Opened Ground Part 23

kept reeling in at a steady speed, the verges dripped.

In my hands like a wrested trophy, the empty round of the steering wheel.

The trance of driving made all roads one: the seraph-haunted, Tuscan footpath, the green oak-alleys of Dordogne or that track through corn where the rich young man asked his question Master what must I do to be saved?

Or the road where the bird with an earth-red back and a white and black tail, like parquet of flint and jet, wheeled over me in visitation.

Sell all you have and give to the poor.

I was up and away like a human soul that plumes from the mouth in undulant, tenor black-letter Latin.

I was one for sorrow, Noah's dove, a panicked shadow crossing the deer path.

If I came to earth it would be by way of a small east window I once squeezed through, scaling heaven by superst.i.tion, drunk and happy on a chapel gable.

I would roost a night on the slab of exile, then hide in the cleft of that churchyard wall where hand after hand keeps wearing away at the cold, hard-breasted votive granite.

And follow me.

I would migrate through a high cave mouth into an oaten, sun-warmed cliff, on down the soft-nubbed, clay-floored pa.s.sage, face-brush, wingflap, to the deepest chamber.

There a drinking deer is cut into rock, its haunch and neck rise with the contours, the incised outline curves to a strained expectant muzzle and a nostril flared at a dried-up source.

For my book of changes I would meditate that stone-faced vigil until the long dumbfounded spirit broke cover to raise a dust in the font of exhaustion.

Villanelle for an Anniversary

A spirit moved, John Harvard walked the yard,

The atom lay unsplit, the west unwon, The books stood open and the gates unbarred.

The maps dreamt on like moondust. Nothing stirred.

The future was a verb in hibernation.

A spirit moved, John Harvard walked the yard.

Before the cla.s.sic style, before the clapboard, All through the small hours of an origin, The books stood open and the gates unbarred.

Night pa.s.sage of a migratory bird.

Wingflap. Gownflap. Like a homing pigeon A spirit moved, John Harvard walked the yard.

Was that his soul (look) sped to its reward By grace or works? A shooting star? An omen?

The books stood open and the gates unbarred.

Begin again where frosts and tests were hard.

Find yourself or founder. Here, imagine A spirit moves, John Harvard walks the yard, The books stand open and the gates unbarred.

(1986).

from THE HAW LANTERN (1987)

For Bernard and Jane McCabe

The riverbed, dried-up, half-full of leaves.

Us, listening to a river in the trees.

Alphabets

I.

A shadow his father makes with joined hands And thumbs and fingers nibbles on the wall Like a rabbit's head. He understands He will understand more when he goes to school.

There he draws smoke with chalk the whole first week, Then draws the forked stick that they call a Y.

This is writing. A swan's neck and swan's back Make the 2 he can see now as well as say.

Two rafters and a cross-tie on the slate Are the letter some call ah, some call ay.

There are charts, there are headlines, there is a right Way to hold the pen and a wrong way.

First it is 'copying out', and then 'English', Marked correct with a little leaning hoe.

Smells of inkwells rise in the cla.s.sroom hush.

A globe in the window tilts like a coloured O.

II.

Declensions sang on air like a hosanna As, column after stratified column, Book One of Elementa Latina, Marbled and minatory, rose up in him.

For he was fostered next in a stricter school Named for the patron saint of the oak wood Where cla.s.ses switched to the pealing of a bell And he left the Latin forum for the shade Of new calligraphy that felt like home.

The letters of this alphabet were trees.

The capitals were orchards in full bloom, The lines of script like briars coiled in ditches.

Here in her snooded garment and bare feet, All ringleted in a.s.sonance and woodnotes, The poet's dream stole over him like sunlight And pa.s.sed into the tenebrous thickets.

He learns this other writing. He is the scribe Who drove a team of quills on his white field.

Round his cell door the blackbirds dart and dab.

Then self-denial, fasting, the pure cold.

By rules that hardened the farther they reached north He bends to his desk and begins again.

Christ's sickle has been in the undergrowth.

The script grows bare and Merovingian.

III.

The globe has spun. He stands in a wooden O.

He alludes to Shakespeare. He alludes to Graves.

Time has bulldozed the school and school window.

Balers drop bales like printouts where stooked sheaves Make lambdas on the stubble once at harvest And the delta face of each potato pit Was patted straight and moulded against frost.

All gone, with the omega that kept Watch above each door, the good-luck horseshoe.

Yet shape-note language, absolute on air As Constantine's sky-lettered IN HOC SIGNO Can still command him; or the necromancer Who would hang from the domed ceiling of his house A figure of the world with colours in it So that the figure of the universe And 'not just single things' would meet his sight When he walked abroad. As from his small window The astronaut sees all that he has sprung from, The risen, aqueous, singular, lucent O Like a magnified and buoyant ovum Or like my own wide pre-reflective stare All agog at the plasterer on his ladder Skimming our gable and writing our name there With his trowel point, letter by strange letter.

Terminus

I.

When I hoked there, I would find An acorn and a rusted bolt.

If I lifted my eyes, a factory chimney And a dormant mountain.

If I listened, an engine shunting And a trotting horse.

Is it any wonder when I thought I would have second thoughts?

II.

When they spoke of the prudent squirrel's h.o.a.rd It shone like gifts at a nativity.

When they spoke of the mammon of iniquity The coins in my pockets reddened like stove-lids.

I was the march drain and the march drain's banks Suffering the limit of each claim.

III.

Two buckets were easier carried than one.

I grew up in between.

My left hand placed the standard iron weight.

My right tilted a last grain in the balance.

Baronies, parishes met where I was born.

When I stood on the central stepping stone I was the last earl on horseback in midstream Still parleying, in earshot of his peers.

From the Frontier of Writing

The tightness and the nilness round that s.p.a.ce