Opened Ground (25 page)

The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside

His cell, but the cell is narrow, so

One turned-up palm is out the window, stiff

As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands

And lays in it and settles down to nest.

Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked

Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked

Into the network of eternal life,

Is moved to pity: now he must hold his hand

Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks

Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.

*

And since the whole thing’s imagined anyhow,

Imagine being Kevin. Which is he?

Self-forgetful or in agony all the time

From the neck on out down through his hurting forearms?

Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees?

Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth

Crept up through him? Is there distance in his head?

Alone and mirrored clear in love’s deep river,

‘To labour and not to seek reward,’ he prays,

A prayer his body makes entirely

For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird

And on the riverbank forgotten the river’s name.

The following for the record, in the light

Of everything before and since:

One bright May morning, nineteen seventy-nine,

Just off the red-eye special from New York,

I’m on the train for Belfast. Plain, simple

Exhilaration at being back: the sea

At Skerries, the nuptial hawthorn bloom,

The trip north taking sweet hold like a chain

On every bodily sprocket.

                                      Enter then –

As if he were some
film
noir
border guard –

Enter this one I’d last met in a dream,

More grimfaced now than in the dream itself

When he’d flagged me down at the side of a mountain road,

Come up and leant his elbow on the roof

And explained through the open window of the car

That all I’d have to do was drive a van

Carefully in to the next customs post

At Pettigo, switch off, get out as if

I were on my way with dockets to the office –

But then instead I’d walk ten yards more down

Towards the main street and get in with – here

Another schoolfriend’s name, a wink and smile,

I’d know him all right, he’d be in a Ford

And I’d be home in three hours’ time, as safe

As houses …

                    So he enters and sits down

Opposite and goes for me head on.

‘When, for fuck’s sake, are you going to write

Something for us? ‘If I do write something,

Whatever it is, I’ll be writing for myself.’

And that was that. Or words to that effect.

The jail walls all those months were smeared with shite.

Out of Long Kesh after his dirty protest

The red eyes were the eyes of Ciaran Nugent

Like something out of Dante’s scurfy hell,

Drilling their way through the rhymes and images

Where I too walked behind the righteous Virgil,

As safe as houses and translating freely:

When
he
had
said
all
this,
his
eyes
rolled

And
his
teeth,
like
a
dog
’s
teeth
clamping
round
a
bone,

Bit
into
the
skull
and
again
took
hold.

When I answered that I came from ‘far away’,

The policeman at the roadblock snapped, ‘Where’s that?’

He’d only half-heard what I said and thought

It was the name of some place up the country.

And now it is – both where I have been living

And where I left – a distance still to go

Like starlight that is light years on the go

From far away and takes light years arriving.

Some people wept, and not for sorrow – joy

That the king had armed and upped and sailed for Troy,

But inside me like struck sound in a gong

That killing-fest, the life-warp and world-wrong

It brought to pass, still augured and endured.

I’d dream of blood in bright webs in a ford,

Of bodies raining down like tattered meat

On top of me asleep – and me the lookout

The queen’s command had posted and forgotten,

The blind spot her farsightedness relied on.

And then the ox would lurch against the gong

And deaden it and I would feel my tongue

Like the dropped gangplank of a cattle truck,

Trampled and rattled, running piss and muck,

All swimmy-trembly as the lick of fire,

A victory beacon in an abattoir …

Next thing then I would waken at a loss,

For all the world a sheepdog stretched in grass,

Exposed to what I knew, still honour-bound

To concentrate attention out beyond

The city and the border, on that line

Where the blaze would leap the hills when Troy had fallen.

My sentry work was fate, a home to go to,

An in-between-times that I had to row through

Year after year: when the mist would start

To lift off fields and inlets, when morning light

Would open like the grain of light being split,

Day in, day out, I’d come alive again,

Silent and sunned as an esker on a plain,

Up on my elbows, gazing, biding time

In my outpost on the roof … What was to come

Out of that ten years’ wait that was the war

Flawed the black mirror of my frozen stare.

If a god of justice had reached down from heaven

For a strong beam to hang his scale-pans on

He would have found me tensed and ready-made.

I balanced between destiny and dread

And saw it coming, clouds bloodshot with the red

Of victory fires, the raw wound of that dawn

Igniting and erupting, bearing down

Like lava on a fleeing population …

Up on my elbows, head back, shutting out

The agony of Clytemnestra’s love-shout

That rose through the palace like the yell of troops

Hurled by King Agamemnon from the ships.

                        No such thing

                        as innocent

                        bystanding.

                        Her soiled vest,

                        her little breasts,

                        her clipped, devast-

                        ated, scabbed

                        punk head,

                        the char-eyed

                        famine gawk –

                        she looked

                        camp-fucked

                        and simple.

                        People

                        could feel

                        a missed

                        trueness in them

                        focus,

                        a homecoming

                        in her dropped-wing,

                        half-calculating

                        bewilderment.

                        No such thing

                        as innocent.

                        Old King Cock-

                        of-the-Walk

                        was back,

                        King Kill-

                        the-Child-

                        and-Take-

                        What-Comes,               

                        King Agamem-

                        non’s drum-

                        balled, old buck’s

                        stride was back.

                        And then her Greek

                        words came,

                        a lamb

                        at lambing time,

                        bleat of clair-

                        voyant dread,

                        the gene-hammer

                        and tread

                        of the roused god.

                        And the result-

                        ant shock desire

                        in bystanders

                        to do it to her

                        there and then.

                        Little rent

                        cunt of their guilt:

                        in she went

                        to the knife,

                        to the killer wife,

                        to the net over               

                        her and her slaver,

                        the Troy reaver,

                        saying, ‘A wipe

                        of the sponge,

                        that’s it.

                        The shadow-hinge

                        swings unpredict-

                        ably and the light’s

                        blanked out.’

Cities of grass. Fort walls. The dumbstruck palace.

I’d come to with the night wind on my face,

Agog, alert again, but far, far less

Focused on victory than I should have been –

Still isolated in my old disdain

Of claques who always needed to be seen

And heard as the true Argives. Mouth athletes,

Quoting the oracle and quoting dates,

Petitioning, accusing, taking votes.

No element that should have carried weight

Out of the grievous distance would translate.

Our war stalled in the pre-articulate.

The little violets’ heads bowed on their sterns,

The pre-dawn gossamers, all dew and scrim

And star-lace, it was more through them

I felt the beating of the huge time-wound

We lived inside. My soul wept in my hand

When I would touch them, my whole being rained

Down on myself, I saw cities of grass,

Valleys of longing, tombs, a windswept brightness,

And far off, in a hilly, ominous place,

Small crowds of people watching as a man

Jumped a fresh earth-wall and another ran

Amorously, it seemed, to strike him down.

                They both needed to talk,

                 pretending what they needed

                 was my advice. Behind backs

                 each one of them confided

                 it was sexual overload

                 every time they did it –

                 and indeed from the beginning

                 (a child could have hardly missed it)

                 their real life was the bed.

                 The king should have been told,

                 but who was there to tell him

                 if not myself? I willed them

                 to cease and break the hold

                 of my cross-purposed silence

                 but still kept on, all smiles

                 to Aegisthus every morning,

                 much favoured and self-loathing.

                 The roof was like an eardrum.

                 The ox’s tons of dumb

                 inertia stood, head-down

                 and motionless as a herm.

                 Atlas, watchmen’s patron,

                 would come into my mind,

                 the only other one

                 up at all hours, ox-bowed

                 under his yoke of cloud

                 out there at the world’s end.

                 The loft-floor where the gods

                 and goddesses took lovers

                 and made out endlessly

                 successfully, those thuds

                 and moans through the cloud cover

                 were wholly on his shoulders.

                 Sometimes I thought of us

                 apotheosized to boulders

                 called Aphrodite’s Pillars.

                 High and low in those days

                 hit their stride together.

                 When the captains in the horse

                 felt Helen’s hand caress

                 its wooden boards and belly

                 they nearly rode each other.

                 But in the end Troy’s mothers

                 bore their brunt in alley,

                 bloodied cot and bed.

                 The war put all men mad,

                 horned, horsed or roof-posted,

                 the boasting and the bested.

                 My own mind was a bull-pen

                 where horned King Agamemnon

                 had stamped his weight in gold.

                 But when hills broke into flame

                 and the queen wailed on and came,

                 it was the king I sold.

                 I moved beyond bad faith:

                 for his bullion bars, his bonus

                 was a rope-net and a bloodbath.

                 And the peace had come upon us.

At Troy, at Athens, what I most clearly

see and nearly smell

is the fresh water.

A filled bath, still unentered

and unstained, waiting behind housewalls

that the far cries of the butchered on the plain

keep dying into, until the hero comes

surging in incomprehensibly

to be attended to and be alone,

stripped to the skin, blood-plastered, moaning

and rocking, splashing, dozing off,

accommodated as if he were a stranger.

And the well at Athens too.

Or rather that old lifeline leading up

and down from the Acropolis

to the well itself, a set of timber steps

slatted in between the sheer cliff face

and a free-standing, covering spur of rock,

secret staircase the defenders knew

and the invaders found, where what was to be

Greek met Greek,

the ladder of the future

and the past, besieger and besieged,

the treadmill of assault

turned waterwheel, the rungs of stealth

and habit all the one

bare foot extended, searching.

And then this ladder of our own that ran

deep into a well-shaft being sunk

in broad daylight, men puddling at the source

through tawny mud, then coming back up

deeper in themselves for having been there,

like discharged soldiers testing the safe ground,

finders, keepers, seers of fresh water

in the bountiful round mouths of iron pumps

and gushing taps.