Opened Ground (8 page)

I can feel the tug

of the halter at the nape

of her neck, the wind

on her naked front.

It blows her nipples

to amber beads,

it shakes the frail rigging

of her ribs.

I can see her drowned

body in the bog,

the weighing stone,

the floating rods and boughs.

Under which at first

she was a barked sapling

that is dug up

oak-bone, brain-firkin:

her shaved head

like a stubble of black corn,

her blindfold a soiled bandage,

her noose a ring

to store

the memories of love.

Little adulteress,

before they punished you

you were flaxen-haired,

undernourished, and your

tar-black face was beautiful.

My poor scapegoat,

I almost love you

but would have cast, I know,

the stones of silence.

I am the artful voyeur

of your brain’s exposed

and darkened combs,

your muscles’ webbing

and all your numbered bones:

I who have stood dumb

when your betraying sisters,

cauled in tar,

wept by the railings,

who would connive

in civilized outrage

yet understand the exact

and tribal, intimate revenge.

Here is the girl’s head like an exhumed gourd.

Oval-faced, prune-skinned, prune-stones for teeth.

They unswaddled the wet fern of her hair

And made an exhibition of its coil,

Let the air at her leathery beauty.

Pash of tallow, perishable treasure:

Her broken nose is dark as a turf clod,

Her eyeholes blank as pools in the old workings.

Diodorus Siculus confessed

His gradual ease among the likes of this:

Murdered, forgotten, nameless, terrible

Beheaded girl, outstaring axe

And beatification, outstaring

What had begun to feel like reverence.

Kinned by hieroglyphic

peat on a spreadfield

to the strangled victim,

the love-nest in the bracken,

I step through origins

like a dog turning

its memories of wilderness

on the kitchen mat:

the bog floor shakes,

water cheeps and lisps

as I walk down

rushes and heather.

I love this turf-face,

its black incisions,

the cooped secrets

of process and ritual;

I love the spring

off the ground,

each bank a gallows drop,

each open pool

the unstopped mouth

of an urn, a moon-drinker,

not to be sounded

by the naked eye. 

Quagmire, swampland, morass:

the slime kingdoms,

domains of the cold-blooded,

of mud pads and dirtied eggs.

But
bog

meaning soft,

the fall of windless rain,

pupil of amber.

Ruminant ground,

digestion of mollusc

and seed-pod,

deep pollen-bin.

Earth-pantry, bone-vault,

sun-bank, embalmer

of votive goods

and sabred fugitives.

Insatiable bride.

Sword-swallower,

casket, midden,

floe of history.

Ground that will strip

its dark side,

nesting ground,

outback of my mind. 

I found a turf-spade

hidden under bracken,

laid flat, and overgrown

with a green fog.

As I raised it

the soft lips of the growth

muttered and split,

a tawny rut

opening at my feet

like a shed skin,

the shaft wettish

as I sank it upright

and beginning to

steam in the sun.

And now they have twinned

that obelisk:

among the stones,

under a bearded cairn

a love-nest is disturbed,

catkin and bog-cotton tremble

as they raise up

the cloven oak-limb.

I stand at the edge of centuries

facing a goddess. 

This centre holds

and spreads,

sump and seedbed,

a bag of waters

and a melting grave.

The mothers of autumn

sour and sink,

ferments of husk and leaf

deepen their ochres.

Mosses come to a head,

heather unseeds,

brackens deposit

their bronze.

This is the vowel of earth

dreaming its root

in flowers and snow,

mutation of weathers

and seasons,

a windfall composing

the floor it rots into.

I grew out of all this

like a weeping willow

inclined to

the appetites of gravity. 

The hand-carved felloes

of the turf-cart wheels

buried in a litter

of turf mould,

the cupid’s bow

of the tail-board,

the socketed lips

of the cribs:

I deified the man

who rode there,

god of the waggon,

the hearth-feeder.

I was his privileged

attendant, a bearer

of bread and drink,

the squire of his circuits.

When summer died

and wives forsook the fields

we were abroad,

saluted, given right-of-way.

Watch our progress

down the haw-lit hedges,

my manly pride

when he speaks to me. 

And you, Tacitus,

observe how I make my grove

on an old crannog

piled by the fearful dead:

a desolate peace.

Our mother ground

is sour with the blood

of her faithful,

they lie gargling

in her sacred heart

as the legions stare

from the ramparts.

Come back to this

‘island of the ocean’

where nothing will suffice.

Read the inhumed faces

of casualty and victim;

report us fairly,

how we slaughter

for the common good

and shave the heads

of the notorious,

how the goddess swallows

our love and terror.

Tonight, a first movement, a pulse,

As if the rain in bogland gathered head

To slip and flood: a bog-burst,

A gash breaking open the ferny bed.

Your back is a firm line of eastern coast

And arms and legs are thrown

Beyond your gradual hills. I caress

The heaving province where our past has grown.

I am the tall kingdom over your shoulder

That you would neither cajole nor ignore.

Conquest is a lie. I grow older

Conceding your half-independent shore

Within whose borders now my legacy

Culminates inexorably.

And I am still imperially

Male, leaving you with the pain,

The rending process in the colony,

The battering ram, the boom burst from within.

The act sprouted an obstinate fifth column

Whose stance is growing unilateral.

His heart beneath your heart is a wardrum

Mustering force. His parasitical

And ignorant little fists already

Beat at your borders and I know they’re cocked

At me across the water. No treaty

I foresee will salve completely your tracked

And stretchmarked body, the big pain

That leaves you raw, like opened ground, again.

Sky-born and royal,

snake-choker, dung-heaver,

his mind big with golden apples,

his future hung with trophies,

Hercules has the measure

of resistance and black powers

feeding off the territory.

Antaeus, the mould-hugger,

is weaned at last:

a fall was a renewal

but now he is raised up –

the challenger’s intelligence

is a spur of light,

a blue prong graiping him

out of his element

into a dream of loss

and origins – the cradling dark,

the river-veins, the secret gullies

of his strength,

the hatching grounds

of cave and souterrain,

he has bequeathed it all

to elegists. Balor will die

and Byrthnoth and Sitting Bull.

Hercules lifts his arms

in a remorseless V,

his triumph unassailed

by the powers he has shaken,

and lifts and banks Antaeus

high as a profiled ridge,

a sleeping giant,

pap for the dispossessed.

I’m writing this just after an encounter

With an English journalist in search of ‘views

On the Irish thing’. I’m back in winter

Quarters where bad news is no longer news,

Where media-men and stringers sniff and point,

Where zoom lenses, recorders and coiled leads

Litter the hotels. The times are out of joint

But I incline as much to rosary beads

As to the jottings and analyses

Of politicians and newspapermen

Who’ve scribbled down the long campaign from gas

And protest to gelignite and Sten,

Who proved upon their pulses ‘escalate’,

‘Backlash’ and ‘crack down’, ‘the provisional wing’,

‘Polarization’ and ‘long-standing hate’.

Yet I live here, I live here too, I sing,

Expertly civil-tongued with civil neighbours

On the high wires of first wireless reports,

Sucking the fake taste, the stony flavours

Of those sanctioned, old, elaborate retorts:

‘Oh, it’s disgraceful, surely, I agree.’

‘Where’s it going to end?’ ‘It’s getting worse.’

‘They’re murderers.’ ‘Internment, understandably …’

The ‘voice of sanity’ is getting hoarse. 

‘Religion’s never mentioned here,’ of course.

‘You know them by their eyes,’ and hold your tongue.

‘One side’s as bad as the other,’ never worse.

Christ, it’s near time that some small leak was sprung

In the great dykes the Dutchman made

To dam the dangerous tide that followed Seamus.

Yet for all this art and sedentary trade

I am incapable. The famous

Northern reticence, the tight gag of place

And times: yes, yes. Of the ‘wee six’ I sing

Where to be saved you only must save face

And whatever you say, you say nothing.

Smoke-signals are loud-mouthed compared with us:

Manoeuvrings to find out name and school,

Subtle discrimination by addresses

With hardly an exception to the rule

That Norman, Ken and Sidney signalled Prod

And Seamus (call me Sean) was sure-fire Pape.

O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,

Of open minds as open as a trap,

Where tongues lie coiled, as under flames lie wicks,

Where half of us, as in a wooden horse,

Were cabin’d and confined like wily Greeks,

Besieged within the siege, whispering morse. 

This morning from a dewy motorway

I saw the new camp for the internees:

A bomb had left a crater of fresh clay

In the roadside, and over in the trees

Machine-gun posts defined a real stockade.

There was that white mist you get on a low ground

And it was déjà-vu, some film made

Of Stalag 17, a bad dream with no sound.

Is there a life before death? That’s chalked up

In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain,

Coherent miseries, a bite and sup:

We hug our little destiny again.

Fair
seedtime
had
my
soul,
and
I
grew
up

Fostered
alike
by
beauty
and
by
fear;

Much
favoured
in
my
birthplace,
and
no
less

In
that
beloved
Vale
to
which,
erelong,

I
was
transplanted
…

   William Wordsworth,
The
Prelude

He
[the
stable-boy]
had
a
book
of  
Orange
rhymes,
and
the
days
when
we
read
them
together
in
the
hay-loft
gave
me
the
pleasure
of
rhyme
for
the
first
time.
Later
on
I
can
remember
being
told,
when
there
was
a
rumour
of
a
Fenian
rising,
that
rifles
were
being
handed
out
to
the
Orangemen;
and
presently,
when
I
began
to
dream
of
my
future
life,
I
thought
I
would
like
to
die
fighting
the
Fenians.

W. B. Yeats,
Autobiographies

Well, as Kavanagh said, we have lived

In important places. The lonely scarp

Of St Columb’s College, where I billeted

For six years, overlooked your Bogside.

I gazed into new worlds: the inflamed throat

Of Brandywell, its floodlit dogtrack,

The throttle of the hare. In the first week

I was so homesick I couldn’t even eat

The biscuits left to sweeten my exile.

I threw them over the fence one night

In September 1951

When the lights of houses in the Lecky Road

Were amber in the fog. It was an act

Of stealth.

                  Then Belfast, and then Berkeley.

Here’s two on’s are sophisticated,

Dabbling in verses till they have become

A life: from bulky envelopes arriving

In vacation time to slim volumes

Despatched ‘with the author’s compliments’.

Those poems in longhand, ripped from the wire spine

Of your exercise book, bewildered me –

Vowels and ideas bandied free

As the seed-pods blowing off our sycamores.

I tried to write about the sycamores

And innovated a South Derry rhyme

With
hushed
and
lulled
full chimes for
pushed
and
pulled.

Those hobnailed boots from beyond the mountain

Were walking, by God, all over the fine

Lawns of elocution.

                               Have our accents

Changed? ‘Catholics, in general, don’t speak

As well as students from the Protestant schools.’

Remember that stuff? Inferiority

Complexes, stuff that dreams were made on.

‘What’s your name, Heaney?’

                                             ‘Heaney, Father.’

                                                                      ‘Fair

Enough.’

                On my first day, the leather strap

Went epileptic in the Big Study,

Its echoes plashing over our bowed heads,

But I still wrote home that a boarder’s life

Was not so bad, shying as usual.

On long vacations, then, I came to life

In the kissing seat of an Austin 16

Parked at a gable, the engine running,

My fingers tight as ivy on her shoulders,

A light left burning for her in the kitchen.

And heading back for home, the summer’s

Freedom dwindling night by night, the air

All moonlight and a scent of hay, policemen

Swung their crimson flashlamps, crowding round

The car like black cattle, snuffing and pointing

The muzzle of a Sten gun in my eye:

‘What’s your name, driver?’

                                          ‘Seamus …’

                                                           
Seamus?

They once read my letters at a roadblock

And shone their torches on your hieroglyphics,

‘Svelte dictions’ in a very florid hand.

Ulster was British, but with no rights on

The English lyric: all around us, though

We hadn’t named it, the ministry of fear.

His bicycle stood at the window-sill,

The rubber cowl of a mud-splasher

Skirting the front mudguard,

Its fat black handlegrips

Heating in sunlight, the ‘spud’

Of the dynamo gleaming and cocked back,

The pedal treads hanging relieved

Of the boot of the law.

His cap was upside down

On the floor, next his chair.

The line of its pressure ran like a bevel

In his slightly sweating hair.

He had unstrapped

The heavy ledger, and my father

Was making tillage returns

In acres, roods, and perches.

Arithmetic and fear.

I sat staring at the polished holster

With its buttoned flap, the braid cord

Looped into the revolver butt.

‘Any other root crops?

Mangolds? Marrowstems? Anything like that?’

‘No.’ But was there not a line

Of turnips where the seed ran out

In the potato field? I assumed

Small guilts and sat

Imagining the black hole in the barracks.

He stood up, shifted the baton-case

Further round on his belt,

Closed the domesday book,

Fitted his cap back with two hands,

And looked at me as he said goodbye.

A shadow bobbed in the window.

He was snapping the carrier spring

Over the ledger. His boot pushed off

And the bicycle ticked, ticked, ticked.

The lambeg balloons at his belly, weighs

Him back on his haunches, lodging thunder

Grossly there between his chin and his knees.

He is raised up by what he buckles under.

Each arm extended by a seasoned rod,

He parades behind it. And though the drummers

Are granted passage through the nodding crowd,

It is the drums preside, like giant tumours.

To every cocked ear, expert in its greed,

His battered signature subscribes ‘No Pope’.

The goatskin’s sometimes plastered with his blood.

The air is pounding like a stethoscope.

While the Constabulary covered the mob

Firing into the Falls, I was suffering

Only the bullying sun of Madrid.

Each afternoon, in the casserole heat

Of the flat, as I sweated my way through

The life of Joyce, stinks from the fishmarket

Rose like the reek off a flax-dam.

At night on the balcony, gules of wine,

A sense of children in their dark corners,

Old women in black shawls near open windows,

The air a canyon rivering in Spanish.

We talked our way home over starlit plains

Where patent leather of the Guardia Civil

Gleamed like fish-bellies in flax-poisoned waters.

‘Go back,’ one said, ‘try to touch the people.’

Another conjured Lorca from his hill.

We sat through death-counts and bullfight reports

On the television, celebrities

Arrived from where the real thing still happened.

I retreated to the cool of the Prado.

Goya’s ‘Shootings of the Third of May’

Covered a wall – the thrown-up arms

And spasm of the rebel, the helmeted

And knapsacked military, the efficient

Rake of the fusillade. In the next room,

His nightmares, grafted to the palace wall –

Dark cyclones, hosting, breaking; Saturn

Jewelled in the blood of his own children,

Gigantic Chaos turning his brute hips

Over the world. Also, that holmgang

Where two berserks club each other to death

For honour’s sake, greaved in a bog, and sinking.

He painted with his fists and elbows, flourished

The stained cape of his heart as history charged.

‘Description is revelation!’ Royal

Avenue, Belfast, 1962,

A Saturday afternoon, glad to meet

Me, newly cubbed in language, he gripped

My elbow. ‘Listen. Go your own way.

Do your own work. Remember

Katherine Mansfield – I
will
tell

How
the
laundry
basket
squeaked
… that note of exile.’

But to hell with overstating it:

‘Don’t have the veins bulging in your Biro.’

And then, ‘Poor Hopkins!’ I have the
Journals

He gave me, underlined, his buckled self

Obeisant to their pain. He discerned

The lineaments of patience everywhere

And fostered me and sent me out, with words

Imposing on my tongue like obols.

It is December in Wicklow:

Alders dripping, birches

Inheriting the last light,

The ash tree cold to look at.

A comet that was lost

Should be visible at sunset,

Those million tons of light

Like a glimmer of haws and rose-hips,

And I sometimes see a falling star.

If I could come on meteorite!

Instead I walk through damp leaves,

Husks, the spent flukes of autumn,

Imagining a hero

On some muddy compound,

His gift like a slingstone

Whirled for the desperate.

How did I end up like this?

I often think of my friends’

Beautiful prismatic counselling

And the anvil brains of some who hate me

As I sit weighing and weighing

My responsible
tristia.

For what? For the ear? For the people?

For what is said behind-backs?

Rain comes down through the alders,

Its low conducive voices

Mutter about let-downs and erosions

And yet each drop recalls

The diamond absolutes.

I am neither internee nor informer;

An inner émigré, grown long-haired

And thoughtful; a wood-kerne

Escaped from the massacre,

Taking protective colouring

From bole and bark, feeling

Every wind that blows;

Who, blowing up these sparks

For their meagre heat, have missed

The once-in-a-lifetime portent,

The comet’s pulsing rose.