Opened Ground Part 27

CHORUS.

I have opened the closed road Between the living and the dead To make the right road clear to you.

I am the voice of Hercules now.

Here on earth my labours were The stepping stones to upper air.

Lives that suffer and come right Are backlit by immortal light.

Go, Philoctetes, with this boy, Go and be cured and capture Troy.

Asclepius will make you whole, Relieve your body and your soul.

Go, with your bow. Conclude the sore And cruel stalemate of our war.

Win by fair combat. But know to shun Reprisal killings when that's done.

Then take just spoils and sail at last Out of the bad dream of your past.

Make sacrifice. Burn spoils to me.

Shoot arrows in my memory.

But when the city's being sacked Preserve the shrines. Show G.o.ds respect.

Reverence for G.o.ds survives Our individual mortal lives.

V.

CHORUS.

Now it's high watermark And floodtide in the heart And time to go.

The sea-nymphs in the spray Will be the chorus now.

What's left to say?

Suspect too much sweet talk But never close your mind.

It was a fortunate wind That blew me here. I leave Half-ready to believe That a crippled trust might walk And the half-true rhyme is love.

from SEEING THINGS (1991)

The Golden Bough

(from Virgil, Aeneid, Book VI)

Aeneas was praying and holding on the altar

When the prophetess started to speak: 'Blood relation of G.o.ds, Trojan, son of Anchises, the way down to Avernus is easy.

Day and night black Pluto's door stands open.

But to retrace your steps and get back to upper air, This is the real task and the real undertaking.

A few have been able to do it, sons of the G.o.ds Favoured by Jupiter Justus, or exalted to heaven In a blaze of heroic glory. Forests spread half-way down And Cocytus winds through the dark, licking its banks.

Still, if love torments you so much and you so much desire To sail the Stygian lake twice and twice to inspect The underworld dark, if you must go beyond what's permitted, Understand what you must do beforehand.

Hidden in the thick of a tree is a bough made of gold And its leaves and pliable twigs are made of it too.

It is sacred to underworld Juno, who is its patron, And overtopped by a grove where deep shadows ma.s.s Along far wooded valleys. No one is ever permitted To go down into earth's hidden places unless he has first Plucked this golden-fledged tree-branch out of its tree And bestowed it on fair Proserpina, to whom it belongs By decree, her own special gift. And when it is plucked A second one grows in its place, golden once more, And the foliage growing upon it glimmers the same.

Therefore look up and search deep and when you have found it Take hold of it boldly and duly. If fate has called you The bough will come away easily, of its own sweet accord.

Otherwise, no matter how much strength you muster, you won't Ever manage to quell it or fell it with the toughest of blades.'

Markings

I.

We marked the pitch: four jackets for four goalposts, That was all. The corners and the squares Were there like longitude and lat.i.tude Under the b.u.mpy ground, to be Agreed about or disagreed about When the time came. And then we picked the teams And crossed the line our called names drew between us.

Youngsters shouting their heads off in a field As the light died and they kept on playing Because by then they were playing in their heads And the actual kicked ball came to them Like a dream heaviness, and their own hard Breathing in the dark and skids on gra.s.s Sounded like effort in another world ...

It was quick and constant, a game that never need Be played out. Some limit had been pa.s.sed, There was fleetness, furtherance, untiredness In time that was extra, unforeseen and free.

II.

You also loved lines pegged out in the garden, The spade nicking the first straight edge along The tight white string. Or string stretched perfectly To make the outline of a house foundation, Pale timber battens set at right angles For every corner, each freshly sawn new board Spick and span in the oddly pa.s.sive gra.s.s.

Or the imaginary line straight down A field of grazing, to be ploughed open From the rod stuck in one headrig to the rod Stuck in the other.

III.

All these things entered you As if they were both the door and what came through it.

They marked the spot, marked time and held it open.

A mower parted the bronze sea of corn.

A windla.s.s hauled the centre out of water.

Two men with a cross-cut kept it swimming Into a felled beech backwards and forwards So that they seemed to row the steady earth.

Man and Boy

I.

'Catch the old one first,'

(My father's joke was also old, and heavy And predictable). 'Then the young ones Will all follow, and Bob's your uncle.'

On slow bright river evenings, the sweet time Made him afraid we'd take too much for granted And so our spirits must be lightly checked.

Blessed be down-to-earth! Blessed be highs!

Blessed be the detachment of dumb love In that broad-backed, low-set man Who feared debt all his life, but now and then Could make a splash like the salmon he said was 'As big as a wee pork pig by the sound of it'.

II.

In earshot of the pool where the salmon jumped Back through its own unheard concentric soundwaves A mower leans forever on his scythe.

He has mown himself to the centre of the field And stands in a final perfect ring Of sunlit stubble.

'Go and tell your father,' the mower says (He said it to my father who told me), 'I have it mowed as clean as a new sixpence.'

My father is a barefoot boy with news, Running at eye-level with weeds and stooks On the afternoon of his own father's death.

The open, black half of the half-door waits.

I feel much heat and hurry in the air.

I feel his legs and quick heels far away And strange as my own when he will piggyback me At a great height, light-headed and thin-boned, Like a witless elder rescued from the fire.

Seeing Things

I.

Inishbofin on a Sunday morning.

Sunlight, turfsmoke, seagulls, boatslip, diesel.

One by one we were being handed down Into a boat that dipped and s.h.i.+lly-shallied Scaresomely every time. We sat tight On short cross-benches, in nervous twos and threes, Obedient, newly close, n.o.body speaking Except the boatmen, as the gunwales sank And seemed they might s.h.i.+p water any minute.

The sea was very calm but even so, When the engine kicked and our ferryman Swayed for balance, reaching for the tiller, I panicked at the s.h.i.+ftiness and heft Of the craft itself. What guaranteed us That quick response and buoyancy and swim Kept me in agony. All the time As we went sailing evenly across The deep, still, seeable-down-into water, It was as if I looked from another boat Sailing through air, far up, and could see How riskily we fared into the morning, And loved in vain our bare, bowed, numbered heads.

II.

Claritas. The dry-eyed Latin word Is perfect for the carved stone of the water Where Jesus stands up to his unwet knees And John the Baptist pours out more water Over his head: all this in bright sunlight On the facade of a cathedral. Lines Hard and thin and sinuous represent The flowing river. Down between the lines Little antic fish are all go. Nothing else.

And yet in that utter visibility The stone's alive with what's invisible: Waterweed, stirred sand-grains hurrying off, The shadowy, unshadowed stream itself.

All afternoon, heat wavered on the steps And the air we stood up to our eyes in wavered Like the zig-zag hieroglyph for life itself.

III.

Once upon a time my undrowned father Walked into our yard. He had gone to spray Potatoes in a field on the riverbank And wouldn't bring me with him. The horse-sprayer Was too big and new-fangled, bluestone might Burn me in the eyes, the horse was fresh, I Might scare the horse, and so on. I threw stones At a bird on the shed roof, as much for The clatter of the stones as anything, But when he came back, I was inside the house And saw him out the window, scatter-eyed And daunted, strange without his hat, His step unguided, his ghosthood immanent.

When he was turning on the riverbank, The horse had rusted and reared up and pitched Cart and sprayer and everything off balance So the whole rig went over into a deep Whirlpool, hoofs, chains, shafts, cartwheels, barrel And tackle, all tumbling off the world, And the hat already merrily swept along The quieter reaches. That afternoon I saw him face to face, he came to me With his damp footprints out of the river, And there was nothing between us there That might not still be happily ever after.

An August Night

His hands were warm and small and knowledgeable.