Opened Ground Part 28

When I saw them again last night, they were two ferrets, Playing all by themselves in a moonlit field.

Field of Vision

I remember this woman who sat for years

In a wheelchair, looking straight ahead Out the window at sycamore trees unleafing And leafing at the far end of the lane.

Straight out past the TV in the corner, The stunted, agitated hawthorn bush, The same small calves with their backs to wind and rain, The same acre of ragwort, the same mountain.

She was steadfast as the big window itself.

Her brow was clear as the chrome bits of the chair.

She never lamented once and she never Carried a spare ounce of emotional weight.

Face to face with her was an education Of the sort you got across a well-braced gate One of those lean, clean, iron, roadside ones Between two whitewashed pillars, where you could see Deeper into the country than you expected And discovered that the field behind the hedge Grew more distinctly strange as you kept standing Focused and drawn in by what barred the way.

The Pitchfork

Of all implements, the pitchfork was the one

That came near to an imagined perfection: When he tightened his raised hand and aimed with it, It felt like a javelin, accurate and light.

So whether he played the warrior or the athlete Or worked in earnest in the chaff and sweat, He loved its grain of tapering, dark-flecked ash Grown satiny from its own natural polish.

Riveted steel, turned timber, burnish, grain, Smoothness, straightness, roundness, length and sheen.

Sweat-cured, sharpened, balanced, tested, fitted.

The springiness, the clip and dart of it.

And then when he thought of probes that reached the farthest, He would see the shaft of a pitchfork sailing past Evenly, imperturbably through s.p.a.ce, Its p.r.o.ngs starlit and absolutely soundless But has learned at last to follow that simple lead Past its own aim, out to an other side Where perfection or nearness to it is imagined Not in the aiming but the opening hand.

The Settle Bed

Willed down, waited for, in place at last and for good.

Trunk-hasped, cart-heavy, painted an ignorant brown.

And pew-strait, bin-deep, standing four-square as an ark.

If I lie in it, I am cribbed in seasoned deal Dry as the unkindled boards of a funeral s.h.i.+p.

My measure has been taken, my ear shuttered up.

Yet I hear an old sombre tide awash in the headboard: Unpathetic och ochs and och hohs, the long bedtime Sigh-life of Ulster, unwilling, unbeaten, Protestant, Catholic, the Bible, the beads, Late talks at gables by moonlight, boots on the hearth, The small hours chimed sweetly away so next thing it was The c.o.c.k on the ridge-tiles.

And now this is 'an inheritance'

Upright, rudimentary, uns.h.i.+ftably planked In the long long ago, yet willable forward Again and again and again, cargoed with Its own dumb, tongue-and-groove worthiness And un-get-roundable weight. But to conquer that weight, Imagine a dower of settle beds tumbled from heaven Like some nonsensical vengeance come on the people, Then learn from that harmless barrage that whatever is given Can always be reimagined, however four-square, Plank-thick, hull-stupid and out of its time It happens to be. You are free as the lookout, That far-seeing joker posted high over the fog, Who declared by the time that he had got himself down The actual s.h.i.+p had stolen away from beneath him.

from Glanmore Revisited

I SCRABBLE.

in memoriam Tom Delaney, archaeologist

Bare flags. Pump water. Winter-evening cold.

Our backs might never warm up but our faces Burned from the hearth-blaze and the hot whiskeys.

It felt remembered even then, an old Rightness half-imagined or foretold, As green sticks hissed and spat into the ashes And whatever rampaged out there couldn't reach us, Firelit, shuttered, slated and stone-walled.

Year after year, our game of Scrabble: love Taken for granted like any other word That was chanced on and allowed within the rules.

So 'scrabble' let it be. Intransitive.

Meaning to scratch or rake at something hard.

Which is what he hears. Our sc.r.a.ping, clinking tools.

II THE COT.

Scythe and axe and hedge-clippers, the shriek

Of the gate the children used to swing on, Poker, scuttle, tongs, a gravel rake The old activity starts up again But starts up differently. We're on our own Years later in the same locus amoenus, Tenants no longer, but in full possession Of an emptied house and whatever keeps between us.

Which must be more than keepsakes, even though The child's cot's back in place where Catherine Woke in the dawn and answered doodle doo To the rooster in the farm across the road And is the same cot I myself slept in When the whole world was a farm that eked and crowed.

V l.u.s.tRAL SONNET.

Breaking and entering: from early on

Words that thrilled me far more than they scared me Even when I'd 'come into my own'

And owned a house, a man of property Who lacked the proper outlook. I would never Double-bar the door or lock the gate Or draw the blinds or pull the curtains over Or give 'security' a second thought.

But all changed when I took possession here And had the old bed sawn on my instruction Since the only way to move it down the stair Was to cut the frame in two. A bad action, So Greek with consequence, so dangerous, Only pure words and deeds secure the house.

VII THE SKYLIGHT.

You were the one for skylights. I opposed

Cutting into the seasoned tongue-and-groove Of pitch pine. I liked it low and closed, Its claustrophobic, nest-up-in-the-roof Effect. I liked the snuff-dry feeling, The perfect, trunk-lid fit of the old ceiling.

Under there, it was all hutch and hatch.

The blue slates kept the heat like midnight thatch.

But when the slates came off, extravagant Sky entered and held surprise wide open.

For days I felt like an inhabitant Of that house where the man sick of the palsy Was lowered through the roof, had his sins forgiven, Was healed, took up his bed and walked away.

A Pillowed Head

Matutinal. Mother-of-pearl

Summer come early. Slashed carmines And washed milky blues.

To be first on the road, Up with the ground-mists and pheasants.

To be older and grateful That this time you too were half-grateful The pangs had begun prepared And clear-headed, foreknowing The trauma, entering on it With full consent of the will.

(The first time, dismayed and arrayed In your cut-off white cotton gown, You were more bride than earth-mother Up on the stirrup-rigged bed, Who were self-possessed now To the point of a walk on the pier Before you checked in.) And then later on I half-fainted When the little slapped palpable girl Was handed to me; but as usual Came to in two wide-open eyes That had been dawned into farther Than ever, and had outseen the last Of all of those mornings of waiting When your domed brow was one long held silence And the dawn chorus anything but.

A Royal Prospect

On the day of their excursion up the Thames