Opened Ground Part 18

I had a bird's eye view of a bird, finch-green, speckly white, nesting on dry leaves, flattened, still, suffering the light.

So I roofed the citadel as gently as I could, and told you and you gently unroofed it but where was the bird now?

There was a single egg, pebbly white, and in the rusted bend of the spout tail feathers splayed and sat tight.

So tender, I said, 'Remember this.

It will be good for you to retrace this path when you have grown away and stand at last at the very centre of the empty city.'

A Bat on the Road A batlike soul waking to consciousness of itself in darkness and secrecy and loneliness.

You would hoist an old hat on the tines of a fork and trawl the mouth of the bridge for the slight bat-thump and flutter. Skinny downy webs, babynails clawing the sweatband ... But don't bring it down, don't break its flight again, don't deny it; this time let it go free.

Follow its bat-flap under the stone bridge, under the Midland and Scottish Railway and lose it there in the dark.

Next thing it shadows moonslicked laurels or skims the lapped net on a tennis court.

Next thing it's ahead of you in the road.

What are you after? You keep swerving off, flying blind over ashpits and netting wire; invited by the brush of a word like peignoir, rustles and glimpses, shot silk, the stealth of floods So close to me I could hear her breathing and there by the lighted window behind trees it hangs in creepers matting the brickwork and now it's a wet leaf blowing in the drive, now soft-deckled, shadow-convolvulus by the White Gates. Who would have thought it? At the White Gates She let them do whatever they liked. Cling there as long as you want. There is nothing to hide.

A Hazel Stick for Catherine Ann

The living mother-of-pearl of a salmon

just out of the water is gone just like that, but your stick is kept salmon-silver.

Seasoned and bendy, it convinces the hand that what you have you hold to play with and pose with and lay about with.

But then too it points back to cattle and spatter and beating the bars of a gate the very stick we might cut from your family tree.

The living cobalt of an afternoon dragonfly drew my eye to it first and the evening I trimmed it for you you saw your first glow-worm all of us stood round in silence, even you gigantic enough to darken the sky for a glow-worm.

And when I poked open the gra.s.s a tiny brightening den lit the eye in the blunt pared end of your stick.

A Kite for Michael and Christopher

All through that Sunday afternoon

a kite flew above Sunday, a tightened drumhead, a flitter of blown chaff.

I'd seen it grey and slippy in the making, I'd tapped it when it dried out white and stiff, I'd tied the bows of newspaper along its six-foot tail.

But now it was far up like a small black lark and now it dragged as if the bellied string were a wet rope hauled upon to lift a shoal.

My friend says that the human soul is about the weight of a snipe, yet the soul at anchor there, the string that sags and ascends, weighs like a furrow a.s.sumed into the heavens.

Before the kite plunges down into the wood and this line goes useless take in your two hands, boys, and feel the strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief.

You were born fit for it.

Stand in here in front of me and take the strain.

The Railway Children

When we climbed the slopes of the cutting

We were eye-level with the white cups Of the telegraph poles and the sizzling wires.

Like lovely freehand they curved for miles East and miles west beyond us, sagging Under their burden of swallows.

We were small and thought we knew nothing Worth knowing. We thought words travelled the wires In the s.h.i.+ny pouches of raindrops, Each one seeded full with the light Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves So infinitesimally scaled We could stream through the eye of a needle.

Widgeon for Paul Muldoon

It had been badly shot.

While he was plucking it he found, he says, the voice box like a flute stop in the broken windpipe and blew upon it unexpectedly his own small widgeon cries.

Sheelagh na Gig at Kilpeck

I.

We look up at her hunkered into her angle under the eaves.

She bears the whole stone burden on the small of her back and shoulders and pinioned elbows, the astute mouth, the gripping fingers saying push, push hard, push harder.

As the hips go high her big tadpole forehead is rounded out in sunlight.

And here beside her are two birds, a rabbit's head, a ram's, a mouth devouring heads.

II.

Her hands holding herself are like hands in an old barn holding a bag open.

I was outside looking in at its lapped and supple mouth running grain.

I looked up under the thatch at the dark mouth and eye of a bird's nest or a rat hole, smelling the rose on the wall, mildew, an earthen floor, the warm depth of the eaves.

And then one night in the yard I stood still under heavy rain wearing the bag like a caul.

III.

We look up to her, her ring-fort eyes, her little slippy shoulders, her nose incised and flat, and feel light-headed looking up.

She is twig-boned, saddle-s.e.xed, grown-up, grown ordinary, seeming to say, 'Yes, look at me to your heart's content but look at every other thing.'

And here is a leaper in a kilt, two figures kissing, a mouth with sprigs, a running hart, two fishes, a damaged beast with an instrument.

'Aye'

(from 'The Loaming')

Big voices in the womanless kitchen.

They never lit a lamp in the summertime but took the twilight as it came like solemn trees. They sat on in the dark with their pipes red in their mouths, the talk come down to Aye and Aye again and, when the dog s.h.i.+fted, a curt There boy!

I closed my eyes to make the light motes stream behind them and my head went airy, my chair rode high and low among branches and the wind stirred up a rookery in the next long Aye.

The King of the Ditchbacks for John Montague I.

As if a trespa.s.ser unbolted a forgotten gate and ripped the growth tangling its lower bars just beyond the hedge he has opened a dark morse along the bank, a crooked wounding of silent, cobwebbed gra.s.s. If I stop he stops like the moon.

He lives in his feet and ears, weather-eyed, all pad and listening, a denless mover.

Under the bridge his reflection s.h.i.+fts sideways to the current, mothy, alluring.

I am haunted by his stealthy rustling, the unexpected spoor, the pollen settling.

II.

I was sure I knew him. The time I'd spent obsessively in that upstairs room bringing myself close to him: each entranced hiatus as I chainsmoked and stared out the dormer into the gra.s.sy hillside I was laying myself open. He was depending on me as I hung out on the limb of a translated phrase like a youngster dared out on to an alder branch over the whirlpool. Small dreamself in the branches. Dream fears I inclined towards, interrogating: Are you the one I ran upstairs to find drowned under running water in the bath?

The one the mowing machine severed like a hare in the stiff frieze of harvest?

Whose little b.l.o.o.d.y clothes we buried in the garden?

The one who lay awake in darkness a wall's breadth from the troubled hoofs?

After I had dared these invocations, I went back towards the gate to follow him. And my stealth was second nature to me, as if I were coming into my own. I remembered I had been vested for this calling.

III.

When I was taken aside that day I had the sense of election: they dressed my head in a fishnet and plaited leafy twigs through meshes so my vision was a bird's at the heart of a thicket and I spoke as I moved like a voice from a shaking bush.

King of the ditchbacks, I went with them obediently to the edge of a pigeon wood deciduous canopy, screened wain of evening we lay beneath in silence.

No birds came, but I waited among briars and stones, or whispered or broke the watery gossamers if I moved a muscle.

'Come back to us,' they said, 'in harvest, when we hide in the stooked corn, when the gundogs can hardly retrieve what's brought down.' And I saw myself rising to move in that dissimulation, top-knotted, masked in sheaves, noting the fall of birds: a rich young man leaving everything he had for a migrant solitude.

Station Island