Opened Ground Part 31

The teacher let some big boys out at two

To gather sticks (In scanty nineteen forty-six) And even though I never was supposed to I wanted out as well. One afternoon I raised my hand With those free livers off the land And found myself at large an hour too soon Under a raggedy, hurrying sky On the road home.

If ever I felt 'heaven's dome'

Was what I lived beneath, it was that day I lied myself into my own desire, Displaced, afraid At what I'd dared to be ahead Of time. The black spot where the gypsies' fire Had charred the roadside gra.s.s, the rags that blew On the stripped hedge, The cold it put me all on edge.

Escape-joy died, one magpie rose and flew And left an emptiness I walked on through To come down to earth In my parents' gaze, the whole question of worth, And their knowledge that loved on without ado.

(1994).

from THE SPIRIT LEVEL (1995)

The Rain Stick

for Beth and Rand

Up-end the rain stick and what happens next

Is a music that you never would have known To listen for. In a cactus stalk Downpour, sluice-rush, spillage and backwash Come flowing through. You stand there like a pipe Being played by water, you shake it again lightly And diminuendo runs through all its scales Like a gutter stopping trickling. And now here comes A sprinkle of drops out of the freshened leaves, Then subtle little wets off gra.s.s and daisies; Then glitter-drizzle, almost-breaths of air.

Up-end the stick again. What happens next Is undiminished for having happened once, Twice, ten, a thousand times before.

Who cares if all the music that transpires Is the fall of grit or dry seeds through a cactus?

You are like a rich man entering heaven Through the ear of a raindrop. Listen now again.

Mint

It looked like a clump of small dusty nettles

Growing wild at the gable of the house Beyond where we dumped our refuse and old bottles: Unverdant ever, almost beneath notice.

But, to be fair, it also spelled promise And newness in the back yard of our life As if something callow yet tenacious Sauntered in green alleys and grew rife.

The snip of scissor blades, the light of Sunday Mornings when the mint was cut and loved: My last things will be first things slipping from me.

Yet let all things go free that have survived.

Let the smells of mint go heady and defenceless Like inmates liberated in that yard.

Like the disregarded ones we turned against Because we'd failed them by our disregard.

A Sofa in the Forties

All of us on the sofa in a line, kneeling

Behind each other, eldest down to youngest, Elbows going like pistons, for this was a train And between the jamb-wall and the bedroom door Our speed and distance were inestimable.

First we shunted, then we whistled, then Somebody collected the invisible For tickets and very gravely punched it As carnage after carnage under us Moved faster, chooka-chook, the sofa legs Went giddy and the unreachable ones Far out on the kitchen floor began to wave.

Ghost-train? Death-gondola? The carved, curved ends, Black leatherette and ornate gauntness of it Made it seem the sofa had achieved Flotation. Its castors on tiptoe, Its braid and fluent backboard gave it airs Of superannuated pageantry: When visitors endured it, straight-backed, When it stood off in its own remoteness, When the insufficient toys appeared on it On Christmas mornings, it held out as itself, Potentially heavenbound, earthbound for sure, Among things that might add up or let you down.

We entered history and ignorance Under the wireless shelf. Yippee-i-ay, Sang 'The Riders of the Range'. HERE IS THE NEWS, Said the absolute speaker. Between him and us A great gulf was fixed where p.r.o.nunciation Reigned tyrannically. The aerial wire Swept from a treetop down in through a hole Bored in the windowframe. When it moved in wind, The sway of language and its furtherings Swept and swayed in us like nets in water Or the abstract, lonely curve of distant trains As we entered history and ignorance.

We occupied our seats with all our might, Fit for the uncomfortableness.

Constancy was its own reward already.

Out in front, on the big upholstered arm, Somebody craned to the side, driver or Fireman, wiping his dry brow with the air Of one who had run the gauntlet. We were The last thing on his mind, it seemed; we sensed A tunnel coming up where we'd pour through Like unlit carriages through fields at night, Our only job to sit, eyes straight ahead, And be transported and make engine noise.

Keeping Going for Hugh

The piper coming from far away is you

With a whitewash brush for a sporran Wobbling round you, a kitchen chair Upside down on your shoulder, your right arm Pretending to tuck the bag beneath your elbow, Your pop-eyes and big cheeks nearly bursting With laughter, but keeping the drone going on Interminably, between catches of breath.

The whitewash brush. An old blanched skirted thing On the back of the byre door, biding its time Until spring airs spelled lime in a work-bucket And a potstick to mix it in with water.

Those smells brought tears to the eyes, we inhaled A kind of greeny burning and thought of brimstone.

But the slop of the actual job Of brus.h.i.+ng walls, the watery grey Being lashed on in broad swatches, then drying out Whiter and whiter, all that worked like magic.

Where had we come from, what was this kingdom We knew we'd been restored to? Our shadows Moved on the wall and a tar border glittered The full length of the house, a black divide Like a freshly opened, pungent, reeking trench.

p.i.s.s at the gable, the dead will congregate.

But separately. The women after dark, Hunkering there a moment before bedtime, The only time the soul was let alone, The only time that face and body calmed In the eye of heaven.

b.u.t.termilk and urine, The pantry, the housed beasts, the listening bedroom.

We were all together there in a foretime, In a knowledge that might not translate beyond Those wind-heaved midnights we still cannot be sure Happened or not. It smelled of hill-fort clay And cattle dung. When the thorn tree was cut down You broke your arm. I shared the dread When a strange bird perched for days on the byre roof.

That scene, with Macbeth helpless and desperate In his nightmare when he meets the hags again And sees the apparitions in the pot I felt at home with that one all right. Hearth, Steam and ululation, the smoky hair Curtaining a cheek. 'Don't go near bad boys In that college that you're bound for. Do you hear me?

Do you hear me speaking to you? Don't forget!'

And then the potstick quickening the gruel, The steam crown swirled, everything intimate And fear-swathed brightening for a moment, Then going dull and fatal and away.

Grey matter like gruel flecked with blood In spatters on the whitewash. A clean spot Where his head had been, other stains subsumed In the parched wall he leant his back against That morning like any other morning, Part-time reservist, toting his lunch-box.

A car came slow down Castle Street, made the halt, Crossed the Diamond, slowed again and stopped Level with him, although it was not his lift.

And then he saw an ordinary face For what it was and a gun in his own face.

His right leg was hooked back, his sole and heel Against the wall, his right knee propped up steady, So he never moved, just pushed with all his might Against himself, then fell past the tarred strip, Feeding the gutter with his copious blood.

My dear brother, you have good stamina.

You stay on where it happens. Your big tractor Pulls up at the Diamond, you wave at people, You shout and laugh above the revs, you keep Old roads open by driving on the new ones.

You called the piper's sporrans whitewash brushes And then dressed up and marched us through the kitchen.

But you cannot make the dead walk or right wrong.

I see you at the end of your tether sometimes, In the milking parlour, holding yourself up Between two cows until your turn goes past, Then coming to in the smell of dung again And wondering, is this all? As it was In the beginning, is now and shall be?

Then rubbing your eyes and seeing our old brush Up on the byre door, and keeping going.

Two Lorries

It's raining on black coal and warm wet ashes.

There are tyre-marks in the yard, Agnew's old lorry Has all its cribs down and Agnew the coalman With his Belfast accent's sweet-talking my mother.

Would she ever go to a film in Magherafelt?

But it's raining and he still has half the load To deliver farther on. This time the lode Our coal came from was silk-black, so the ashes Will be the silkiest white. The Magherafelt (Via Toomebridge) bus goes by. The half-stripped lorry With its emptied, folded coal-bags moves my mother: The tasty ways of a leather-ap.r.o.ned coalman!

And films no less! The conceit of a coalman ...

She goes back in and gets out the black lead And emery paper, this nineteen-forties mother, All business round her stove, half-wiping ashes With a backhand from her cheek as the bolted lorry Gets revved and turned and heads for Magherafelt And the last delivery. Oh, Magherafelt!

Oh, dream of red plush and a city coalman As time fastforwards and a different lorry Groans into shot, up Broad Street, with a payload That will blow the bus station to dust and ashes ...

After that happened, I'd a vision of my mother, A revenant on the bench where I would meet her In that cold-floored waiting-room in Magherafelt, Her shopping bags full up with shovelled ashes.

Death walked out past her like a dust-faced coalman Refolding body-bags, plying his load Empty upon empty, in a flurry Of motes and engine-revs, but which lorry Was it now? Young Agnew's or that other, Heavier, deadlier one, set to explode In a time beyond her time in Magherafelt ...

So tally bags and sweet-talk darkness, coalman.