Opened Ground by Seamus Heaney Page B

empty briar is swishing
    When I come down, and beyond, inside, your face
    Haunts like a new moon glimpsed through tangled glass.
     

    X
    I dreamt we slept in a moss in Donegal
    On turf banks under blankets, with our faces
    Exposed all night in a wetting drizzle,
    Pallid as the dripping sapling birches.
    Lorenzo and Jessica in a cold climate.
    Diarmuid and Grainne waiting to be found.
    Darkly asperged and censed, we were laid out
    Like breathing effigies on a raised ground.
    And in that dream I dreamt – how like you this?–
    Our first night years ago in that hotel
    When you came with your deliberate kiss
    To raise us towards the lovely and painful
    Covenants of flesh; our separateness;
    The respite in our dewy dreaming faces.

An Afterwards
    She would plunge all poets in the ninth circle
    And fix them, tooth in skull, tonguing for brain;
    For backbiting in life she’d make their hell
    A rabid egotistical daisy-chain.
    Unyielding, spurred, ambitious, unblunted,
    Lockjawed, mantrapped, each a fastened badger
    Jockeying for position, hasped and mounted
    Like Ugolino on Archbishop Roger.
    And when she’d make her circuit of the ice,
    Aided and abetted by Virgil’s wife,
    I would cry out, ‘My sweet, who wears the bays
    In our green land above, whose is the life
    Most dedicated and exemplary?’
    And she: ‘I have closed my widowed ears
    To the sulphurous news of poets and poetry.
    Why could you not have, oftener, in our years
    Unclenched, and come down laughing from your room
    And walked the twilight with me and your children –
    Like that one evening of elder bloom
    And hay, when the wild roses were fading?’
    And (as some maker gaffs me in the neck)
    ‘You weren’t the worst. You aspired to a kind,
    Indifferent, faults-on-both-sides tact.
    You left us first, and then those books, behind.’

The Otter
    When you plunged
    The light of Tuscany wavered
    And swung through the pool
    From top to bottom.
    I loved your wet head and smashing crawl,
    Your fine swimmer’s back and shoulders
    Surfacing and surfacing again
    This year and every year since.
    I sat dry-throated on the warm stones.
    You were beyond me.
    The mellowed clarities, the grape-deep air
    Thinned and disappointed.
    Thank God for the slow loadening,
    When I hold you now
    We are close and deep
    As the atmosphere on water.
    My two hands are plumbed water.
    You are my palpable, lithe
    Otter of memory
    In the pool of the moment,
    Turning to swim on your back,
    Each silent, thigh-shaking kick
    Retilting the light,
    Heaving the cool at your neck.

    And suddenly you’re out,
    Back again, intent as ever,
    Heavy and frisky in your freshened pelt,
    Printing the stones.

The Skunk
    Up, black, striped and damasked like the chasuble
    At a funeral Mass, the skunk’s tail
    Paraded the skunk. Night after night
    I expected her like a visitor.
    The refrigerator whinnied into silence.
    My desk light softened beyond the verandah.
    Small oranges loomed in the orange tree.
    I began to be tense as a voyeur.
    After eleven years I was composing
    Love-letters again, broaching the word ‘wife’
    Like a stored cask, as if its slender vowel
    Had mutated into the night earth and air
    Of California. The beautiful, useless
    Tang of eucalyptus spelt your absence.
    The aftermath of a mouthful of wine
    Was like inhaling you off a cold pillow.
    And there she was, the intent and glamorous,
    Ordinary, mysterious skunk,
    Mythologized, demythologized,
    Snuffing the boards five feet beyond me.
    It all came back to me last night, stirred
    By the sootfall of your things at bedtime,
    Your head-down, tail-up hunt in a bottom drawer
    For the black plunge-line nightdress.

A Dream of Jealousy
    Walking with you and another lady
    In wooded parkland, the whispering grass
    Ran its fingers through our guessing silence
    And the trees opened into a shady
    Unexpected clearing where we sat down.
    I think the candour of the light dismayed us.
    We talked about desire and being jealous,
    Our conversation a loose