Opened Ground Read Online Free PDF Page B

the railings,
    who would connive
    in civilized outrage
    yet understand the exact
    and tribal, intimate revenge.

Strange Fruit
    Here is the girl’s head like an exhumed gourd.
    Oval-faced, prune-skinned, prune-stones for teeth.
    They unswaddled the wet fern of her hair
    And made an exhibition of its coil,
    Let the air at her leathery beauty.
    Pash of tallow, perishable treasure:
    Her broken nose is dark as a turf clod,
    Her eyeholes blank as pools in the old workings.
    Diodorus Siculus confessed
    His gradual ease among the likes of this:
    Murdered, forgotten, nameless, terrible
    Beheaded girl, outstaring axe
    And beatification, outstaring
    What had begun to feel like reverence.

Kinship
    I
    Kinned by hieroglyphic
    peat on a spreadfield
    to the strangled victim,
    the love-nest in the bracken,
    I step through origins
    like a dog turning
    its memories of wilderness
    on the kitchen mat:
    the bog floor shakes,
    water cheeps and lisps
    as I walk down
    rushes and heather.
    I love this turf-face,
    its black incisions,
    the cooped secrets
    of process and ritual;
    I love the spring
    off the ground,
    each bank a gallows drop,
    each open pool
    the unstopped mouth
    of an urn, a moon-drinker,
    not to be sounded
    by the naked eye. 
    II
    Quagmire, swampland, morass:
    the slime kingdoms,
    domains of the cold-blooded,
    of mud pads and dirtied eggs.
    But bog
    meaning soft,
    the fall of windless rain,
    pupil of amber.
    Ruminant ground,
    digestion of mollusc
    and seed-pod,
    deep pollen-bin.
    Earth-pantry, bone-vault,
    sun-bank, embalmer
    of votive goods
    and sabred fugitives.
    Insatiable bride.
    Sword-swallower,
    casket, midden,
    floe of history.
    Ground that will strip
    its dark side,
    nesting ground,
    outback of my mind. 
    III
    I found a turf-spade
    hidden under bracken,
    laid flat, and overgrown
    with a green fog.
    As I raised it
    the soft lips of the growth
    muttered and split,
    a tawny rut
    opening at my feet
    like a shed skin,
    the shaft wettish
    as I sank it upright
    and beginning to
    steam in the sun.
    And now they have twinned
    that obelisk:
    among the stones,
    under a bearded cairn
    a love-nest is disturbed,
    catkin and bog-cotton tremble
    as they raise up
    the cloven oak-limb.
    I stand at the edge of centuries
    facing a goddess. 
    IV
    This centre holds
    and spreads,
    sump and seedbed,
    a bag of waters
    and a melting grave.
    The mothers of autumn
    sour and sink,
    ferments of husk and leaf
    deepen their ochres.
    Mosses come to a head,
    heather unseeds,
    brackens deposit
    their bronze.
    This is the vowel of earth
    dreaming its root
    in flowers and snow,
    mutation of weathers
    and seasons,
    a windfall composing
    the floor it rots into.
    I grew out of all this
    like a weeping willow
    inclined to
    the appetites of gravity. 
    V
    The hand-carved felloes
    of the turf-cart wheels
    buried in a litter
    of turf mould,
    the cupid’s bow
    of the tail-board,
    the socketed lips
    of the cribs:
    I deified the man
    who rode there,
    god of the waggon,
    the hearth-feeder.
    I was his privileged
    attendant, a bearer
    of bread and drink,
    the squire of his circuits.
    When summer died
    and wives forsook the fields
    we were abroad,
    saluted, given right-of-way.
    Watch our progress
    down the haw-lit hedges,
    my manly pride
    when he speaks to me. 
    VI
    And you, Tacitus,
    observe how I make my grove
    on an old crannog
    piled by the fearful dead:
    a desolate peace.
    Our mother ground
    is sour with the blood
    of her faithful,
    they lie gargling
    in her sacred heart
    as the legions stare
    from the ramparts.
    Come back to this
    ‘island of the ocean’
    where nothing will suffice.
    Read the inhumed faces
    of casualty and victim;
    report us fairly,
    how we slaughter
    for the common good

    and shave the heads
    of the notorious,
    how the goddess swallows
    our love and terror.

Act of Union
    I
    Tonight, a first movement, a pulse,
    As if the rain in bogland gathered head
    To slip and flood: a bog-burst,
    A gash breaking open the ferny bed.
    Your back is a firm line