Opened Ground Part 5

Soundings.

II.

A man wading lost fields breaks the pane of flood: a flower of mud- water blooms up to his reflection like a cut swaying its red spoors through a basin.

His hands grub where the spade has uncastled sunken drills, an atlantis he depends on. So he is hooped to where he planted and sky and ground are running naturally among his arms that grope the cropping land.

III.

When rains were gathering there would be an all-night roaring off the ford.

Their world-schooled ear could monitor the usual confabulations, the race slabbering past the gable, the Moyola harping on its gravel beds: all spouts by daylight brimmed with their own airs and overflowed each barrel in long tresses.

I c.o.c.k my ear at an absence in the shared calling of blood arrives my need for antediluvian lore.

Soft voices of the dead are whispering by the sh.o.r.e that I would question (and for my children's sake) about crops rotted, river mud glazing the baked clay floor.

IV.

The tawny guttural water spells itself: Moyola is its own score and consort, bedding the locale in the utterance, reed music, an old chanter breathing its mists through vowels and history.

A swollen river, a mating call of sound rises to pleasure me, Dives, h.o.a.rder of common ground.

Toome

My mouth holds round

the soft blastings, Toome, Toome, as under the dislodged slab of the tongue I push into a souterrain prospecting what new in a hundred centuries'

loam, flints, musket-b.a.l.l.s, fragmented ware, torcs and fish-bones, till I am sleeved in alluvial mud that shelves suddenly under bogwater and tributaries, and elvers tail my hair.

Broagh

Riverback, the long rigs

ending in broad docken and a canopied pad down to the ford.

The garden mould bruised easily, the shower gathering in your heelmark was the black O in Broagh, its low tattoo among the windy boortrees and rhubarb-blades ended almost suddenly, like that last gh the strangers found difficult to manage.

Oracle

Hide in the hollow trunk

of the willow tree, its listening familiar, until, as usual, they cuckoo your name across the fields.

You can hear them draw the poles of stiles as they approach calling you out: small mouth and ear in a woody cleft, lobe and larynx of the mossy places.

The Backward Look

A stagger in air

as if a language failed, a sleight of wing.

A snipe's bleat is fleeing its nesting-ground into dialect, into variants, transliterations whirr on the nature reserves little goat of the air, of the evening, little goat of the frost.

It is his tail-feathers drumming elegies in the slipstream of wild goose and yellow bittern as he corkscrews away into the vaults that we live off, his flight through the sniper's eyrie, over twilit earthworks and wallsteads, disappearing among gleanings and leavings in the combs of a fieldworker's archive.

A New Song

I met a girl from Derrygarve

And the name, a lost potent musk, Recalled the river's long swerve, A kingfisher's blue bolt at dusk And stepping stones like black molars Sunk in the ford, the s.h.i.+fty glaze Of the whirlpool, the Moyola Pleasuring beneath alder trees.

And Derrygarve, I thought, was just: Vanished music, twilit water A smooth libation of the past Poured by this chance vestal daughter.

But now our river tongues must rise From licking deep in native haunts To flood, with vowelling embrace, Demesnes staked out in consonants.

And Castledawson we'll enlist And Upperlands, each planted bawn Like bleaching-greens resumed by gra.s.s A vocable, as rath and bullaun.

The Other Side

I.

Thigh-deep in sedge and marigolds, a neighbour laid his shadow on the stream, vouching 'It's as poor as Lazarus, that ground,'

and brushed away among the shaken leaf.a.ge.

I lay where his lea sloped to meet our fallow, nested on moss and rushes, my ear swallowing his fabulous, biblical dismissal, that tongue of chosen people.

When he would stand like that on the other side, white-haired, swinging his blackthorn at the marsh weeds, he prophesied above our scraggy acres, then turned away towards his promised furrows on the hill, a wake of pollen drifting to our bank, next season's tares.

II.

For days we would rehea.r.s.e each patriarchal dictum: Lazarus, the Pharaoh, Solomon and David and Goliath rolled magnificently, like loads of hay too big for our small lanes, or faltered on a rut 'Your side of the house, I believe, hardly rule by the Book at all.'

His brain was a whitewashed kitchen hung with texts, swept tidy as the body o' the kirk.

III.

Then sometimes when the rosary was dragging mournfully on in the kitchen we would hear his step round the gable though not until after the litany would the knock come to the door and the casual whistle strike up on the doorstep. 'A right-looking night,'

he might say, 'I was dandering by and says I, I might as well call.'

But now I stand behind him in the dark yard, in the moan of prayers.

He puts a hand in a pocket or taps a little tune with the blackthorn shyly, as if he were party to lovemaking or a stranger's weeping.

Should I slip away, I wonder, or go up and touch his shoulder and talk about the weather or the price of gra.s.s-seed?

Tinder (from A Northern h.o.a.rd)

We picked flints,

Pale and dirt-veined, So small finger and thumb Ached around them; Cold beads of history and home We fingered, a cave-mouth flame Of leaf and stick Trembling at the mind's wick.

We clicked stone on stone That sparked a weak flame-pollen And failed, our knuckle joints Striking as often as the flints.

What did we know then Of tinder, charred linen and iron, Huddled at dusk in a ring, Our fists shut, our hope shrunken?

What could strike a blaze From our dead igneous days?

Now we squat on cold cinder, Red-eyed, after the flames' soft thunder And our thoughts settle like ash.

We face the tundra's whistling brush With new history, flint and iron, Cast-offs, sc.r.a.ps, nail, canine.

The Tollund Man

I.

Some day I will go to Aarhus To see his peat-brown head, The mild pods of his eyelids, His pointed skin cap.

In the flat country nearby Where they dug him out, His last gruel of winter seeds Caked in his stomach, Naked except for The cap, noose and girdle, I will stand a long time.

Bridegroom to the G.o.ddess, She tightened her torc on him And opened her fen, Those dark juices working Him to a saint's kept body, Trove of the turfcutters'

Honeycombed workings.

Now his stained face Reposes at Aarhus.

II.

I could risk blasphemy, Consecrate the cauldron bog Our holy ground and pray Him to make germinate The scattered, ambushed Flesh of labourers, Stockinged corpses Laid out in the farmyards, Tell-tale skin and teeth Flecking the sleepers Of four young brothers, trailed For miles along the lines.

III.