Opened Ground Part 13

The intelligence in his bone.

The unquestionable houseboy's shoulders that could have been my own.

The Singer's House

When they said Carrickfergus I could hear

the frosty echo of saltminers' picks.

I imagined it, chambered and glinting, a township built of light.

What do we say any more to conjure the salt of our earth?

So much comes and is gone that should be crystal and kept, and amicable weathers that bring up the grain of things, their tang of season and store, are all the packing we'll get.

So I say to myself Gweebarra and its music hits off the place like water hitting off granite.

I see the glittering sound framed in your window, knives and forks set on oilcloth, and the seals' heads, suddenly outlined, scanning everything.

People here used to believe that drowned souls lived in the seals.

At spring tides they might change shape.

They loved music and swam in for a singer who might stand at the end of summer in the mouth of a whitewashed turf-shed, his shoulder to the jamb, his song a rowboat far out in evening.

When I came here first you were always singing, a hint of the clip of the pick in your winnowing climb and attack.

Raise it again, man. We still believe what we hear.

The Guttural Muse

Late summer, and at midnight

I smelt the heat of the day: At my window over the hotel car park I breathed the muddied night airs off the lake And watched a young crowd leave the discotheque.

Their voices rose up thick and comforting As oily bubbles the feeding tench sent up That evening at dusk the slimy tench Once called the 'doctor fish' because his slime Was said to heal the wounds of fish that touched it.

A girl in a white dress Was being courted out among the cars: As her voice swarmed and puddled into laughs I felt like some old pike all badged with sores Wanting to swim in touch with soft-mouthed life.

Glanmore Sonnets for Ann Saddlemyer 'our heartiest welcomer'

I.

Vowels ploughed into other: opened ground.

The mildest February for twenty years Is mist bands over furrows, a deep no sound Vulnerable to distant gargling tractors.

Our road is steaming, the turned-up acres breathe.

Now the good life could be to cross a field And art a paradigm of earth new from the lathe Of ploughs. My lea is deeply tilled.

Old plough-socks gorge the subsoil of each sense And I am quickened with a redolence Of farmland as a dark unblown rose.

Wait then ... Breasting the mist, in sowers' ap.r.o.ns, My ghosts come striding into their spring stations.

The dream grain whirls like freakish Easter snows.

II.

Sensings, mountings from the hiding places, Words entering almost the sense of touch, Ferreting themselves out of their dark hutch 'These things are not secrets but mysteries,'

Oisin Kelly told me years ago In Belfast, hankering after stone That connived with the chisel, as if the grain Remembered what the mallet tapped to know.

Then I landed in the hedge-school of Glanmore And from the backs of ditches hoped to raise A voice caught back off slug-horn and slow chanter That might continue, hold, dispel, appease: Vowels ploughed into other, opened ground, Each verse returning like the plough turned round.

III.

This evening the cuckoo and the corncrake (So much, too much) consorted at twilight.

It was all crepuscular and iambic.

Out on the field a baby rabbit Took his bearings, and I knew the deer (I've seen them too from the window of the house, Like connoisseurs, inquisitive of air) Were careful under larch and May-green spruce.

I had said earlier, 'I won't relapse From this strange loneliness I've brought us to.

Dorothy and William ' She interrupts: 'You're not going to compare us two... ?'

Outside a rustling and twig-combing breeze Refreshes and relents. Is cadences.

IV.

I used to lie with an ear to the line For that way, they said, there should come a sound Escaping ahead, an iron tune Of f.l.a.n.g.e and piston pitched along the ground, But I never heard that. Always, instead, Struck couplings and shuntings two miles away Lifted over the woods. The head Of a horse swirled back from a gate, a grey Turnover of haunch and mane, and I'd look Up to the cutting where she'd soon appear.

Two fields back, in the house, small ripples shook Silently across our drinking water (As they are shaking now across my heart) And vanished into where they seemed to start.

V.

Soft corrugations in the boortree's trunk, Its green young shoots, its rods like freckled solder: It was our bower as children, a greenish, dank And snapping memory as I get older.

And elderberry I have learned to call it.

I love its blooms like saucers brimmed with meal, Its berries a swart caviar of shot, A buoyant sp.a.w.n, a light bruised out of purple.

Elderberry? It is shires dreaming wine.

Boortree is bower tree, where I played 'touching tongues'

And felt another's texture quick on mine.

So, etymologist of roots and graftings, I fall back to my tree-house and would crouch Where small buds shoot and flourish in the hush.

VI.

He lived there in the unsayable lights.

He saw the fuchsia in a drizzling noon, The elderflower at dusk like a risen moon And green fields greying on the windswept heights.

'I will break through,' he said, 'what I glazed over With perfect mist and peaceful absences'

Sudden and sure as the man who dared the ice And raced his bike across the Moyola River.

A man we never saw. But in that winter Of nineteen forty-seven, when the snow Kept the country bright as a studio, In a cold where things might crystallize or founder, His story quickened us, a wild white goose Heard after dark above the drifted house.

VII.

Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Irish Sea: Green, swift upsurges, North Atlantic flux Conjured by that strong gale-warning voice, Collapse into a sibilant penumbra.

Midnight and closedown. Sirens of the tundra, Of eel-road, seal-road, keel-road, whale-road, raise Their wind-compounded keen behind the baize And drive the trawlers to the lee of Wicklow.

L'Etoile, Le Guillemot, La Belle Helene Nursed their bright names this morning in the bay That toiled like mortar. It was marvellous And actual, I said out loud, 'A haven,'

The word deepening, clearing, like the sky Elsewhere on Minches, Cromarty, The Faroes.

VIII.

Thunderlight on the split logs: big raindrops At body heat and lush with omen Spattering dark on the hatchet iron.

This morning when a magpie with jerky steps Inspected a horse asleep beside the wood I thought of dew on armour and carrion.

What would I meet, blood-boltered, on the road?

How deep into the woodpile sat the toad?

What welters through this dark hush on the crops?

Do you remember that pension in Les Landes Where the old one rocked and rocked and rocked A mongol in her lap, to little songs?

Come to me quick, I am upstairs shaking.

My all of you birchwood in lightning.

IX.

Outside the kitchen window a black rat Sways on the briar like infected fruit: 'It looked me through, it stared me out, I'm not Imagining things. Go you out to it.'

Did we come to the wilderness for this?

We have our burnished bay tree at the gate, Cla.s.sical, hung with the reek of silage From the next farm, tart-leafed as inwit.

Blood on a pitchfork, blood on chaff and hay, Rats speared in the sweat and dust of threshing What is my apology for poetry?

The empty briar is swishing When I come down, and beyond, inside, your face Haunts like a new moon glimpsed through tangled gla.s.s.

X.

I dreamt we slept in a moss in Donegal On turf banks under blankets, with our faces Exposed all night in a wetting drizzle, Pallid as the dripping sapling birches.

Lorenzo and Jessica in a cold climate.

Diarmuid and Grainne waiting to be found.

Darkly asperged and censed, we were laid out Like breathing effigies on a raised ground.

And in that dream I dreamt how like you this?

Our first night years ago in that hotel When you came with your deliberate kiss To raise us towards the lovely and painful Covenants of flesh; our separateness; The respite in our dewy dreaming faces.

An Afterwards

She would plunge all poets in the ninth circle

And fix them, tooth in skull, tonguing for brain; For backbiting in life she'd make their h.e.l.l A rabid egotistical daisy-chain.

Unyielding, spurred, ambitious, unblunted, Lockjawed, mantrapped, each a fastened badger Jockeying for position, hasped and mounted Like Ugolino on Archbishop Roger.