Opened Ground Part 4

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-pa.s.s 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.

Bann Clay

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 gra.s.s, It baked white in the sun, Relieved its h.o.a.rded 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.

Bogland for T. P. Flanagan

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.

b.u.t.ter sunk under More than a hundred years Was recovered salty and white.

The ground itself is kind, black b.u.t.ter 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.

from WINTERING OUT (1972)

Fodder

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 gra.s.s 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.

Bog Oak

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.

Anahorish

My 'place of clear water',

the first hill in the world where springs washed into the shiny gra.s.s 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.

Servant Boy

He is wintering out

the back-end of a bad year, swinging a hurricane-lamp through some outhouse, a jobber among shadows.

Old work-wh.o.r.e, 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.

Land

I.

I stepped it, perch by perch.

Unbraiding rushes and gra.s.s 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.

II.

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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s an open-work of new straw and harvest bows.

Gazing out past the shifting hares.

III.

I sense the pads unfurling under gra.s.s 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.

Gifts of Rain

I.

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.