Opened Ground Part 32

Listen to the rain spit in new ashes As you heft a load of dust that was Magherafelt, Then reappear from your lorry as my mother's Dreamboat coalman filmed in silk-white ashes.

Damson

Gules and cement dust. A matte tacky blood

On the bricklayer's knuckles, like the damson stain That seeped through his packed lunch.

A full hod stood Against the mortared wall, his big bright trowel In his left hand (for once) was pointing down As he marvelled at his right, held high and raw: King of the castle, scaffold-stepper, shown Bleeding to the world.

Wound that I saw In glutinous colour fifty years ago Damson as omen, weird, a dream to read Is weeping with the held-at-arm's-length dead From everywhere and nowhere, here and now.

Over and over, the slur, the sc.r.a.pe and mix As he trowelled and retrowelled and laid down Courses of glum mortar. Then the bricks Jiggled and settled, tocked and tapped in line.

I loved especially the trowel's s.h.i.+ne, Its edge and apex always coming clean And brightening itself by mucking in.

It looked light but felt heavy as a weapon, Yet when he lifted it there was no strain.

It was all point and skim and float and glisten Until he washed and lapped it tight in sacking Like a cult blade that had to be kept hidden.

Ghosts with their tongues out for a lick of blood Are crowding up the ladder, all unhealed, And some of them still rigged in b.l.o.o.d.y gear.

Drive them back to the doorstep or the road Where they lay in their own blood once, in the hot Nausea and last gasp of dear life.

Trowel-wielder, woundie, drive them off Like Odysseus in Hades las.h.i.+ng out With his sword that dug the trench and cut the throat Of the sacrificial lamb.

But not like him Builder, not sacker, your s.h.i.+eld the mortar board Drive them back to the wine-dark taste of home, The smell of damsons simmering in a pot, Jam ladled thick and steaming down the sunlight.

Weighing In

The 56 lb weight. A solid iron

Unit of negation. Stamped and cast With an inset, rung-thick, moulded, short crossbar For a handle. Squared-off and harmless-looking Until you tried to lift it, then a socket-ripping, Life-belittling force Gravity's black box, the immovable Stamp and squat and square-root of dead weight.

Yet balance it Against another one placed on a weighbridge On a well-adjusted, freshly greased weighbridge And everything trembled, flowed with give and take.

And this is all the good tidings amount to: This principle of bearing, bearing up And bearing out, just having to Balance the intolerable in others Against our own, having to abide Whatever we settled for and settled into Against our better judgement. Pa.s.sive Suffering makes the world go round.

Peace on earth, men of good will, all that Holds good only as long as the balance holds, The scales ride steady and the angels' strain Prolongs itself at an unearthly pitch.

To refuse the other cheek. To cast the stone.

Not to do so some time, not to break with The obedient one you hurt yourself into Is to fail the hurt, the self, the ingrown rule.

Prophesy who struck thee! When soldiers mocked Blindfolded Jesus and he didn't strike back They were neither shamed nor edified, although Something was made manifest the power Of power not exercised, of hope inferred By the powerless forever. Still, for Jesus' sake, Do me a favour, would you, just this once?

Prophesy, give scandal, cast the stone.

Two sides to every question, yes, yes, yes ...

But every now and then, just weighing in Is what it must come down to, and without Any self-exculpation or self-pity.

Alas, one night when follow-through was called for And a quick hit would have fairly rankled, You countered that it was my narrowness That kept me keen, so got a first submission.

I held back when I should have drawn blood And that way (mea culpa) lost an edge.

A deep mistaken chivalry, old friend.

At this stage only foul play cleans the slate.

St Kevin and the Blackbird

And then there was St Kevin and the blackbird.

The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside His cell, but the cell is narrow, so One turned-up palm is out the window, stiff As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands And lays in it and settles down to nest.

Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked Into the network of eternal life, Is moved to pity: now he must hold his hand Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.

And since the whole thing's imagined anyhow, Imagine being Kevin. Which is he?

Self-forgetful or in agony all the time From the neck on out down through his hurting forearms?

Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees?

Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth Crept up through him? Is there distance in his head?

Alone and mirrored clear in love's deep river, 'To labour and not to seek reward,' he prays, A prayer his body makes entirely For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird And on the riverbank forgotten the river's name.

from The Flight Path

IV.

The following for the record, in the light Of everything before and since: One bright May morning, nineteen seventy-nine, Just off the red-eye special from New York, I'm on the train for Belfast. Plain, simple Exhilaration at being back: the sea At Skerries, the nuptial hawthorn bloom, The trip north taking sweet hold like a chain On every bodily sprocket.

Enter then As if he were some film noir border guard Enter this one I'd last met in a dream, More grimfaced now than in the dream itself When he'd flagged me down at the side of a mountain road, Come up and leant his elbow on the roof And explained through the open window of the car That all I'd have to do was drive a van Carefully in to the next customs post At Pettigo, switch off, get out as if I were on my way with dockets to the office But then instead I'd walk ten yards more down Towards the main street and get in with here Another schoolfriend's name, a wink and smile, I'd know him all right, he'd be in a Ford And I'd be home in three hours' time, as safe As houses ...

So he enters and sits down Opposite and goes for me head on.

'When, for f.u.c.k's sake, are you going to write Something for us? 'If I do write something, Whatever it is, I'll be writing for myself.'

And that was that. Or words to that effect.

The jail walls all those months were smeared with s.h.i.+te.

Out of Long Kesh after his dirty protest The red eyes were the eyes of Ciaran Nugent Like something out of Dante's scurfy h.e.l.l, Drilling their way through the rhymes and images Where I too walked behind the righteous Virgil, As safe as houses and translating freely: When he had said all this, his eyes rolled And his teeth, like a dog's teeth clamping round a bone, Bit into the skull and again took hold.

V.

When I answered that I came from 'far away', The policeman at the roadblock snapped, 'Where's that?'

He'd only half-heard what I said and thought It was the name of some place up the country.

And now it is both where I have been living And where I left a distance still to go Like starlight that is light years on the go From far away and takes light years arriving.

Mycenae Lookout for Cynthia and Dimitri Hadzi The ox is on my tongue Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1 THE WATCHMAN'S WAR

Some people wept, and not for sorrow joy

That the king had armed and upped and sailed for Troy, But inside me like struck sound in a gong That killing-fest, the life-warp and world-wrong It brought to pa.s.s, still augured and endured.

I'd dream of blood in bright webs in a ford, Of bodies raining down like tattered meat On top of me asleep and me the lookout The queen's command had posted and forgotten, The blind spot her farsightedness relied on.

And then the ox would lurch against the gong And deaden it and I would feel my tongue Like the dropped gangplank of a cattle truck, Trampled and rattled, running p.i.s.s and muck, All swimmy-trembly as the lick of fire, A victory beacon in an abattoir ...

Next thing then I would waken at a loss, For all the world a sheepdog stretched in gra.s.s, Exposed to what I knew, still honour-bound To concentrate attention out beyond The city and the border, on that line Where the blaze would leap the hills when Troy had fallen.

My sentry work was fate, a home to go to, An in-between-times that I had to row through Year after year: when the mist would start To lift off fields and inlets, when morning light Would open like the grain of light being split, Day in, day out, I'd come alive again, Silent and sunned as an esker on a plain, Up on my elbows, gazing, biding time In my outpost on the roof ... What was to come Out of that ten years' wait that was the war Flawed the black mirror of my frozen stare.

If a G.o.d of justice had reached down from heaven For a strong beam to hang his scale-pans on He would have found me tensed and ready-made.

I balanced between destiny and dread And saw it coming, clouds bloodshot with the red Of victory fires, the raw wound of that dawn Igniting and erupting, bearing down Like lava on a fleeing population ...

Up on my elbows, head back, shutting out The agony of Clytemnestra's love-shout That rose through the palace like the yell of troops Hurled by King Agamemnon from the s.h.i.+ps.

2 Ca.s.sandra No such thing as innocent bystanding.

Her soiled vest, her little b.r.e.a.s.t.s, her clipped, devast- ated, scabbed punk head, the char-eyed famine gawk she looked camp-f.u.c.ked and simple.

People could feel a missed trueness in them focus, a homecoming in her dropped-wing, half-calculating bewilderment.

No such thing as innocent.

Old King c.o.c.k- of-the-Walk was back, King Kill- the-Child- and-Take- What-Comes, King Agamem- non's drum- balled, old buck's stride was back.

And then her Greek words came, a lamb at lambing time, bleat of clair- voyant dread, the gene-hammer and tread of the roused G.o.d.

And the result- ant shock desire in bystanders to do it to her there and then.

Little rent c.u.n.t of their guilt: in she went to the knife, to the killer wife, to the net over her and her slaver, the Troy reaver, saying, 'A wipe of the sponge, that's it.

The shadow-hinge swings unpredict- ably and the light's blanked out.'

3 HIS DAWN VISION.