Opened Ground Part 14

And when she'd make her circuit of the ice, Aided and abetted by Virgil's wife, I would cry out, 'My sweet, who wears the bays In our green land above, whose is the life Most dedicated and exemplary?'

And she: 'I have closed my widowed ears To the sulphurous news of poets and poetry.

Why could you not have, oftener, in our years Unclenched, and come down laughing from your room And walked the twilight with me and your children Like that one evening of elder bloom And hay, when the wild roses were fading?'

And (as some maker gaffs me in the neck) 'You weren't the worst. You aspired to a kind, Indifferent, faults-on-both-sides tact.

You left us first, and then those books, behind.'

The Otter

When you plunged

The light of Tuscany wavered And swung through the pool From top to bottom.

I loved your wet head and smas.h.i.+ng crawl, Your fine swimmer's back and shoulders Surfacing and surfacing again This year and every year since.

I sat dry-throated on the warm stones.

You were beyond me.

The mellowed clarities, the grape-deep air Thinned and disappointed.

Thank G.o.d for the slow loadening, When I hold you now We are close and deep As the atmosphere on water.

My two hands are plumbed water.

You are my palpable, lithe Otter of memory In the pool of the moment, Turning to swim on your back, Each silent, thigh-shaking kick Retilting the light, Heaving the cool at your neck.

And suddenly you're out, Back again, intent as ever, Heavy and frisky in your freshened pelt, Printing the stones.

The Skunk

Up, black, striped and damasked like the chasuble

At a funeral Ma.s.s, the skunk's tail Paraded the skunk. Night after night I expected her like a visitor.

The refrigerator whinnied into silence.

My desk light softened beyond the verandah.

Small oranges loomed in the orange tree.

I began to be tense as a voyeur.

After eleven years I was composing Love-letters again, broaching the word 'wife'

Like a stored cask, as if its slender vowel Had mutated into the night earth and air Of California. The beautiful, useless Tang of eucalyptus spelt your absence.

The aftermath of a mouthful of wine Was like inhaling you off a cold pillow.

And there she was, the intent and glamorous, Ordinary, mysterious skunk, Mythologized, demythologized, Snuffing the boards five feet beyond me.

It all came back to me last night, stirred By the sootfall of your things at bedtime, Your head-down, tail-up hunt in a bottom drawer For the black plunge-line nightdress.

A Dream of Jealousy

Walking with you and another lady

In wooded parkland, the whispering gra.s.s Ran its fingers through our guessing silence And the trees opened into a shady Unexpected clearing where we sat down.

I think the candour of the light dismayed us.

We talked about desire and being jealous, Our conversation a loose single gown Or a white picnic tablecloth spread out Like a book of manners in the wilderness.

'Show me,' I said to our companion, 'what I have much coveted, your breast's mauve star.'

And she consented. Oh neither these verses Nor my prudence, love, can heal your wounded stare.

Field Work

I.

Where the sally tree went pale in every breeze, where the perfect eye of the nesting blackbird watched, where one fern was always green I was standing watching you take the pad from the gatehouse at the crossing and reach to lift a white wash off the whins.

I could see the vaccination mark stretched on your upper arm, and smell the coal smell of the train that comes between us, a slow goods, waggon after waggon full of big-eyed cattle.

II.

But your vaccination mark is on your thigh, an O that's healed into the bark.

Except a dryad's not a woman you are my wounded dryad in a mothering smell of wet and ring-wormed chestnuts.

Our moon was small and far, was a coin long gazed at brilliant on the Pequod's mast across Atlantic and Pacific waters.

III.

Not the mud slick, not the black weedy water full of alder cones and pock-marked leaves.

Not the cow parsley in winter with its old whitened s.h.i.+ns and wrists, its sibilance, its shaking.

Not even the tart green shade of summer thick with b.u.t.terflies and fungus plump as a leather saddle.

No. But in a still corner, braced to its pebble-dashed wall, heavy, earth-drawn, all mouth and eye, the sunflower, dreaming umber.

IV.

Catsp.i.s.s smell, the pink bloom open: I press a leaf of the flowering currant on the back of your hand for the tight slow burn of its sticky juice to prime your skin, and your veins to be crossed criss-cross with leaf-veins.

I lick my thumb and dip it in mould, I anoint the anointed leaf-shape. Mould blooms and pigments the back of your hand like a birthmark my umber one, you are stained, stained to perfection.

Song

A rowan like a lipsticked girl.

Between the by-road and the main road Alder trees at a wet and dripping distance Stand off among the rushes.

There are the mud-flowers of dialect And the immortelles of perfect pitch And that moment when the bird sings very close To the music of what happens.

Leavings

A soft whoosh, the sunset blaze

of straw on blackened stubble, a thatch-deep, freshening barbarous crimson burn I rode down England as they fired the crop that was the leavings of a crop, the smashed tow-coloured barley, down from Ely's Lady Chapel, the sweet tenor Latin forever banished, the sumptuous windows threshed clear by Thomas Cromwell.

Which circle does he tread, scalding on cobbles, each one a broken statue's head?

After midnight, after summer, to walk in a sparking field, to smell dew and ashes and start Will Brangwen's ghost from the hot soot a breaking sheaf of light, abroad in the hiss and clash of stooking.

The Harvest Bow

As you plaited the harvest bow

You implicated the mellowed silence in you In wheat that does not rust But brightens as it tightens twist by twist Into a knowable corona, A throwaway love-knot of straw.

Hands that aged round ashplants and cane sticks And lapped the spurs on a lifetime of gamec.o.c.ks Harked to their gift and worked with fine intent Until your fingers moved somnambulant: I tell and finger it like braille, Gleaning the unsaid off the palpable, And if I spy into its golden loops I see us walk between the railway slopes Into an evening of long gra.s.s and midges, Blue smoke straight up, old beds and ploughs in hedges, An auction notice on an outhouse wall You with a harvest bow in your lapel, Me with the fis.h.i.+ng rod, already homesick For the big lift of these evenings, as your stick Whacking the tips off weeds and bushes Beats out of time, and beats, but flushes Nothing: that original townland Still tongue-tied in the straw tied by your hand.

The end of art is peace Could be the motto of this frail device That I have pinned up on our deal dresser Like a drawn snare Slipped lately by the spirit of the corn Yet burnished by its pa.s.sage, and still warm.

In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge killed in France 31 July 1917

The bronze soldier hitches a bronze cape

That crumples stiffly in imagined wind No matter how the real winds buff and sweep His sudden hunkering run, forever craned Over Flanders. Helmet and haversack, The gun's firm slope from b.u.t.t to bayonet, The loyal, fallen names on the embossed plaque It all meant little to the worried pet I was in nineteen forty-six or seven, Gripping my Aunt Mary by the hand Along the Portstewart prom, then round the crescent To thread the Castle Walk out to the strand.