Opened Ground Part 33

Cities of gra.s.s. Fort walls. The dumbstruck palace.

I'd come to with the night wind on my face, Agog, alert again, but far, far less Focused on victory than I should have been Still isolated in my old disdain Of claques who always needed to be seen And heard as the true Argives. Mouth athletes, Quoting the oracle and quoting dates, Pet.i.tioning, accusing, taking votes.

No element that should have carried weight Out of the grievous distance would translate.

Our war stalled in the pre-articulate.

The little violets' heads bowed on their sterns, The pre-dawn gossamers, all dew and scrim And star-lace, it was more through them I felt the beating of the huge time-wound We lived inside. My soul wept in my hand When I would touch them, my whole being rained Down on myself, I saw cities of gra.s.s, Valleys of longing, tombs, a windswept brightness, And far off, in a hilly, ominous place, Small crowds of people watching as a man Jumped a fresh earth-wall and another ran Amorously, it seemed, to strike him down.

4 THE NIGHTS.

They both needed to talk,

pretending what they needed was my advice. Behind backs each one of them confided it was s.e.xual overload every time they did it and indeed from the beginning (a child could have hardly missed it) their real life was the bed.

The king should have been told, but who was there to tell him if not myself? I willed them to cease and break the hold of my cross-purposed silence but still kept on, all smiles to Aegisthus every morning, much favoured and self-loathing.

The roof was like an eardrum.

The ox's tons of dumb inertia stood, head-down and motionless as a herm.

Atlas, watchmen's patron, would come into my mind, the only other one up at all hours, ox-bowed under his yoke of cloud out there at the world's end.

The loft-floor where the G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses took lovers and made out endlessly successfully, those thuds and moans through the cloud cover were wholly on his shoulders.

Sometimes I thought of us apotheosized to boulders called Aphrodite's Pillars.

High and low in those days. .h.i.t their stride together.

When the captains in the horse felt Helen's hand caress its wooden boards and belly they nearly rode each other.

But in the end Troy's mothers bore their brunt in alley, bloodied cot and bed.

The war put all men mad, horned, horsed or roof-posted, the boasting and the bested.

My own mind was a bull-pen where horned King Agamemnon had stamped his weight in gold.

But when hills broke into flame and the queen wailed on and came, it was the king I sold.

I moved beyond bad faith: for his bullion bars, his bonus was a rope-net and a bloodbath.

And the peace had come upon us.

5 HIS REVERIE OF WATER.

At Troy, at Athens, what I most clearly

see and nearly smell is the fresh water.

A filled bath, still unentered and unstained, waiting behind housewalls that the far cries of the butchered on the plain keep dying into, until the hero comes surging in incomprehensibly to be attended to and be alone, stripped to the skin, blood-plastered, moaning and rocking, splas.h.i.+ng, dozing off, accommodated as if he were a stranger.

And the well at Athens too.

Or rather that old lifeline leading up and down from the Acropolis to the well itself, a set of timber steps slatted in between the sheer cliff face and a free-standing, covering spur of rock, secret staircase the defenders knew and the invaders found, where what was to be Greek met Greek, the ladder of the future and the past, besieger and besieged, the treadmill of a.s.sault turned waterwheel, the rungs of stealth and habit all the one bare foot extended, searching.

And then this ladder of our own that ran deep into a well-shaft being sunk in broad daylight, men puddling at the source through tawny mud, then coming back up deeper in themselves for having been there, like discharged soldiers testing the safe ground, finders, keepers, seers of fresh water in the bountiful round mouths of iron pumps and gus.h.i.+ng taps.

The Gravel Walks

River gravel. In the beginning, that.

High summer, and the angler's motorbike Deep in roadside flowers, like a fallen knight Whose ghost we'd lately questioned: 'Any luck?'

As the engines of the world prepared, green nuts Dangled and cl.u.s.tered closer to the whirlpool.

The trees dipped down. The flints and sandstone-bits Worked themselves smooth and smaller in a sparkle Of shallow, hurrying barley-sugar water Where minnows schooled that we scared when we played An eternity that ended once a tractor Dropped its link-box in the gravel bed And cement mixers began to come to life And men in dungarees, like captive shades, Mixed concrete, loaded, wheeled, turned, wheeled, as if The Pharaoh's brickyards burned inside their heads.

h.o.a.rd and praise the verity of gravel.

Gems for the undeluded. Milt of earth.

Its plain, champing song against the shovel Soundtests and sandblasts words like 'honest worth'.

Beautiful in or out of the river, The kingdom of gravel was inside you too Deep down, far back, clear water running over Pebbles of caramel, hailstone, mackerel-blue.

But the actual washed stuff kept you slow and steady As you went stooping with your barrow full Into an absolution of the body, The shriven life tired bones and marrow feel.

So walk on air against your better judgement Establis.h.i.+ng yourself somewhere in between Those solid batches mixed with grey cement And a tune called 'The Gravel Walks' that conjures green.

Whitby-sur-Moyola

Caedmon too I was lucky to have known,

Back in situ there with his full bucket And armfuls of clean straw, the perfect yardman, Unabsorbed in what he had to do But doing it perfectly, and watching you.

He had worked his angel stint. He was hard as nails And all that time he'd been poeting with the harp His real gift was the big ignorant roar He could still let out of him, just bogging in As if the sacred subjects were a herd That had broken out and needed rounding up.

I never saw him once with his hands joined Unless it was a case of eyes to heaven And the quick sniff and test of fingertips After he'd pa.s.sed them through a sick beast's water.

Oh, Caedmon was the real thing all right.

'Poet's Chair'

for Carolyn Mulholland Leonardo said: the sun has never Seen a shadow. Now watch the sculptor move Full circle round her next work, like a lover In the sphere of s.h.i.+fting angles and fixed love.

I.

Angling shadows of itself are what Your 'Poet's Chair' stands to and rises out of In its sun-stalked inner-city courtyard.

On the qui vive all the time, its four legs land On their feet cat's-foot, goat-foot, big soft splay-foot too; Its straight back sprouts two bronze and leafy saplings.

Every flibbertigibbet in the town, Old birds and boozers, late-night p.i.s.sers, kissers, All have a go at sitting on it some time.

It's the way the air behind them's winged and full, The way a graft has seized their shoulder-blades That makes them happy. Once out of nature, They're going to come back in leaf and bloom And angel step. Or something like that. Leaves On a b.l.o.o.d.y chair! Would you believe it?

II.

Next thing I see the chair in a white prison With Socrates sitting on it, bald as a coot, Discoursing in bright sunlight with his friends.

His time is short. The day his trial began A verdant boat sailed for Apollo's shrine In Delos, for the annual rite Of commemoration. Until its wreathed And creepered rigging re-enters Athens Harbour, the city's life is holy.

No executions. No hemlock bowl. No tears And none now as the poison does its work And the expert jailer talks the company through The stages of the numbness. Socrates At the centre of the city and the day Has proved the soul immortal. The bronze leaves Cannot believe their ears, it is so silent.

Soon Crito will have to close his eyes and mouth, But for the moment everything's an ache Deferred, foreknown, imagined and most real.

III.

My father's ploughing one, two, three, four sides Of the lea ground where I sit all-seeing At centre field, my back to the thorn tree They never cut. The horses are all hoof And burnished flank, I am all foreknowledge.

Of the poem as a ploughshare that turns time Up and over. Of the chair in leaf The fairy thorn is entering for the future.

Of being here for good in every sense.

The Swing

Fingertips just tipping you would send you

Every bit as far once you got going As a big push in the back.

Sooner or later, We all learned one by one to go sky high, Backward and forward in the open shed, Toeing and rowing and jack-knifing through air.

Not Fragonard. Nor Brueghel. It was more Hans Memling's light of heaven off green gra.s.s, Light over fields and hedges, the shed-mouth Sunstruck and expectant, the bedding-straw Piled to one side, like a Nativity Foreground and background waiting for the figures.

And then, in the middle ground, the swing itself With an old lopsided sack in the loop of it, Perfectly still, hanging like pulley-slack, A lure let down to tempt the soul to rise.

Even so, we favoured the earthbound. She Sat there as majestic as an empress Steeping her swollen feet one at a time In the enamel basin, feeding it Every now and again with an opulent Steaming arc from a kettle on the floor Beside her. The plout of that was music To our ears, her smile a mitigation.