Opened Ground Part 21

XI.

As if the prisms of the kaleidoscope I plunged once in a b.u.t.t of muddied water surfaced like a marvellous lights.h.i.+p and out of its silted crystals a monk's face that had spoken years ago from behind a grille spoke again about the need and chance to salvage everything, to re-envisage the zenith and glimpsed jewels of any gift mistakenly abased ...

What came to nothing could always be replenished.

'Read poems as prayers,' he said, 'and for your penance translate me something by Juan de la Cruz.'

Returned from Spain to our chapped wilderness, his consonants aspirate, his forehead s.h.i.+ning, he had made me feel there was nothing to confess.

Now his sandalled pa.s.sage stirred me on to this: How well I know that fountain, filling, running, although it is the night.

That eternal fountain, hidden away, I know its haven and its secrecy although it is the night.

But not its source because it does not have one, which is all sources' source and origin although it is the night.

No other thing can be so beautiful.

Here the earth and heaven drink their fill although it is the night.

So pellucid it never can be muddied, and I know that all light radiates from it although it is the night.

I know no sounding-line can find its bottom, n.o.body ford or plumb its deepest fathom although it is the night.

And its current so in flood it overspills to water h.e.l.l and heaven and all peoples although it is the night.

And the current that is generated there, as far as it wills to, it can flow that far although it is the night.

And from these two a third current proceeds which neither of these two, I know, precedes although it is the night.

This eternal fountain hides and splashes within this living bread that is life to us although it is the night.

Hear it calling out to every creature.

And they drink these waters, although it is dark here because it is the night.

I am repining for this living fountain.

Within this bread of life I see it plain although it is the night.

XII.

Like a convalescent, I took the hand stretched down from the jetty, sensed again an alien comfort as I stepped on ground to find the helping hand still gripping mine, fish-cold and bony, but whether to guide or to be guided I could not be certain for the tall man in step at my side seemed blind, though he walked straight as a rush upon his ashplant, his eyes fixed straight ahead.

Then I knew him in the flesh out there on the tarmac among the cars, wintered hard and sharp as a blackthorn bush.

His voice eddying with the vowels of all rivers came back to me, though he did not speak yet, a voice like a prosecutor's or a singer's, cunning, narcotic, mimic, definite as a steel nib's downstroke, quick and clean, and suddenly he hit a litter basket with his stick, saying, 'Your obligation is not discharged by any common rite.

What you do you must do on your own.

The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-l.u.s.t that imagines its haven like your hands at night dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.

You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.

Take off from here. And don't be so earnest, so ready for the sackcloth and the ashes.

Let go, let fly, forget.

You've listened long enough. Now strike your note.'

It was as if I had stepped free into s.p.a.ce alone with nothing that I had not known already. Raindrops blew in my face as I came to and heard the harangue and jeers going on and on. 'The English language belongs to us. You are raking at dead fires, rehearsing the old whinges at your age.

That subject people stuff is a cod's game, infantile, like this peasant pilgrimage.

You lose more of yourself than you redeem doing the decent thing. Keep at a tangent.

When they make the circle wide, it's time to swim out on your own and fill the element with signatures on your own frequency, echo-soundings, searches, probes, allurements, elver-gleams in the dark of the whole sea.'

The shower broke in a cloudburst, the tarmac fumed and sizzled. As he moved off quickly the downpour loosed its screens round his straight walk.

from Sweeney Redivivus

The First Gloss

Take hold of the shaft of the pen.

Subscribe to the first step taken from a justified line into the margin.

Sweeney Redivivus

I stirred wet sand and gathered myself

to climb the steep-flanked mound, my head like a ball of wet twine dense with soakage, but beginning to unwind.

Another smell was blowing off the river, bitter as night airs in a scutch mill.

The old trees were nowhere, the hedges thin as penwork and the whole enclosure lost under hard paths and sharp-ridged houses.

And there I was, incredible to myself, among people far too eager to believe me and my story, even if it happened to be true.

In the Beech

I was a lookout posted and forgotten.

On one side under me, the concrete road.

On the other, the bullocks' covert, the breath and plaster of a drinking place where the school-leaver discovered peace to touch himself in the reek of churned-up mud.

And the tree itself a strangeness and a comfort, as much a column as a bole. The very ivy puzzled its milk-tooth frills and tapers over the grain: was it bark or masonry?

I watched the red-brick chimney rear its stamen, course by course, and the steeplejacks up there at their antics like flies against the mountain.

I felt the tanks' advance beginning at the cynosure of the growth rings, then winced at their imperium refreshed in each powdered bolt-mark on the concrete.

And the pilot with his goggles back came in so low I could see the c.o.c.kpit rivets.

My hidebound boundary tree. My tree of knowledge.

My thick-tapped, soft-fledged, airy listening post.

The First Kingdom

The royal roads were cow paths.

The queen mother hunkered on a stool and played the harpstrings of milk into a wooden pail.

With seasoned sticks the n.o.bles lorded it over the hindquarters of cattle.

Units of measurement were pondered by the cartful, barrowful and bucketful.

Time was a backward rote of names and mishaps, bad harvests, fires, unfair settlements, deaths in floods, murders and miscarriages.

And if my rights to it all came only by their acclamation, what was it worth?

I blew hot and blew cold.

They were two-faced and accommodating.

And seed, breed and generation still they are holding on, every bit as pious and exacting and demeaned.

The First Flight

It was more sleepwalk than spasm

yet that was a time when the times were also in spasm the ties and the knots running through us split open down the lines of the grain.

As I drew close to pebbles and berries, the smell of wild garlic, relearning the acoustic of frost and the meaning of woodnote, my shadow over the field was only a spin-off, my empty place an excuse for s.h.i.+fts in the camp, old rehearsals of debts and betrayal.

Singly they came to the tree with a stone in each pocket to whistle and bill me back in and I would collide and cascade through leaves when they left, my point of repose knocked askew.

I was mired in attachment until they began to p.r.o.nounce me a feeder off battlefields so I mastered new rungs of the air to survey out of reach their bonfires on hills, their hosting and fasting, the levies from Scotland as always, and the people of art diverting their rhythmical chants to fend off the onslaught of winds I would welcome and climb at the top of my bent.

Drifting Off

The guttersnipe and the albatross

gliding for days without a single wingbeat were equally beyond me.