Opened Ground Part 30

I stood on the railway sleepers hearing larks, Gra.s.shoppers, cuckoos, dog-barks, trainer planes Cutting and modulating and drawing off.

Heat wavered on the immaculate line And shine of the cogged rails. On either side, Dog daisies stood like vestals, the hot stones Were clover-meshed and streaked with engine oil.

Air spanned, pa.s.sage waited, the balance rode, Nothing prevailed, whatever was in store Witnessed itself already taking place In a time marked by a.s.sent and by hiatus.

xv And strike this scene in gold too, in relief, So that a greedy eye cannot exhaust it: Stable straw, Rembrandt-gleam and burnish Where my father bends to a tea-chest packed with salt, The hurricane lamp held up at eye-level In his bunched left fist, his right hand foraging For the unbleeding, vivid-fleshed bacon, Home-cured hocks pulled up into the light For pondering a while and putting back.

That night I owned the piled grain of Egypt.

I watched the sentry's torchlight on the h.o.a.rd.

I stood in the door, unseen and blazed upon.

xix Memory as a building or a city, Well lighted, well laid out, appointed with Tableaux vivants and costumed effigies Statues in purple cloaks, or painted red, Ones wearing crowns, ones smeared with mud or blood: So that the mind's eye could haunt itself With fixed a.s.sociations and learn to read Its own contents in meaningful order, Ancient textbooks recommended that Familiar places be linked deliberately With a code of images. You knew the portent In each setting, you blinked and concentrated.

xxii Where does spirit live? Inside or outside Things remembered, made things, things unmade?

What came first, the seabird's cry or the soul Imagined in the dawn cold when it cried?

Where does it roost at last? On dungy sticks In a jackdaw's nest up in the old stone tower Or a marble bust commanding the parterre?

How habitable is perfected form?

And how inhabited the windy light?

What's the use of a held note or held line That cannot be a.s.sailed for rea.s.surance?

(Set questions for the ghost of W.B.) xxiv Deserted harbour stillness. Every stone Clarified and dormant under water, The harbour wall a masonry of silence.

Fullness. Shimmer. Laden high Atlantic The moorings barely stirred in, very slight Clucking of the swell against boat boards.

Perfected vision: c.o.c.kle minarets Consigned down there with green-slicked bottle gla.s.s, Sh.e.l.l-debris and a reddened bud of sandstone.

Air and ocean known as antecedents Of each other. In apposition with Omnipresence, equilibrium, brim.

Crossings

xxvii

Everything flows. Even a solid man, A pillar to himself and to his trade, All yellow boots and stick and soft felt hat, Can sprout wings at the ankle and grow fleet As the G.o.d of fair days, stone posts, roads and crossroads, Guardian of travellers and psychopomp.

'Look for a man with an ashplant on the boat,'

My father told his sister setting out For London, 'and stay near him all night And you'll be safe.' Flow on, flow on The journey of the soul with its soul guide And the mysteries of dealing-men with sticks!

xxix Scissor-and-slap abruptness of a latch.

Its coldness to the thumb. Its see-saw lift And drop and innocent harshness.

Which is a music of binding and of loosing Unheard in this generation, but there to be Called up or called down at a touch renewed.

Once the latch p.r.o.nounces, roof Is original again, threshold fatal, The sanction powerful as the foreboding.

Your footstep is already known, so bow Just a little, raise your right hand, Make impulse one with wilfulness, and enter.

x.x.x On St Brigid's Day the new life could be entered By going through her girdle of straw rope: The proper way for men was right leg first, Then right arm and right shoulder, head, then left Shoulder, arm and leg. Women drew it down Over the body and stepped out of it.

The open they came into by these moves Stood opener, hoops came off the world, They could feel the February air Still soft above their heads and imagine The limp rope fray and flare like wind-borne gleanings Or an unhindered goldfinch over ploughland.

x.x.xii Running water never disappointed.

Crossing water always furthered something.

Stepping stones were stations of the soul.

A kesh could mean the track some called a causey Raised above the wetness of the bog, Or the causey where it bridged old drains and streams.

It steadies me to tell these things. Also I cannot mention keshes or the ford Without my father's shade appearing to me On a path towards sunset, eyeing spades and clothes That turf-cutters stowed perhaps or souls cast off Before they crossed the log that spans the burn.

x.x.xiii Be literal a moment. Recollect Walking out on what had been emptied out After he died, turning your back and leaving.

That morning tiles were harder, windows colder, The raindrops on the pane more scourged, the gra.s.s Barer to the sky, more wind-harrowed, Or so it seemed. The house that he had planned 'Plain, big, straight, ordinary, you know', A paradigm of rigour and correction, Rebuke to fanciness and shrine to limit, Stood firmer than ever for its own idea Like a printed X-ray for the X-rayed body.

x.x.xiv Yeats said, To those who see spirits, human skin For a long time afterwards appears most coa.r.s.e.

The face I see that all falls short of since Pa.s.ses down an aisle: I share the bus From San Francisco Airport into Berkeley With one other pa.s.senger, who's dropped At the Treasure Island military base Half-way across Bay Bridge. Vietnam-bound, He could have been one of the newly dead come back, Unsurprisable but still disappointed, Having to bear his farm-boy self again, His shaving cuts, his otherworldly brow.

x.x.xvi And yes, my friend, we too walked through a valley.

Once. In darkness. With all the streetlamps off.

As danger gathered and the march dispersed.

Scene from Dante, made more memorable By one of his head-clearing similes Fireflies, say, since the policemen's torches Cl.u.s.tered and flicked and tempted us to trust Their unpredictable, attractive light.

We were like herded shades who had to cross And did cross, in a panic, to the car Parked as we'd left it, that gave when we got in Like Charon's boat under the faring poets.

Squarings

x.x.xvii

In famous poems by the sage Han Shan, Cold Mountain is a place that can also mean A state of mind. Or different states of mind At different times, for the poems seem One-off, impulsive, the kind of thing that starts I have sat here facing the Cold Mountain For twenty-nine years, or There is no path That goes all the way enviable stuff, Unfussy and believable.

Talking about it isn't good enough But quoting from it at least demonstrates The virtue of an art that knows its mind.

x.x.xviii We climbed the Capitol by moonlight, felt The transports of temptation on the heights: We were privileged and belated and we knew it.

Then something in me moved to prophesy Against the beloved stand-offishness of marble And all emulation of stone-cut verses.

'Down with form triumphant, long live,' (said I) 'Form mendicant and convalescent. We attend The come-back of pure water and the prayer-wheel.'

To which a voice replied, 'Of course we do.

But the others are in the Forum Cafe waiting, Wondering where we are. What'll you have?'

x.x.xix When you sat, far-eyed and cold, in the basalt throne Of 'the wishing chair' at Giant's Causeway, The small of your back made very solid sense.

Like a papoose at sap-time strapped to a maple tree, You gathered force out of the world-tree's hardness.

If you stretched your hand forth, things might turn to stone.

But you were only goose-fleshed skin and bone, The rocks and wonder of the world were only Lava crystallized, salts of the earth The wishing chair gave a savour to, its kelp And ozone freshening your outlook Beyond the range you thought you'd settled for.

xl I was four but I turned four hundred maybe Encountering the ancient dampish feel Of a clay floor. Maybe four thousand even.

Anyhow, there it was. Milk poured for cats In a rank puddle-place, splash-darkened mould Around the terracotta water-crock.

Ground of being. Body's deep obedience To all its shifting tenses. A half-door Opening directly into starlight.

Out of that earth house I inherited A stack of singular, cold memory-weights To load me, hand and foot, in the scale of things.

xli Sand-bed, they said. And gravel-bed. Before I knew river shallows or river pleasures I knew the ore of longing in those words.

The places I go back to have not failed But will not last. Waist-deep in cow-parsley, I re-enter the swim, riding or quelling The very currents memory is composed of, Everything acc.u.mulated ever As I took squarings from the tops of bridges Or the banks of self at evening.

Lick of fear. Sweet transience. Flirt and splash.

Crumpled flow the sky-dipped willows trailed in.

xlii Heather and kesh and turf stacks reappear Summer by summer still, gra.s.shoppers and all, The same yet rarer: fields of the nearly blessed Where gaunt ones in their shirtsleeves stooped and dug Or stood alone at dusk surveying bog-banks Apparitions now, yet active still And territorial, still sure of their ground, Still interested, not knowing how far The country of the shades has been pushed back, How long the lark has stopped outside these fields And only seems unstoppable to them Caught like a far hill in a freak of sunshine.

xliii Choose one set of tracks and track a hare Until the prints stop, just like that, in snow.

End of the line. Smooth drifts. Where did she go?

Back on her tracks, of course, then took a spring Yards off to the side; clean break; no scent or sign.

She landed in her form and ate the snow.

Consider too the ancient hieroglyph Of 'hare and zig-zag', which meant 'to exist', To be on the qui vive, weaving and dodging Like our friend who sprang (goodbye) beyond our ken And missed a round at last (but of course he'd stood it): The shake-the-heart, the dew-hammer, the far-eyed.

xliv All gone into the world of light? Perhaps As we read the line sheer forms do crowd The starry vestibule. Otherwise They do not. What lucency survives Is blanched as worms on nightlines I would lift, Ungratified if always well prepared For the nothing there which was only what had been there.

Although in fact it is more like a caught line snapping, That moment of admission of All gone, When the rod b.u.t.t loses touch and the tip drools And eddies swirl a dead leaf past in silence Swifter (it seems) than the water's pa.s.sage.

xlv For certain ones what was written may come true: They shall live on in the distance At the mouths of rivers.

For our ones, no. They will re-enter Dryness that was heaven on earth to them, Happy to eat the scones baked out of clay.

For some, perhaps, the delta's reed-beds And cold bright-footed seabirds always wheeling.

For our ones, snuff And hob-soot and the heat off ashes.

And a judge who comes between them and the sun In a pillar of radiant house-dust.

xlvi Mountain air from the mountain up behind; Out front, the end-of-summer, stone-walled fields; And in a slated house the fiddle going Like a flat stone skimmed at sunset Or the irrevocable slipstream of flat earth Still fleeing behind s.p.a.ce.

Was music once a proof of G.o.d's existence?

As long as it admits things beyond measure, That supposition stands.

So let the ear attend like a farmhouse window In placid light, where the extravagant Pa.s.sed once under full sail into the longed-for.

xlvii The visible sea at a distance from the sh.o.r.e Or beyond the anchoring grounds Was called the offing.

The emptier it stood, the more compelled The eye that scanned it.

But once you turned your back on it, your back Was suddenly all eyes like Argus's.

Then, when you'd look again, the offing felt Untrespa.s.sed still, and yet somehow vacated As if a lambent troop that exercised On the borders of your vision had withdrawn Behind the skyline to manoeuvre and regroup.

xlviii Strange how things in the offing, once they're sensed, Convert to things foreknown; And how what's come upon is manifest Only in light of what has been gone through.

Seventh heaven may be The whole truth of a sixth sense come to pa.s.s.

At any rate, when light breaks over me The way it did on the road beyond Coleraine Where wind got saltier, the sky more hurried And silver lame shivered on the Bann Out in mid-channel between the painted poles, That day I'll be in step with what escaped me.

A Transgression