Opened Ground (26 page)

High summer, and the angler’s motorbike

Deep in roadside flowers, like a fallen knight

Whose ghost we’d lately questioned: ‘Any luck?’

As the engines of the world prepared, green nuts

Dangled and clustered closer to the whirlpool.

The trees dipped down. The flints and sandstone-bits

Worked themselves smooth and smaller in a sparkle

Of shallow, hurrying barley-sugar water

Where minnows schooled that we scared when we played –

An eternity that ended once a tractor

Dropped its link-box in the gravel bed

And cement mixers began to come to life

And men in dungarees, like captive shades,

Mixed concrete, loaded, wheeled, turned, wheeled, as if

The Pharaoh’s brickyards burned inside their heads.

*

Hoard and praise the verity of gravel.

Gems for the undeluded. Milt of earth.

Its plain, champing song against the shovel

Soundtests and sandblasts words like ‘honest worth’.

Beautiful in or out of the river,

The kingdom of gravel was inside you too –

Deep down, far back, clear water running over

Pebbles of caramel, hailstone, mackerel-blue.

But the actual washed stuff kept you slow and steady

As you went stooping with your barrow full

Into an absolution of the body,

The shriven life tired bones and marrow feel.

So walk on air against your better judgement

Establishing yourself somewhere in between

Those solid batches mixed with grey cement

And a tune called ‘The Gravel Walks’ that conjures green.

Caedmon too I was lucky to have known,

Back
in
situ
there with his full bucket

And armfuls of clean straw, the perfect yardman,

Unabsorbed in what he had to do

But doing it perfectly, and watching you.

He had worked his angel stint. He was hard as nails

And all that time he’d been poeting with the harp

His real gift was the big ignorant roar

He could still let out of him, just bogging in

As if the sacred subjects were a herd

That had broken out and needed rounding up.

I never saw him once with his hands joined

Unless it was a case of eyes to heaven

And the quick sniff and test of fingertips

After he’d passed them through a sick beast’s water.

Oh, Caedmon was the real thing all right.

Leonardo
said:
the
sun
has
never

Seen
a
shadow.
Now
watch
the
sculptor
move

Full
circle
round
her
next
work,
like
a
lover

In
the
sphere
of
shifting
angles
and
fixed
love.

Angling shadows of itself are what

Your ‘Poet's Chair' stands to and rises out of

In its sun-stalked inner-city courtyard.

On the
qui
vive
all the time, its four legs land

On their feet – cat's-foot, goat-foot, big soft splay-foot too;

Its straight back sprouts two bronze and leafy saplings.

Every flibbertigibbet in the town,

Old birds and boozers, late-night pissers, kissers,

All have a go at sitting on it some time.

It's the way the air behind them's winged and full,

The way a graft has seized their shoulder-blades

That makes them happy. Once out of nature,

They're going to come back in leaf and bloom

And angel step. Or something like that.
Leaves

On
a
bloody
chair!
Would
you
believe
it?

Next thing I see the chair in a white prison

With Socrates sitting on it, bald as a coot,

Discoursing in bright sunlight with his friends.

His time is short. The day his trial began

A verdant boat sailed for Apollo's shrine

In Delos, for the annual rite

Of commemoration. Until its wreathed

And creepered rigging re-enters Athens

Harbour, the city's life is holy.

No executions. No hemlock bowl. No tears

And none now as the poison does its work

And the expert jailer talks the company through

The stages of the numbness. Socrates

At the centre of the city and the day

Has proved the soul immortal. The bronze leaves

Cannot believe their ears, it is so silent.

Soon Crito will have to close his eyes and mouth,

But for the moment everything's an ache

Deferred, foreknown, imagined and most real. 

My father's ploughing one, two, three, four sides

Of the lea ground where I sit all-seeing

At centre field, my back to the thorn tree

They never cut. The horses are all hoof

And burnished flank, I am all foreknowledge.

Of the poem as a ploughshare that turns time

Up and over. Of the chair in leaf

The fairy thorn is entering for the future.

Of being here for good in every sense.

Fingertips just tipping you would send you

Every bit as far – once you got going –

As a big push in the back.

                                           Sooner or later,

We all learned one by one to go sky high,

Backward and forward in the open shed,

Toeing and rowing and jack-knifing through air.

*

Not Fragonard. Nor Brueghel. It was more

Hans Memling’s light of heaven off green grass,

Light over fields and hedges, the shed-mouth

Sunstruck and expectant, the bedding-straw

Piled to one side, like a Nativity

Foreground and background waiting for the figures.

And then, in the middle ground, the swing itself

With an old lopsided sack in the loop of it,

Perfectly still, hanging like pulley-slack,

A lure let down to tempt the soul to rise.

*

Even so, we favoured the earthbound. She

Sat there as majestic as an empress

Steeping her swollen feet one at a time

In the enamel basin, feeding it

Every now and again with an opulent

Steaming arc from a kettle on the floor

Beside her. The plout of that was music

To our ears, her smile a mitigation.

Whatever light the goddess had once shone

Around her favourite coming from the bath

Was what was needed then: there should have been

Fresh linen, ministrations by attendants,

Procession and amazement. Instead, she took

Each rolled elastic stocking and drew it on

Like the life she would not fail and was not

Meant for. And once, when she’d scoured the basin,

She came and sat to please us on the swing,

Neither out of place nor in her element,

Just tempted by it for a moment only,

Half-retrieving something half-confounded.

Instinctively we knew to let her be.

*

To start up by yourself, you hitched the rope

Against your backside and backed on into it

Until it tautened, then tiptoed and drove off

As hard as possible. You hurled a gathered thing

From the small of your own back into the air.

Your head swept low, you heard the whole shed creak.

*

We all learned one by one to go sky high.

Then townlands vanished into aerodromes,

Hiroshima made light of human bones,

Concorde’s neb migrated towards the future.

So who were we to want to hang back there

In spite of all?

                          In spite of all, we sailed

Beyond ourselves and over and above

The rafters aching in our shoulderblades,

The give and take of branches in our arms.

Claire O’Reilly used her granny’s stick –

A crook-necked one – to snare the highest briars

That always grew the ripest blackberries.

When it came to gathering, Persephone

Was in the halfpenny place compared to Claire.

She’d trespass and climb gates and walk the railway

Where sootflakes blew into convolvulus

And the train tore past with the stoker yelling

Like a balked king from his iron chariot.

With its drover’s canes and blackthorns and ashplants,

The ledge of the back seat of my father’s car

Had turned into a kind of stick-shop window,

But the only one who ever window-shopped

Was Jim of the hanging jaw, for Jim was simple

And rain or shine he’d make his desperate rounds

From windscreen to back window, hands held up

To both sides of his face, peering and groaning.

So every now and then the sticks would be

Brought out for him and stood up one by one

Against the front mudguard; and one by one

Jim would take the measure of them, sight

And wield and slice and poke and parry

The unhindering air; until he found

The true extension of himself in one

That made him jubilant. He’d run and crow,

Stooped forward, with his right elbow stuck out

And the stick held horizontal to the ground,

Angled across in front of him, as if

He were leashed to it and it drew him on

Like a harness rod of the inexorable. 

The weather here’s so good, he took the chance

To do a bit of weeding.’

                                         So I saw him

Down on his hands and knees beside the leek rig,

Touching, inspecting, separating one

Stalk from the other, gently pulling up

Everything not tapered, frail and leafless,

Pleased to feel each little weed-root break,

But rueful also …

                               Then found myself listening to

The amplified grave ticking of hall clocks

Where the phone lay unattended in a calm

Of mirror glass and sunstruck pendulums …

This is how Death would summon Everyman.

Next thing he spoke and I nearly said I loved him.

And tell your mother to try

To find me a bubble for the spirit level

And a new knot for this tie.’

But still he was glad, I know, when I stood my ground,

Putting it up to him

With a smile that trumped his smile and his fool’s errand,

Waiting for the next move in the game.

When human beings found out about death

They sent the dog to Chukwu with a message:

They wanted to be let back to the house of life.

They didn’t want to end up lost forever

Like burnt wood disappearing into smoke

Or ashes that get blown away to nothing.

Instead, they saw their souls in a flock at twilight

Cawing and headed back for the same old roosts

And the same bright airs and wing-stretchings each morning.

Death would be like a night spent in the wood:

At first light they’d be back in the house of life.

(The dog was meant to tell all this to Chukwu).

But death and human beings took second place

When he trotted off the path and started barking

At another dog in broad daylight just barking

Back at him from the far bank of a river.

And that is how the toad reached Chukwu first,

The toad who’d overheard in the beginning

What the dog was meant to tell. ‘Human beings,’ he said

(And here the toad was trusted absolutely),

‘Human beings want death to last forever.’

Then Chukwu saw the people’s souls in birds

Coming towards him like black spots off the sunset

To a place where there would be neither roosts nor trees

Nor any way back to the house of life.

And his mind reddened and darkened all at once

And nothing that the dog would tell him later

Could change that vision. Great chiefs and great loves

In obliterated light, the toad in mud,

The dog crying out all night behind the corpse house. 

The dotted line my father’s ashplant made

On Sandymount Strand

Is something else the tide won’t wash away.