You"ll know them if I can get them true.
They kneel under the hedge in a half-circle Behind a windbreak wind is breaking through.
They are the seed cutters. The tuck and frill Of leaf-sprout is on the seed potatoes Buried under that straw. With time to kill, They are taking their time. Each sharp knife goes Lazily halving each root that falls apart In the palm of the hand: a milky gleam, And, at the centre, a dark watermark.
Oh, calendar customs! Under the broom Yellowing over them, compose the frieze With all of us there, our anonymities.
Funeral Rites
I.
I shouldered a kind of manhood stepping in to lift the coffins of dead relations.
They had been laid out in tainted rooms, their eyelids glistening, their dough-white hands shackled in rosary beads.
Their puffed knuckles had unwrinkled, the nails were darkened, the wrists obediently sloped.
The dulse-brown shroud, the quilted satin cribs: I knelt courteously admiring it all as wax melted down and veined the candles, the flames hovering to the women hovering behind me.
And always, in a corner, the coffin lid, its nail-heads dressed with little gleaming crosses.
Dear soapstone masks, kissing their igloo brows had to suffice before the nails were sunk and the black glacier of each funeral pushed away.
II.
Now as news comes in of each neighbourly murder we pine for ceremony, customary rhythms: the temperate footsteps of a cortege, winding past each blinded home.
I would restore the great chambers of Boyne, prepare a sepulchre under the cupmarked stones.
Out of side-streets and by-roads purring family cars nose into line, the whole country tunes to the m.u.f.fled drumming of ten thousand engines.
Somnambulant women, left behind, move through emptied kitchens imagining our slow triumph towards the mounds.
Quiet as a serpent in its gra.s.sy boulevard, the procession drags its tail out of the Gap of the North as its head already enters the megalithic doorway.
III.
When they have put the stone back in its mouth we will drive north again past Strang and Carling fjords, the cud of memory allayed for once, arbitration of the feud placated, imagining those under the hill disposed like Gunnar who lay beautiful inside his burial mound, though dead by violence and unavenged.
Men said that he was chanting verses about honour and that four lights burned in corners of the chamber: which opened then, as he turned with a joyful face to look at the moon.
North
I returned to a long strand,
the hammered curve of a bay, and found only the secular powers of the Atlantic thundering.
I faced the unmagical invitations of Iceland, the pathetic colonies of Greenland, and suddenly those fabulous raiders, those lying in Orkney and Dublin measured against their long swords rusting, those in the solid belly of stone ships, those hacked and glinting in the gravel of thawed streams were ocean-deafened voices warning me, lifted again in violence and epiphany.
The longship"s swimming tongue was buoyant with hindsight it said Thor"s hammer swung to geography and trade, thick-witted couplings and revenges, the hatreds and behind-backs of the althing, lies and women, exhaustions nominated peace, memory incubating the spilled blood.
It said, "Lie down in the word-h.o.a.rd, burrow the coil and gleam of your furrowed brain.
Compose in darkness.
Expect aurora borealis in the long foray but no cascade of light.
Keep your eye clear as the bleb of the icicle, trust the feel of what nubbed treasure your hands have known."
Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces
I.
It could be a jaw-bone or a rib or a portion cut from something st.u.r.dier: anyhow, a small outline was incised, a cage or trellis to conjure in.
Like a child"s tongue following the toils of his calligraphy, like an eel swallowed in a basket of eels, the line amazes itself eluding the hand that fed it, a bill in flight, a swimming nostril.
II.
These are trial pieces, the craft"s mystery improvised on bone: foliage, bestiaries, interlacings elaborate as the netted routes of ancestry and trade.
That have to be magnified on display so that the nostril is a migrant prow sniffing the Liffey, swanning it up to the ford, dissembling itself in antler combs, bone pins, coins, weights, scale-pans.
III.
Like a long sword sheathed in its moisting burial clays, the keel stuck fast in the slip of the bank, its clinker-built hull spined and plosive as Dublin.
And now we reach in for shards of the vertebrae, the ribs of hurdle, the mother-wet caches and for this trial piece incised by a child, a longship, a buoyant migrant line.
IV.
That enters my longhand, turns cursive, unscarfing a zoomorphic wake, a worm of thought I follow into the mud.
I am Hamlet the Dane, skull-handler, parablist, smeller of rot in the state, infused with its poisons, pinioned by ghosts and affections, murders and pieties, coming to consciousness by jumping in graves, dithering, blathering.
V.
Come fly with me, come sniff the wind with the expertise of the Vikings neighbourly, scoretaking killers, haggers and hagglers, gombeen-men, h.o.a.rders of grudges and gain.
With a butcher"s aplomb they spread out your lungs and made you warm wings for your shoulders.
Old fathers, be with us.
Old cunning a.s.sessors of feuds and of sites for ambush or town.
VI.
"Did you ever hear tell,"
said Jimmy Farrell, "of the skulls they have in the city of Dublin?
White skulls and black skulls and yellow skulls, and some with full teeth, and some haven"t only but one,"
and compounded history in the pan of "an old Dane, maybe, was drowned in the Flood."
My words lick around cobbled quays, go hunting lightly as pampooties over the skull-capped ground.
Bone Dreams
I.
White bone found on the grazing: the rough, porous language of touch and its yellowing, ribbed impression in the gra.s.s a small ship-burial.
As dead as stone, flint-find, nugget of chalk, I touch it again, I wind it in the sling of mind to pitch it at England and follow its drop to strange fields.
II.
Bone-house: a skeleton in the tongue"s old dungeons.
I push back through dictions, Elizabethan canopies, Norman devices, the erotic mayflowers of Provence and the ivied Latins of churchmen to the scop"s tw.a.n.g, the iron flash of consonants cleaving the line.
III.
In the coffered riches of grammar and declensions I found bn-hs, its fire, benches, wattle and rafters, where the soul fluttered a while in the roofs.p.a.ce.
There was a small crock for the brain, and a cauldron of generation swung at the centre: love-den, blood-holt, dream-bower.
IV.
Come back past philology and kennings, re-enter memory where the bone"s lair is a love-nest in the gra.s.s.
I hold my lady"s head like a crystal and ossify myself by gazing: I am screes on her escarpments, a chalk giant carved upon her downs.
Soon my hands, on the sunken fosse of her spine, move towards the pa.s.ses.
V.
And we end up cradling each other between the lips of an earthwork.
As I estimate for pleasure her knuckles" paving, the turning stiles of the elbows, the vallum of her brow and the long wicket of collar-bone, I have begun to pace the Hadrian"s Wall of her shoulder, dreaming of Maiden Castle.
VI.
One morning in Devon I found a dead mole with the dew still beading it.
I had thought the mole a big-boned coulter but there it was, small and cold as the thick of a chisel.
I was told, "Blow, blow back the fur on his head.
Those little points were the eyes.
And feel the shoulders."
I touched small distant Pennines, a pelt of gra.s.s and grain running south.
Bog Queen
I lay waiting