Opened Ground Part 11

Each arm extended by a seasoned rod, He parades behind it. And though the drummers Are granted pa.s.sage through the nodding crowd, It is the drums preside, like giant tumours.

To every c.o.c.ked 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.

4 SUMMER 1969.

While the Constabulary covered the mob

Firing into the Falls, I was suffering Only the bullying sun of Madrid.

Each afternoon, in the ca.s.serole 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.

5 FOSTERAGE.

for Michael McLaverty

'Description is revelation!' Royal Avenue, Belfast, 1962, A Sat.u.r.day 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 h.e.l.l 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.

6 EXPOSURE.

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 emigre, grown long-haired And thoughtful; a wood-kerne Escaped from the ma.s.sacre, 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.

from FIELD WORK (1979)

Oysters

Our sh.e.l.ls clacked on the plates.

My tongue was a filling estuary, My palate hung with starlight: As I tasted the salty Pleiades Orion dipped his foot into the water.

Alive and violated They lay on their beds of ice: Bivalves: the split bulb And philandering sigh of ocean.

Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered.

We had driven to that coast Through flowers and limestone And there we were, toasting friendship, Laying down a perfect memory In the cool of thatch and crockery.

Over the Alps, packed deep in hay and snow, The Romans hauled their oysters south to Rome: I saw damp panniers disgorge The frond-lipped, brine-stung Glut of privilege And was angry that my trust could not repose In the clear light, like poetry or freedom Leaning in from sea. I ate the day Deliberately, that its tang Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.

Triptych

I AFTER A KILLING.

There they were, as if our memory hatched them,

As if the unquiet founders walked again: Two young men with rifles on the hill, Profane and bracing as their instruments.

Who's sorry for our trouble?

Who dreamt that we might dwell among ourselves In rain and scoured light and wind-dried stones?

Basalt, blood, water, headstones, leeches.

In that neuter original loneliness From Brandon to Dunseverick I think of small-eyed survivor flowers, The pined-for, unmolested orchid.

I see a stone house by a pier.

Elbow room. Broad window light.

The heart lifts. You walk twenty yards To the boats and buy mackerel.

And today a girl walks in home to us Carrying a basket full of new potatoes, Three tight green cabbages, and carrots With the tops and mould still fresh on them.

II SIBYL.

My tongue moved, a swung relaxing hinge.

I said to her, 'What will become of us?'

And as forgotten water in a well might shake At an explosion under morning Or a crack run up a gable, She began to speak.

'I think our very form is bound to change.

Dogs in a siege. Saurian relapses. Pismires.