Opened Ground (20 page)

Scuts of froth swirled from the discharge pipe.

We halted on the other bank and watched

A milky water run from the pierced side

Of milk itself, the crock of its substance spilt

Across white limbo floors where shift-workers

Waded round the clock, and the factory

Kept its distance like a bright-decked star-ship.

There we go, soft-eyed calves of the dew,

Astonished and assumed into fluorescence.

I thought of her as the wishing tree that died

And saw it lifted, root and branch, to heaven,

Trailing a shower of all that had been driven

Need by need by need into its hale

Sap-wood and bark: coin and pin and nail

Came streaming from it like a comet-tail

New-minted and dissolved. I had a vision

Of an airy branch-head rising through damp cloud,

Of turned-up faces where the tree had stood.

Far from home Grotus dedicated an altar to Coventina

Who holds in her right hand a waterweed

And in her left a pitcher spilling out a river.

Anywhere Grotus looked at running water he felt at home

And when he remembered the stone where he cut his name

Some dried-up course beneath his breastbone started

Pouring and darkening – more or less the way

The thought of his stunted altar works on me.

Remember when our electric pump gave out,

Priming it with bucketfuls, our idiotic rage

And hangdog phone-calls to the farm next door

For somebody please to come and fix it?

And when it began to hammer on again,

Jubilation at the tap’s full force, the sheer

Given fact of water, how you felt you’d never

Waste one drop but know its worth better always.

Do you think we could run through all that one more time?

I’ll be Grotus, you be Coventina.

Light as a skiff, manoeuvrable

yet outmanoeuvred,

I affected epaulettes and a cockade,

wrote a style well-bred and impervious

to the solidarity I angled for,

and played the ancient Roman with a razor.

I was the shouldered oar that ended up

far from the brine and whiff of venture,

like a scratching-post or a crossroads flagpole,

out of my element among small farmers –

I who once wakened to the shouts of men

rising from the bottom of the sea,

men in their shirts mounting through deep water

when the Atlantic stove our cabin’s dead lights in

and the big fleet split and Ireland dwindled

as we ran before the gale under bare poles.

We lived deep in a land of optative moods,

under high, banked clouds of resignation.

A rustle of loss in the phrase
Not
in
our
lifetime,

the broken nerve when we prayed
Vouchsafe
or
Deign,

were creditable, sufficient to the day.

Once a year we gathered in a field

of dance platforms and tents where children sang

songs they had learned by rote in the old language.

An auctioneer who had fought in the brotherhood

enumerated the humiliations

we always took for granted, but not even he

considered this, I think, a call to action.

Iron-mouthed loudspeakers shook the air

yet nobody felt blamed. He had confirmed us.

When our rebel anthem played the meeting shut

we turned for home and the usual harassment

by militiamen on overtime at roadblocks.

   And next thing, suddenly, this change of mood.

   Books open in the newly wired kitchens.

   Young heads that might have dozed a life away

   against the flanks of milking cows were busy

   paving and pencilling their first causeways

   across the prescribed texts. The paving stones

   of quadrangles came next and a grammar

   of imperatives, the new age of demands.

   They would banish the conditional for ever,

   this generation born impervious to

   the triumph in our cries of
de
profundis.

   Our faith in winning by enduring most

   they made anathema, intelligences

   brightened and unmannerly as crowbars.

What
looks
the
strongest
has
outlived
its
term.

The
future
lies
with
what’s
affirmed
from
under.

These things that corroborated us when we dwelt

under the aegis of our stealthy patron,

the guardian angel of passivity,

now sink a fang of menace in my shoulder.

I repeat the word ‘stricken’ to myself

and stand bareheaded under the banked clouds

edged more and more with brassy thunderlight.

I yearn for hammerblows on clinkered planks,

the uncompromised report of driven thole-pins,

to know there is one among us who never swerved

from all his instincts told him was right action,

who stood his ground in the indicative,

whose boat will lift when the cloudburst happens.

Statues with exposed hearts and barbed-wire crowns

Still stood in alcoves, hares flitted beneath

The dozing bellies of jets, our menu-writers

And punks with aerosol sprays held their own

With the best of them. Satellite link-ups

Wafted over us the blessings of popes, heliports

Maintained a charmed circle for idols on tour

And casualties on their stretchers. We sleepwalked

The line between panic and formulae, screentested

Our first native models and the last of the mummers,

Watching ourselves at a distance, advantaged

And airy as a man on a springboard

Who keeps limbering up because the man cannot dive.

And then in the foggy midlands it appeared,

Our mud vision, as if a rose window of mud

Had invented itself out of the glittery damp,

A gossamer wheel, concentric with its own hub

Of nebulous dirt, sullied yet lucent.

We had heard of the sun standing still and the sun

That changed colour, but we were vouchsafed

Original clay, transfigured and spinning.

And then the sunsets ran murky, the wiper

Could never entirely clean off the windscreen,

Reservoirs tasted of silt, a light fuzz

Accrued in the hair and the eyebrows, and some

Took to wearing a smudge on their foreheads

To be prepared for whatever. Vigils

Began to be kept around puddled gaps,

On altars bulrushes ousted the lilies

And a rota of invalids came and went

On beds they could lease placed in range of the shower.

A generation who had seen a sign!

Those nights when we stood in an umber dew and smelled

Mould in the verbena, or woke to a light

Furrow-breath on the pillow, when the talk

Was all about who had seen it and our fear

Was touched with a secret pride, only ourselves

Could be adequate then to our lives. When the rainbow

Curved flood-brown and ran like a water-rat’s back

So that drivers on the hard shoulder switched off to watch,

We wished it away, and yet we presumed it a test

That would prove us beyond expectation.

We lived, of course, to learn the folly of that.

One day it was gone and the east gable

Where its trembling corolla had balanced

Was starkly a ruin again, with dandelions

Blowing high up on the ledges, and moss

That slumbered on through its increase. As cameras raked

The site from every angle, experts

Began their
post
factum
jabber and all of us

Crowded in tight for the big explanations.

Just like that, we forgot that the vision was ours,

Our one chance to know the incomparable

And dive to a future. What might have been origin

We dissipated in news. The clarified place

Had retrieved neither us nor itself – except

You could say we survived. So say that, and watch us

Who had our chance to be mud-men, convinced and estranged,

Figure in our own eyes for the eyes of the world.

Once we presumed to found ourselves for good

Between its blue hills and those sandless shores

Where we spent our desperate night in prayer and vigil,

Once we had gathered driftwood, made a hearth

And hung our cauldron in its firmament,

The island broke beneath us like a wave.

The land sustaining us seemed to hold firm

Only when we embraced it
in
extremis.

All I believe that happened there was vision.

You never saw it used but still can hear

The sift and fall of stuff hopped on the mesh,

Clods and buds in a little dust-up,

The dribbled pile accruing under it.

Which would be better, what sticks or what falls through?

Or does the choice itself create the value?

Legs apart, deft-handed, start a mime

To sift the sense of things from what’s imagined

And work out what was happening in that story

Of the man who carried water in a riddle.

Was it culpable ignorance, or was it rather

A
via
negativa
through drops and let-downs?

CHORUS

Philoctetes.

                    Hercules.

                            Odysseus.

Heroes. Victims. Gods and human beings.

All throwing shapes, every one of them

Convinced he’s in the right, all of them glad

To repeat themselves and their every last mistake,

No matter what.

                         People so deep into

Their own self-pity self-pity buoys them up.

People so staunch and true, they are pillars of truth,

Shining with self-regard like polished stones.

And their whole life spent admiring themselves

For their own long-suffering.

                                         Highlighting old scars

And flashing them around like decorations.

I hate it, I always hated it, I am

A part of it myself.

PHILOCTETES TO NEOPTOLEMUS

Gods curse it!

                    But it’s me the gods have cursed.

They’ve let my name and story be wiped out.

The real offenders got away with it

And I am still here, rotting like a leper.

Tell me, son. Achilles was your father.

Did you ever maybe hear him mentioning

A man who had inherited a bow –

The actual bow and arrows that belonged

To Hercules, and that Hercules gave him?

Did you never hear, son, about Philoctetes?

About the snake-bite he got at a shrine

When the first fleet was voyaging to Troy?

And then the way he broke out with a sore

And was marooned on the commanders’ orders?

Let me tell you, son, the way they deserted me.

The sea and the sea-swell had me all worn out

So I dozed and fell asleep under a rock

Down on the shore.

                            And there and then, like that,

They headed off.

                        And they were delighted.

                                            And the only thing

They left me was a bundle of old rags.

Some day I want them all to waken up

The way I did that day. Imagine, son.

The bay all empty. The ships all disappeared.

Absolute loneliness. Nothing there except

The beat of the waves and the beat of my raw wound
…

This island is a nowhere. Nobody

Would ever put in here. There’s nothing.

Nothing to attract a lookout’s eye.

Nobody in his right mind would come near it.

And the rare ones that ever did turn up

Landed by accident, against their will.

They would take pity on me, naturally.

Share out their supplies and give me clothes.

But not a one of them would ever, ever

Take me on board with them to ship me home.

          Every day has been a weeping wound

For ten years now. Ten years of misery –

That’s all my service ever got for me.

That’s what I’ve got to thank Odysseus for

And Menelaus and Agamemnon.

                                             Gods curse them all!

I ask for the retribution I deserve.

PHILOCTETES

Have you not a sword for me? Or an axe? Or something?

CHORUS

What for?

PHILOCTETES

              What for? What do you think for?

For foot and head and hand. For the relief

Of cutting myself off. I want away.

CHORUS

Away where?

PHILOCTETES

                  Away to the house of death.

To my father, sitting waiting

Under the clay roof. I’ll come back in to him

Out of the light, out of his memory

Of the day I left.

                       We’ll be on the riverbank

Again, and see the Greeks arriving

And me setting out for Troy, in all good faith.

              
CHORUS

               Human beings suffer.

              They torture one another.

              They get hurt and get hard.

              No poem or play or song

              Can fully right a wrong

              Inflicted and endured.

              History says, Don’t hope

              On this side of the grave,

              But then, once in a lifetime

              The longed-for tidal wave

              Of justice can rise up

              And hope and history rhyme.

              So hope for a great sea-change

              On the far side of revenge.

              Believe that a farther shore

              Is reachable from here.

              Believe in miracles

              And cures and healing wells.

              Call miracle self-healing,

              The utter self-revealing

              Double-take of feeling.

If there’s fire on the mountain

And lightning and storm

And a god speaks from the sky 

That means someone is hearing

The outcry and the birth-cry

Of new life at its term.

It means once in a lifetime

That justice can rise up

And hope and history rhyme.

PHILOCTETES

Hercules:

            I saw him in the fire.

Hercules

            was shining in the air.

I heard the voice of Hercules in my head.

CHORUS

I have opened the closed road

Between the living and the dead

To make the right road clear to you.

I am the voice of Hercules now.

Here on earth my labours were

The stepping stones to upper air.

Lives that suffer and come right

Are backlit by immortal light.

Go, Philoctetes, with this boy,

Go and be cured and capture Troy.

Asclepius will make you whole,

Relieve your body and your soul.

Go, with your bow. Conclude the sore

And cruel stalemate of our war.

Win by fair combat. But know to shun

Reprisal killings when that’s done.

Then take just spoils and sail at last

Out of the bad dream of your past.

Make sacrifice. Burn spoils to me.

Shoot arrows in my memory.

But when the city’s being sacked

Preserve the shrines. Show gods respect.

Reverence for gods survives

Our individual mortal lives.

     
CHORUS

      Now it’s high watermark

      And floodtide in the heart

      And time to go.

      The sea-nymphs in the spray

      Will be the chorus now.

      What’s left to say?

      Suspect too much sweet talk

      But never close your mind.

      It was a fortunate wind

      That blew me here. I leave

      Half-ready to believe

      That a crippled trust might walk

      And the half-true rhyme is love.