

Against the mortared wall, his big bright trowel

In his left hand (for once) was pointing down

As he marvelled at his right, held high and raw:

King of the castle, scaffold-stepper, shown

Bleeding to the world.

                                          Wound that I saw

In glutinous colour fifty years ago –

Damson as omen, weird, a dream to read –

Is weeping with the held-at-arm’s-length dead

From everywhere and nowhere, here and now.

*

Over and over, the slur, the scrape and mix

As he trowelled and retrowelled and laid down

Courses of glum mortar. Then the bricks

Jiggled and settled, tocked and tapped in line.

I loved especially the trowel’s shine,

Its edge and apex always coming clean

And brightening itself by mucking in.

It looked light but felt heavy as a weapon,

Yet when he lifted it there was no strain.

It was all point and skim and float and glisten

Until he washed and lapped it tight in sacking

Like a cult blade that had to be kept hidden.

*

Ghosts with their tongues out for a lick of blood

Are crowding up the ladder, all unhealed,

And some of them still rigged in bloody gear.

Drive them back to the doorstep or the road

Where they lay in their own blood once, in the hot

Nausea and last gasp of dear life.

Trowel-wielder, woundie, drive them off

Like Odysseus in Hades lashing out

With his sword that dug the trench and cut the throat

Of the sacrificial lamb.

                                           But not like him –

Builder, not sacker, your shield the mortar board –

Drive them back to the wine-dark taste of home,

The smell of damsons simmering in a pot,

Jam ladled thick and steaming down the sunlight.

Unit of negation. Stamped and cast

With an inset, rung-thick, moulded, short crossbar

For a handle. Squared-off and harmless-looking

Until you tried to lift it, then a socket-ripping,

Life-belittling force –

Gravity’s black box, the immovable

Stamp and squat and square-root of dead weight.

Yet balance it

Against another one placed on a weighbridge –

On a well-adjusted, freshly greased weighbridge –

And everything trembled, flowed with give and take.

*

And this is all the good tidings amount to:

This principle of bearing, bearing up

And bearing out, just having to

Balance the intolerable in others

Against our own, having to abide

Whatever we settled for and settled into

Against our better judgement. Passive

Suffering makes the world go round.

Peace on earth, men of good will, all that

Holds good only as long as the balance holds,

The scales ride steady and the angels’ strain

Prolongs itself at an unearthly pitch.

*

To refuse the other cheek. To cast the stone.

Not to do so some time, not to break with

The obedient one you hurt yourself into

Is to fail the hurt, the self, the ingrown rule.

Prophesy
who
struck
thee!
When soldiers mocked

Blindfolded Jesus and he didn’t strike back

They were neither shamed nor edified, although

Something was made manifest – the power

Of power not exercised, of hope inferred

By the powerless forever. Still, for Jesus’ sake,

Do me a favour, would you, just this once?

Prophesy, give scandal, cast the stone.

*

Two sides to every question, yes, yes, yes …

But every now and then, just weighing in

Is what it must come down to, and without

Any self-exculpation or self-pity.

Alas, one night when follow-through was called for

And a quick hit would have fairly rankled,

You countered that it was my narrowness

That kept me keen, so got a first submission.

I held back when I should have drawn blood

And that way (
mea
culpa
)
lost an edge.

A deep mistaken chivalry, old friend.

At this stage only foul play cleans the slate.