Opened Ground by Seamus Heaney Page A

unforgettable,
                            unmentionable,
                            and broke out again like cattle
                            through bushes, wet and raised,
                            only yards from the house.
    III
                            Everywhere being nowhere,
                            who can prove
                            one place more than another?
                            We come back emptied,
                            to nourish and resist
                            the words of coming to rest:
                            birthplace, roofbeam, whitewash,
                            flagstone, hearth,
                            like unstacked iron weights
                            afloat among galaxies.
                            Still, was it thirty years ago
                            I read until first light
                            for the first time, to finish
                            The Return of the Native?
                            The corncrake in the aftergrass
                            verified himself, and I heard
                            roosters and dogs, the very same
                            as if he had written them.

Changes
    As you came with me in silence
    to the pump in the long grass
    I heard much that you could not hear:
    the bite of the spade that sank it,
    the slithering and grumble
    as the mason mixed his mortar,
    and women coming with white buckets
    like flashes on their ruffled wings.
    The cast-iron rims of the lid
    clinked as I uncovered it,
    something stirred in its mouth.
    I had a bird’s eye view of a bird,
    finch-green, speckly white,
    nesting on dry leaves, flattened, still,
    suffering the light.
    So I roofed the citadel
    as gently as I could, and told you
    and you gently unroofed it
    but where was the bird now?
    There was a single egg, pebbly white,

    and in the rusted bend of the spout
    tail feathers splayed and sat tight.
    So tender, I said, ‘Remember this.
    It will be good for you to retrace this path
    when you have grown away and stand at last
    at the very centre of the empty city.’

A Bat on the Road
    A batlike soul waking to consciousness of itself in darkness and secrecy and loneliness.
    You would hoist an old hat on the tines of a fork
    and trawl the mouth of the bridge for the slight
    bat-thump and flutter. Skinny downy webs,
    babynails clawing the sweatband … But don’t
    bring it down, don’t break its flight again,
    don’t deny it; this time let it go free.
    Follow its bat-flap under the stone bridge,
    under the Midland and Scottish Railway
    and lose it there in the dark.
    Next thing it shadows moonslicked laurels
    or skims the lapped net on a tennis court.
    Next thing it’s ahead of you in the road.
    What are you after? You keep swerving off,
    flying blind over ashpits and netting wire;
    invited by the brush of a word like peignoir,
    rustles and glimpses, shot silk, the stealth of floods
    So close to me I could hear her breathing
    and there by the lighted window behind trees
    it hangs in creepers matting the brickwork
    and now it’s a wet leaf blowing in the drive,
    now soft-deckled, shadow-convolvulus

    by the White Gates. Who would have thought it? At the White Gates
    She let them do whatever they liked. Cling there
    as long as you want. There is nothing to hide.

A Hazel Stick for Catherine Ann
    The living mother-of-pearl of a salmon
    just out of the water
    is gone just like that, but your stick
    is kept salmon-silver.
    Seasoned and bendy,
    it convinces the hand
    that