Opened Ground by Seamus Heaney

carcasses
    the badgers have come back.
    One that grew notorious
    lay untouched in the roadside.
    Last night one had me braking
    but more in fear than in honour.

    Cool from the sett and redolent
    of his runs under the night,
    the bogey of fern country
    broke cover in me
    for what he is:
    pig family
    and not at all what he’s painted.
    How perilous is it to choose
    not to love the life we’re shown?
    His sturdy dirty body
    and interloping grovel.
    The intelligence in his bone.
    The unquestionable houseboy’s shoulders
    that could have been my own.

The Singer’s House
    When they said Carrickfergus I could hear
    the frosty echo of saltminers’ picks.
    I imagined it, chambered and glinting,
    a township built of light.
    What do we say any more
    to conjure the salt of our earth?
    So much comes and is gone
    that should be crystal and kept,
    and amicable weathers
    that bring up the grain of things,
    their tang of season and store,
    are all the packing we’ll get.
    So I say to myself Gweebarra
    and its music hits off the place
    like water hitting off granite.
    I see the glittering sound
    framed in your window,
    knives and forks set on oilcloth,
    and the seals’ heads, suddenly outlined,
    scanning everything.
    People here used to believe
    that drowned souls lived in the seals.
    At spring tides they might change shape.
    They loved music and swam in for a singer

    who might stand at the end of summer
    in the mouth of a whitewashed turf-shed,
    his shoulder to the jamb, his song
    a rowboat far out in evening.
    When I came here first you were always singing,
    a hint of the clip of the pick
    in your winnowing climb and attack.
    Raise it again, man. We still believe what we hear.

The Guttural Muse
    Late summer, and at midnight
    I smelt the heat of the day:
    At my window over the hotel car park
    I breathed the muddied night airs off the lake
    And watched a young crowd leave the discotheque.
    Their voices rose up thick and comforting
    As oily bubbles the feeding tench sent up
    That evening at dusk – the slimy tench
    Once called the ‘doctor fish’ because his slime
    Was said to heal the wounds of fish that touched it.
    A girl in a white dress
    Was being courted out among the cars:
    As her voice swarmed and puddled into laughs
    I felt like some old pike all badged with sores
    Wanting to swim in touch with soft-mouthed life.

Glanmore Sonnets
    for Ann Saddlemyer
    ‘our heartiest welcomer’
    I
    Vowels ploughed into other: opened ground.
    The mildest February for twenty years
    Is mist bands over furrows, a deep no sound
    Vulnerable to distant gargling tractors.
    Our road is steaming, the turned-up acres breathe.
    Now the good life could be to cross a field
    And art a paradigm of earth new from the lathe
    Of ploughs. My lea is deeply tilled.
    Old plough-socks gorge the subsoil of each sense
    And I am quickened with a redolence
    Of farmland as a dark unblown rose.
    Wait then … Breasting the mist, in sowers’ aprons,
    My ghosts come striding into their spring stations.
    The dream grain whirls like freakish Easter snows.
     

    II
    Sensings, mountings from the hiding places,
    Words entering almost the sense of touch,
    Ferreting themselves out of their dark hutch –
    ‘These things are not secrets but mysteries,’
    Oisin Kelly told me years ago
    In Belfast, hankering after stone
    That connived with the chisel, as if the grain
    Remembered what the mallet tapped to know.
    Then I landed in the hedge-school of Glanmore
    And from the backs of ditches hoped to raise
    A voice caught back off slug-horn and slow chanter
    That might continue, hold, dispel, appease:
    Vowels ploughed into other, opened ground,
    Each verse returning like the plough turned round.
     

    III
    This evening the cuckoo and the corncrake
    (So much, too much) consorted at twilight.
    It was all crepuscular and iambic.
    Out on the field a baby rabbit
    Took his bearings, and I knew the deer
    (I’ve seen them too from the window of the house,
    Like connoisseurs,