Opened Ground Part 29

To Hampton Court, they were nearly sunstruck.

She with her neck bared in a page-boy cut, He all dreamy anyhow, wild for her But pretending to be a thousand miles away, Studying the boat's wake in the water.

And here are the photographs. Head to one side, In her sleeveless blouse, one bare shoulder high And one arm loose, a bird with a dropped wing Surprised in cover. He looks at you straight, a.s.sailable, enamoured, full of vows, Young dauphin in the once-upon-a-time.

And next the lowish red-brick Tudor frontage.

No more photographs, however, now We are present there as the smell of gra.s.s And suntan oil, standing like their sixth sense Behind them at the entrance to the maze, Heartbroken for no reason, willing them To dare it to the centre they are lost for ...

Instead, like reflections staggered through warped gla.s.s, They reappear as in a black and white Old grainy newsreel, where their pleasure-boat Goes back spotlit across sunken bridges And they alone are borne downstream unscathed, Between mud banks where the wounded rave all night At flameless blasts and echoless gunfire In all of which is ominously figured Their free pa.s.sage through historic times, Like a silk train being brushed across a leper Or the safe conduct of two royal favourites, Unhindered and resented and bright-eyed.

So let them keep a tally of themselves And be accountable when called upon For although by every golden mean their lot Is fair and due, pleas will be allowed Against every right and t.i.tle vested in them (And in a court where mere innocuousness Has never gained approval or acquittal.) Wheels within Wheels

I.

The first real grip I ever got on things Was when I learned the art of pedalling (By hand) a bike turned upside down, and drove Its back wheel preternaturally fast.

I loved the disappearance of the spokes, The way the s.p.a.ce between the hub and rim Hummed with transparency. If you threw A potato into it, the hooped air Spun mush and drizzle back into your face; If you touched it with a straw, the straw frittered.

Something about the way those pedal treads Worked very palpably at first against you And then began to sweep your hand ahead Into a new momentum that all entered me Like an access of free power, as if belief Caught up and spun the objects of belief In an orbit coterminous with longing.

II.

But enough was not enough. Who ever saw The limit in the given anyhow?

In fields beyond our house there was a well ('The well' we called it. It was more a hole With water in it, with small hawthorn trees On one side, and a muddy, dungy ooze On the other, all tramped through by cattle).

I loved that too. I loved the turbid smell, The sump-life of the place like old chain oil.

And there, next thing, I brought my bicycle.

I stood its saddle and its handlebars Into the soft bottom, I touched the tyres To the water's surface, then turned the pedals Until like a mill-wheel pouring at the treadles (But here reversed and las.h.i.+ng a mare's tail) The world-refres.h.i.+ng and immersed back wheel Spun lace and dirt-suds there before my eyes And showered me in my own regenerate clays.

For weeks I made a nimbus of old glit.

Then the hub jammed, rims rusted, the chain snapped.

III.

Nothing rose to the occasion after that Until, in a circus ring, drumrolled and spotlit, Cowgirls wheeled in, each one immaculate At the still centre of a lariat.

Perpetuum mobile. Sheer pirouette.

Tumblers. Jongleurs. Ring-a-rosies. Stet!

Fosterling 'That heavy greenness fostered by water'

John Montague

At school I loved one picture's heavy greenness

Horizons rigged with windmills' arms and sails.

The millhouses' still outlines. Their in-placeness Still more in place when mirrored in ca.n.a.ls.

I can't remember not ever having known The immanent hydraulics of a land Of glar and glit and floods at dailigone.

My silting hope. My lowlands of the mind.

Heaviness of being. And poetry Sluggish in the doldrums of what happens.

Me waiting until I was nearly fifty To credit marvels. Like the tree-clock of tin cans The tinkers made. So long for air to brighten, Time to be dazzled and the heart to lighten.

from Squarings

Lightenings

i

s.h.i.+fting brilliancies. Then winter light In a doorway, and on the stone doorstep A beggar s.h.i.+vering in silhouette.

So the particular judgement might be set: Bare wallstead and a cold hearth rained into Bright puddle where the soul-free cloud-life roams.

And after the commanded journey, what?

Nothing magnificent, nothing unknown.

A gazing out from far away, alone.

And it is not particular at all, Just old truth dawning: there is no next-time-round.

Unroofed scope. Knowledge-freshening wind.

ii Roof it again. Batten down. Dig in.

Drink out of tin. Know the scullery cold, A latch, a door-bar, forged tongs and a grate.

Touch the crossbeam, drive iron in a wall, Hang a line to verify the plumb From lintel, coping-stone and chimney-breast.

Relocate the bedrock in the threshold.

Take squarings from the recessed gable pane.

Make your study the unregarded floor.

Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.

iii Squarings? In the game of marbles, squarings Were all those anglings, aimings, feints and squints You were allowed before you'd shoot, all those Hunkerings, tensings, pressures of the thumb, Test-outs and pull-backs, re-envisagings, All the ways your arms kept hoping towards Blind certainties that were going to prevail Beyond the one-off moment of the pitch.

A million million accuracies pa.s.sed Between your muscles' outreach and that s.p.a.ce Marked with three round holes and a drawn line.

You squinted out from a skylight of the world.

v Three marble holes thumbed in the concrete road Before the concrete hardened still remained Three decades after the marble-player vanished Into Australia. Three stops to play The music of the arbitrary on.

Blow on them now and hear an undersong Your levelled breath made once going over The empty bottle. Improvise. Make free Like old hay in its flimsy afterlife High on a windblown hedge. Ocarina earth.

Three listening posts up on some hard-baked tier Above the resonating amphorae.

vi Once, as a child, out in a field of sheep, Thomas Hardy pretended to be dead And lay down flat among their dainty s.h.i.+ns.

In that sniffed-at, bleated-into, gra.s.sy s.p.a.ce He experimented with infinity.

His small cool brow was like an anvil waiting For sky to make it sing the perfect pitch Of his dumb being, and that stir he caused In the fleece-hustle was the original Of a ripple that would travel eighty years Outward from there, to be the same ripple Inside him at its last circ.u.mference.

vii (I misremembered. He went down on all fours, Florence Emily says, crossing a ewe-leaze.

Hardy sought the creatures face to face, Their witless eyes and liability To panic made him feel less alone, Made proleptic sorrow stand a moment Over him, perfectly known and sure.

And then the flock's dismay went swimming on Into the blinks and murmurs and deflections He'd know at parties in renowned old age When sometimes he imagined himself a ghost And circulated with that new perspective.) viii The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise Were all at prayers inside the oratory A s.h.i.+p appeared above them in the air.

The anchor dragged along behind so deep It hooked itself into the altar rails And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill, A crewman s.h.i.+nned and grappled down the rope And struggled to release it. But in vain.

'This man can't bear our life here and will drown,'

The abbot said, 'unless we help him.' So They did, the freed s.h.i.+p sailed, and the man climbed back Out of the marvellous as he had known it.

ix A boat that did not rock or wobble once Sat in long gra.s.s one Sunday afternoon In nineteen forty-one or two. The heat Out on Lough Neagh and in where cattle stood Jostling and skittering near the hedge Grew redolent of the tweed skirt and tweed sleeve I nursed on. I remember little treble Timber-notes their smart heels struck from planks, Me cradled in an elbow like a secret Open now as the eye of heaven was then Above three sisters talking, talking steady In a boat the ground still falls and falls from under.

x Overhang of gra.s.s and seedling birch On the quarry face. Rock-hob where you watched All that cargoed brightness travelling Above and beyond and sumptuously across The water in its clear deep dangerous holes On the quarry floor. Ultimate Fathomableness, ultimate Stony up-againstness: could you reconcile What was diaphanous there with what was ma.s.sive?

Were you equal to or were you opposite To build-ups so promiscuous and weightless?

s.h.i.+eld your eyes, look up and face the music.

xii And lightening? One meaning of that Beyond the usual sense of alleviation, Illumination, and so on, is this: A phenomenal instant when the spirit flares With pure exhilaration before death The good thief in us harking to the promise!

So paint him on Christ's right hand, on a promontory Scanning empty s.p.a.ce, so body-racked he seems Untranslatable into the bliss Ached for at the moon-rim of his forehead, By nail-craters on the dark side of his brain: This day thou shalt be with Me in Paradise.

Settings

xiii

Hazel stealth. A trickle in the culvert.

Athletic sealight on the doorstep slab, On the sea itself, on silent roofs and gables.

Whitewashed suntraps. Hedges hot as chimneys.

Chairs on all fours. A plate-rack braced and laden.

The fossil poetry of hob and slate.

Desire within its moat, dozing at ease Like a gorged cormorant on the rock at noon, Exiled and in tune with the big glitter.

Re-enter this as the adult of solitude, The silence-forder and the definite Presence you sensed withdrawing first time round.

xiv One afternoon I was seraph on gold leaf.