Opened Ground (21 page)

Aeneas was praying and holding on the altar

When the prophetess started to speak: ‘Blood relation of gods,

Trojan, son of Anchises, the way down to Avernus is easy.

Day and night black Pluto’s door stands open.

But to retrace your steps and get back to upper air,

This is the real task and the real undertaking.

A few have been able to do it, sons of the gods

Favoured by Jupiter Justus, or exalted to heaven

In a blaze of heroic glory. Forests spread half-way down

And Cocytus winds through the dark, licking its banks.

Still, if love torments you so much and you so much desire

To sail the Stygian lake twice and twice to inspect

The underworld dark, if you must go beyond what’s permitted,

Understand what you must do beforehand.

Hidden in the thick of a tree is a bough made of gold

And its leaves and pliable twigs are made of it too.

It is sacred to underworld Juno, who is its patron,

And overtopped by a grove where deep shadows mass

Along far wooded valleys. No one is ever permitted

To go down into earth’s hidden places unless he has first

Plucked this golden-fledged tree-branch out of its tree

And bestowed it on fair Proserpina, to whom it belongs

By decree, her own special gift. And when it is plucked

A second one grows in its place, golden once more,

And the foliage growing upon it glimmers the same.

Therefore look up and search deep and when you have found it

Take hold of it boldly and duly. If fate has called you

The bough will come away easily, of its own sweet accord.

Otherwise, no matter how much strength you muster, you won’t

Ever manage to quell it or fell it with the toughest of blades.’

We marked the pitch: four jackets for four goalposts,

That was all. The corners and the squares

Were there like longitude and latitude

Under the bumpy ground, to be

Agreed about or disagreed about

When the time came. And then we picked the teams

And crossed the line our called names drew between us.

Youngsters shouting their heads off in a field

As the light died and they kept on playing

Because by then they were playing in their heads

And the actual kicked ball came to them

Like a dream heaviness, and their own hard

Breathing in the dark and skids on grass

Sounded like effort in another world …

It was quick and constant, a game that never need

Be played out. Some limit had been passed,

There was fleetness, furtherance, untiredness

In time that was extra, unforeseen and free.

You also loved lines pegged out in the garden,

The spade nicking the first straight edge along

The tight white string. Or string stretched perfectly

To make the outline of a house foundation,

Pale timber battens set at right angles

For every corner, each freshly sawn new board

Spick and span in the oddly passive grass.

Or the imaginary line straight down

A field of grazing, to be ploughed open

From the rod stuck in one headrig to the rod

Stuck in the other.

              All these things entered you

As if they were both the door and what came through it.

They marked the spot, marked time and held it open.

A mower parted the bronze sea of corn.

A windlass hauled the centre out of water.

Two men with a cross-cut kept it swimming

Into a felled beech backwards and forwards

So that they seemed to row the steady earth.

‘Catch the old one first,’

(My father’s joke was also old, and heavy

And predictable). ‘Then the young ones

Will all follow, and Bob’s your uncle.’

On slow bright river evenings, the sweet time

Made him afraid we’d take too much for granted

And so our spirits must be lightly checked.

Blessed be down-to-earth! Blessed be highs!

Blessed be the detachment of dumb love

In that broad-backed, low-set man

Who feared debt all his life, but now and then

Could make a splash like the salmon he said was

‘As big as a wee pork pig by the sound of it’.

In earshot of the pool where the salmon jumped

Back through its own unheard concentric soundwaves

A mower leans forever on his scythe.

He has mown himself to the centre of the field

And stands in a final perfect ring

Of sunlit stubble.

‘Go and tell your father,’ the mower says

(He said it to my father who told me),

‘I have it mowed as clean as a new sixpence.’

My father is a barefoot boy with news,

Running at eye-level with weeds and stooks

On the afternoon of his own father’s death.

The open, black half of the half-door waits.

I feel much heat and hurry in the air.

I feel his legs and quick heels far away

And strange as my own – when he will piggyback me

At a great height, light-headed and thin-boned,

Like a witless elder rescued from the fire.

Inishbofin on a Sunday morning.

Sunlight, turfsmoke, seagulls, boatslip, diesel.

One by one we were being handed down

Into a boat that dipped and shilly-shallied

Scaresomely every time. We sat tight

On short cross-benches, in nervous twos and threes,

Obedient, newly close, nobody speaking

Except the boatmen, as the gunwales sank

And seemed they might ship water any minute.

The sea was very calm but even so,

When the engine kicked and our ferryman

Swayed for balance, reaching for the tiller,

I panicked at the shiftiness and heft

Of the craft itself. What guaranteed us –

That quick response and buoyancy and swim –

Kept me in agony. All the time

As we went sailing evenly across

The deep, still, seeable-down-into water,

It was as if I looked from another boat

Sailing through air, far up, and could see

How riskily we fared into the morning,

And loved in vain our bare, bowed, numbered heads.

Claritas.
The dry-eyed Latin word

Is perfect for the carved stone of the water

Where Jesus stands up to his unwet knees

And John the Baptist pours out more water

Over his head: all this in bright sunlight

On the façade of a cathedral. Lines

Hard and thin and sinuous represent

The flowing river. Down between the lines

Little antic fish are all go. Nothing else.

And yet in that utter visibility

The stone’s alive with what’s invisible:

Waterweed, stirred sand-grains hurrying off,

The shadowy, unshadowed stream itself.

All afternoon, heat wavered on the steps

And the air we stood up to our eyes in wavered

Like the zig-zag hieroglyph for life itself.

Once upon a time my undrowned father

Walked into our yard. He had gone to spray

Potatoes in a field on the riverbank

And wouldn’t bring me with him. The horse-sprayer

Was too big and new-fangled, bluestone might

Burn me in the eyes, the horse was fresh, I

Might scare the horse, and so on. I threw stones

At a bird on the shed roof, as much for

The clatter of the stones as anything,

But when he came back, I was inside the house

And saw him out the window, scatter-eyed

And daunted, strange without his hat,

His step unguided, his ghosthood immanent.

When he was turning on the riverbank,

The horse had rusted and reared up and pitched

Cart and sprayer and everything off balance

So the whole rig went over into a deep

Whirlpool, hoofs, chains, shafts, cartwheels, barrel

And tackle, all tumbling off the world,

And the hat already merrily swept along

The quieter reaches. That afternoon

I saw him face to face, he came to me

With his damp footprints out of the river,

And there was nothing between us there

That might not still be happily ever after.

His hands were warm and small and knowledgeable.

When I saw them again last night, they were two ferrets,

Playing all by themselves in a moonlit field.

I remember this woman who sat for years

In a wheelchair, looking straight ahead

Out the window at sycamore trees unleafing

And leafing at the far end of the lane.

Straight out past the  TV in the corner,

The stunted, agitated hawthorn bush,

The same small calves with their backs to wind and rain,

The same acre of ragwort, the same mountain.

She was steadfast as the big window itself.

Her brow was clear as the chrome bits of the chair.

She never lamented once and she never

Carried a spare ounce of emotional weight.

Face to face with her was an education

Of the sort you got across a well-braced gate –

One of those lean, clean, iron, roadside ones

Between two whitewashed pillars, where you could see

Deeper into the country than you expected

And discovered that the field behind the hedge

Grew more distinctly strange as you kept standing

Focused and drawn in by what barred the way. 

Of all implements, the pitchfork was the one

That came near to an imagined perfection:

When he tightened his raised hand and aimed with it,

It felt like a javelin, accurate and light.

So whether he played the warrior or the athlete

Or worked in earnest in the chaff and sweat,

He loved its grain of tapering, dark-flecked ash

Grown satiny from its own natural polish.

Riveted steel, turned timber, burnish, grain,

Smoothness, straightness, roundness, length and sheen.

Sweat-cured, sharpened, balanced, tested, fitted.

The springiness, the clip and dart of it.

And then when he thought of probes that reached the farthest,

He would see the shaft of a pitchfork sailing past

Evenly, imperturbably through space,

Its prongs starlit and absolutely soundless –

But has learned at last to follow that simple lead

Past its own aim, out to an other side

Where perfection – or nearness to it – is imagined

Not in the aiming but the opening hand.

Willed down, waited for, in place at last and for good.

Trunk-hasped, cart-heavy, painted an ignorant brown.

And pew-strait, bin-deep, standing four-square as an ark.

If I lie in it, I am cribbed in seasoned deal

Dry as the unkindled boards of a funeral ship.

My measure has been taken, my ear shuttered up.

Yet I hear an old sombre tide awash in the headboard:

Unpathetic
och
ochs
and
och
hohs,
the long bedtime

Sigh-life of Ulster, unwilling, unbeaten,

Protestant, Catholic, the Bible, the beads,

Late talks at gables by moonlight, boots on the hearth,

The small hours chimed sweetly away so next thing it was

The cock on the ridge-tiles.

                               And now this is ‘an inheritance’ –

Upright, rudimentary, unshiftably planked

In the long long ago, yet willable forward

Again and again and again, cargoed with

Its own dumb, tongue-and-groove worthiness

And un-get-roundable weight. But to conquer that weight,

Imagine a dower of settle beds tumbled from heaven

Like some nonsensical vengeance come on the people,

Then learn from that harmless barrage that whatever is given

Can always be reimagined, however four-square,

Plank-thick, hull-stupid and out of its time

It happens to be. You are free as the lookout,

That far-seeing joker posted high over the fog,

Who declared by the time that he had got himself down

The actual ship had stolen away from beneath him.

Bare flags. Pump water. Winter-evening cold.

Our backs might never warm up but our faces

Burned from the hearth-blaze and the hot whiskeys.

It felt remembered even then, an old

Rightness half-imagined or foretold,

As green sticks hissed and spat into the ashes

And whatever rampaged out there couldn’t reach us,

Firelit, shuttered, slated and stone-walled.

Year after year, our game of Scrabble: love

Taken for granted like any other word

That was chanced on and allowed within the rules.

So ‘scrabble’ let it be. Intransitive.

Meaning to scratch or rake at something hard.

Which is what he hears. Our scraping, clinking tools.

Scythe and axe and hedge-clippers, the shriek

Of the gate the children used to swing on,

Poker, scuttle, tongs, a gravel rake –

The old activity starts up again

But starts up differently. We’re on our own

Years later in the same
locus
amoenus,

Tenants no longer, but in full possession

Of an emptied house and whatever keeps between us.

Which must be more than keepsakes, even though

The child’s cot’s back in place where Catherine

Woke in the dawn and answered
doodle
doo

To the rooster in the farm across the road –

And is the same cot I myself slept in

When the whole world was a farm that eked and crowed.

Breaking and entering: from early on

Words that thrilled me far more than they scared me –

Even when I’d ‘come into my own’

And owned a house, a man of property

Who lacked the proper outlook. I would never

Double-bar the door or lock the gate

Or draw the blinds or pull the curtains over

Or give ‘security’ a second thought.

But all changed when I took possession here

And had the old bed sawn on my instruction

Since the only way to move it down the stair

Was to cut the frame in two. A bad action,

So Greek with consequence, so dangerous,

Only pure words and deeds secure the house.

You were the one for skylights. I opposed

Cutting into the seasoned tongue-and-groove

Of pitch pine. I liked it low and closed,

Its claustrophobic, nest-up-in-the-roof

Effect. I liked the snuff-dry feeling,

The perfect, trunk-lid fit of the old ceiling.

Under there, it was all hutch and hatch.

The blue slates kept the heat like midnight thatch.

But when the slates came off, extravagant

Sky entered and held surprise wide open.

For days I felt like an inhabitant

Of that house where the man sick of the palsy

Was lowered through the roof, had his sins forgiven,

Was healed, took up his bed and walked away.