Opened Ground Part 17

Sloe Gin

The clear weather of juniper

darkened into winter.

She fed gin to sloes and sealed the gla.s.s container.

When I unscrewed it I smelled the disturbed tart stillness of a bush rising through the pantry.

When I poured it it had a cutting edge and flamed like Betelgeuse.

I drink to you in smoke-mirled, blue- black sloes, bitter and dependable.

Chekhov on Sakhalin for Derek Mahon

So, he would pay his 'debt to medicine'.

But first he drank cognac by the ocean With his back to all he had travelled there to face.

His head was swimming free as the troikas Of Tyumen, he looked down from the rail Of his thirty years and saw a mile Into himself as if he were clear water: Lake Baikal from the deckrail of the steamer.

So far away, Moscow was like lost youth.

And who was he, to savour in his mouth Fine spirits that the puzzled literati Packed off with him to a penal colony Him, born, you may say, under the counter?

At least that meant he knew its worth. No cantor In full throat by the iconostasis Got holier joy than he got from that gla.s.s That shone and warmed like diamonds warming On some pert young cleavage in a salon, Inviolable and affronting.

He felt the gla.s.s go cold in the midnight sun.

When he staggered up and smashed it on the stones It rang as clearly as the convicts' chains That haunted him. All through the months to come It rang on like the burden of his freedom To try for the right tone not tract, not thesis And walk away from floggings. He who thought to squeeze His slave's blood out and waken the free man Shadowed a convict guide through Sakhalin.

Sandstone Keepsake

It is a kind of chalky russet

solidified gourd, sedimentary and so reliably dense and bricky I often clasp it and throw it from hand to hand.

It was ruddier, with an underwater hint of contusion, when I lifted it, wading a s.h.i.+ngle beach on Inishowen.

Across the estuary light after light came on silently round the perimeter of the camp. A stone from Phlegethon, bloodied on the bed of h.e.l.l's hot river?

Evening frost and the salt water made my hand smoke, as if I'd plucked the heart that d.a.m.ned Guy de Montfort to the boiling flood but not really, though I remembered his victim's heart in its casket, long venerated.

Anyhow, there I was with the wet red stone in my hand, staring across at the watch-towers from my free state of image and allusion, swooped on, then dropped by trained binoculars: a silhouette not worth bothering about, out for the evening in scarf and waders and not about to set times wrong or right, stooping along, one of the venerators.

from Shelf Life

Granite Chip

Houndstooth stone. Aberdeen of the mind.

Saying An union in the cup I'll throw I have hurt my hand, pressing it hard around this bit hammered off Joyce's Martello Tower, this flecked insoluble brilliant I keep but feel little in common with a kind of stone-age circ.u.mcising knife, a Calvin edge in my complaisant pith.

Granite is jaggy, salty, punitive and exacting. Come to me, it says all you who labour and are burdened, I will not refresh you. And it adds, Seize the day. And, You can take me or leave me.

Old Smoothing Iron

Often I watched her lift it

from where its compact wedge rode the back of the stove like a tug at anchor.

To test its heat she'd stare and spit in its iron face or hold it up next her cheek to divine the stored danger.

Soft thumps on the ironing board.

Her dimpled angled elbow and intent stoop as she aimed the smoothing iron like a plane into linen, like the resentment of women.

To work, her dumb lunge says, is to move a certain ma.s.s through a certain distance, is to pull your weight and feel exact and equal to it.

Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.

Stone from Delphi

To be carried back to the shrine some dawn

when the sea spreads its far sun-crops to the south and I make a morning offering again: that I may escape the miasma of spilled blood, govern the tongue, fear hybris, fear the G.o.d until he speaks in my untrammelled mouth.

Making Strange

I stood between them,

the one with his travelled intelligence and tawny containment, his speech like the tw.a.n.g of a bowstring, and another, unshorn and bewildered in the tubs of his Wellingtons, smiling at me for help, faced with this stranger I'd brought him.

Then a cunning middle voice came out of the field across the road saying, 'Be adept and be dialect, tell of this wind coming past the zinc hut, call me sweetbriar after the rain or s...o...b..rries cooled in the fog.

But love the cut of this travelled one and call me also the cornfield of Boaz.

Go beyond what's reliable in all that keeps pleading and pleading, these eyes and puddles and stones, and recollect how bold you were when I visited you first with departures you cannot go back on.'

A chaffinch flicked from an ash and next thing I found myself driving the stranger through my own country, adept at dialect, reciting my pride in all that I knew, that began to make strange at that same recitation.

The Birthplace

I.

The deal table where he wrote, so small and plain, the single bed a dream of discipline.

And a flagged kitchen downstairs, its mote-slants of thick light: the unperturbed, reliable ghost life he carried, with no need to invent.

And high trees round the house, breathed upon day and night by winds as slow as a cart coming late from market, or the stir a fiddle could make in his reluctant heart.

II.

That day, we were like one of his troubled couples, speechless until he spoke for them, haunters of silence at noon in a deep lane that was s.e.xual with ferns and b.u.t.terflies, scared at our hurt, throat-sick, heat-struck, driven into the damp-floored wood where we made an episode of ourselves, unforgettable, unmentionable, and broke out again like cattle through bushes, wet and raised, only yards from the house.

III.

Everywhere being nowhere, who can prove one place more than another?

We come back emptied, to nourish and resist the words of coming to rest: birthplace, roofbeam, whitewash, flagstone, hearth, like unstacked iron weights afloat among galaxies.

Still, was it thirty years ago I read until first light for the first time, to finish The Return of the Native?

The corncrake in the aftergra.s.s verified himself, and I heard roosters and dogs, the very same as if he had written them.

Changes

As you came with me in silence

to the pump in the long gra.s.s I heard much that you could not hear: the bite of the spade that sank it, the slithering and grumble as the mason mixed his mortar, and women coming with white buckets like flashes on their ruffled wings.

The cast-iron rims of the lid clinked as I uncovered it, something stirred in its mouth.