Opened Ground (4 page)

On the most westerly Blasket

In a dry-stone hut

He got this air out of the night.

Strange noises were heard

By others who followed, bits of a tune

Coming in on loud weather

Though nothing like melody.

He blamed their fingers and ear

As unpractised, their fiddling easy

For he had gone alone into the island

And brought back the whole thing.

The house throbbed like his full violin.

So whether he calls it spirit music

Or not, I don’t care. He took it

Out of wind off mid-Atlantic.

Still he maintains, from nowhere.

It comes off the bow gravely,

Rephrases itself into the air.

All year round the whin

Can show a blossom or two

But it’s in full bloom now.

As if the small yolk stain

From all the birds’ eggs in

All the nests of the spring

Were spiked and hung

Everywhere on bushes to ripen.

Hills oxidize gold.

Above the smoulder of green shoot

And dross of dead thorns underfoot

The blossoms scald.

Put a match under

Whins, they go up of a sudden.

They make no flame in the sun

But a fierce heat tremor

Yet incineration like that

Only takes the thorn.

The tough sticks don’t burn,

Remain like bone, charred horn.

Gilt, jaggy, springy, frilled

This stunted, dry richness

Persists on hills, near stone ditches,

Over flintbed and battlefield.

Any point in that wood

Was a centre, birch trunks

Ghosting your bearings,

Improvising charmed rings

Wherever you stopped.

Though you walked a straight line

It might be a circle you travelled

With toadstools and stumps

Always repeating themselves.

Or did you re-pass them?

Here were bleyberries quilting the floor,

The black char of a fire,

And having found them once

You were sure to find them again.

Someone had always been there

Though always you were alone.

Lovers, birdwatchers,

Campers, gypsies and tramps

Left some trace of their trades

Or their excrement.

Hedging the road so

It invited all comers

To the hush and the mush

Of its whispering treadmill,

Its limits defined,

So they thought, from outside.

They must have been thankful

For the hum of the traffic

If they ventured in

Past the picnickers’ belt

Or began to recall

Tales of fog on the mountains.

You had to come back

To learn how to lose yourself,

To be pilot and stray – witch,

Hansel and Gretel in one.

Labourers pedalling at ease

Past the end of the lane

Were white with it. Dungarees

And boots wore its powdery stain.

All day in open pits

They loaded on to the bank

Slabs like the squared-off clots

Of a blue cream. Sunk

For centuries under the grass,

It baked white in the sun,

Relieved its hoarded waters

And began to ripen.

It underruns the valley,

The first slow residue

Of a river finding its way.

Above it, the webbed marsh is new,

Even the clutch of Mesolithic

Flints. Once, cleaning a drain

I shovelled up livery slicks

Till the water gradually ran

Clear on its old floor.

Under the humus and roots

This smooth weight. I labour

Towards it still. It holds and gluts.

We have no prairies

To slice a big sun at evening –

Everywhere the eye concedes to

Encroaching horizon,

Is wooed into the cyclops’ eye

Of a tarn. Our unfenced country

Is bog that keeps crusting

Between the sights of the sun.

They’ve taken the skeleton

Of the Great Irish Elk

Out of the peat, set it up,

An astounding crate full of air.

Butter sunk under

More than a hundred years

Was recovered salty and white.

The ground itself is kind, black butter

Melting and opening underfoot,

Missing its last definition

By millions of years.

They’ll never dig coal here,

Only the waterlogged trunks

Of great firs, soft as pulp.

Our pioneers keep striking

Inwards and downwards,

Every layer they strip

Seems camped on before.

The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.

The wet centre is bottomless.

Or, as we said,

fother,
I open

my arms for it

again. But first

to draw from the tight

vise of a stack

the weathered eaves

of the stack itself

falling at your feet,

last summer’s tumbled

swathes of grass

and meadowsweet

multiple as loaves

and fishes, a bundle

tossed over half-doors

or into mucky gaps.

These long nights

I would pull hay

for comfort, anything

to bed the stall.

A carter’s trophy

split for rafters,

a cobwebbed, black,

long-seasoned rib

under the first thatch.

I might tarry

with the moustached

dead, the creel-fillers,

or eavesdrop on

their hopeless wisdom

as a blow-down of smoke

struggles over the half-door

and mizzling rain

blurs the far end

of the cart track.

The softening ruts

lead back to no

‘oak groves’, no

cutters of mistletoe

in the green clearings.

Perhaps I just make out

Edmund Spenser,

dreaming sunlight,

encroached upon by

geniuses who creep

‘out of every corner

of the woodes and glennes’

towards watercress and carrion.

My ‘place of clear water’,

the first hill in the world

where springs washed into

the shiny grass

and darkened cobbles

in the bed of the lane.

Anahorish,
soft gradient

of consonant, vowel-meadow,

after-image of lamps

swung through the yards

on winter evenings.

With pails and barrows

those mound-dwellers

go waist-deep in mist

to break the light ice

at wells and dunghills.

He is wintering out

the back-end of a bad year,

swinging a hurricane-lamp

through some outhouse,

a jobber among shadows.

Old work-whore, slave-

blood, who stepped fair-hills

under each bidder’s eye

and kept your patience

and your counsel, how

you draw me into

your trail. Your trail

broken from haggard to stable,

a straggle of fodder

stiffened on snow,

comes first-footing

the back doors of the little

barons: resentful

and impenitent,

carrying the warm eggs.

I stepped it, perch by perch.

Unbraiding rushes and grass

I opened my right-of-way

through old bottoms and sowed-out ground

and gathered stones off the ploughing

to raise a small cairn.

Cleaned out the drains, faced the hedges,

often got up at dawn

to walk the outlying fields.

I composed habits for those acres

so that my last look would be

neither gluttonous nor starved.

I was ready to go anywhere. 

This is in place of what I would leave,

plaited and branchy,

on a long slope of stubble:

a woman of old wet leaves,

rush-bands and thatcher’s scollops,

stooked loosely, her breasts an open-work

of new straw and harvest bows.

Gazing out past

the shifting hares.

I sense the pads

unfurling under grass and clover:

if I lie with my ear

in this loop of silence

long enough, thigh-bone

and shoulder against the phantom ground,

I expect to pick up

a small drumming

and must not be surprised

in bursting air

to find myself snared, swinging

an ear-ring of sharp wire.

Cloudburst and steady downpour now

for days.

                 Still mammal,

straw-footed on the mud,

he begins to sense weather

by his skin.

A nimble snout of flood

licks over stepping stones

and goes uprooting.

                                  He fords

his life by sounding.

                                  Soundings. 

A man wading lost fields

breaks the pane of flood:

a flower of mud-

water blooms up to his reflection

like a cut swaying

its red spoors through a basin.

His hands grub

where the spade has uncastled

sunken drills, an atlantis

he depends on. So

he is hooped to where he planted

and sky and ground

are running naturally among his arms

that grope the cropping land. 

When rains were gathering

there would be an all-night

roaring off the ford.

Their world-schooled ear

could monitor the usual

confabulations, the race

slabbering past the gable,

the Moyola harping on

its gravel beds:

all spouts by daylight

brimmed with their own airs

and overflowed each barrel

in long tresses.

I cock my ear

at an absence –

in the shared calling of blood

arrives my need

for antediluvian lore.

Soft voices of the dead

are whispering by the shore

that I would question

(and for my children’s sake)

about crops rotted, river mud

glazing the baked clay floor. 

The tawny guttural water

spells itself: Moyola

is its own score and consort,

bedding the locale

in the utterance,

reed music, an old chanter

breathing its mists

through vowels and history.

A swollen river,

a mating call of sound

rises to pleasure me, Dives,

hoarder of common ground.

My mouth holds round

the soft blastings,

Toome,
Toome,

as under the dislodged

slab of the tongue

I push into a souterrain

prospecting what new

in a hundred centuries’

loam, flints, musket-balls,

fragmented ware,

torcs and fish-bones,

till I am sleeved in

alluvial mud that shelves

suddenly under

bogwater and tributaries,

and elvers tail my hair.

Riverback, the long rigs

ending in broad docken

and a canopied pad

down to the ford.

The garden mould

bruised easily, the shower

gathering in your heelmark

was the black
O
 

in
Broagh,

its low tattoo

among the windy boortrees

and rhubarb-blades

ended almost

suddenly, like that last

gh
the strangers found

difficult to manage.

Hide in the hollow trunk

of the willow tree,

its listening familiar,

until, as usual, they

cuckoo your name

across the fields.

You can hear them

draw the poles of stiles

as they approach

calling you out:

small mouth and ear

in a woody cleft,

lobe and larynx

of the mossy places.