New and Selected Poems (7 page)

IV

 

Come back past

philology and kennings,

re-enter memory

where the bone’s lair

   

 

is a love-nest

in the grass.

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 passes.

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 grass and grain

running south.

I lay waiting

between turf-face and demesne wall,

between heathery levels

and glass-toothed stone.

   

 

My body was braille

for the creeping influences:

dawn suns groped over my head

and cooled at my feet,

   

 

through my fabrics and skins

the seeps of winter

digested me,

the illiterate roots

   

 

pondered and died

in the cavings

of stomach and socket.

I lay waiting

   

 

on the gravel bottom,

my brain darkening,

a jar of spawn

fermenting underground

   

 

dreams of Baltic amber.

Bruised berries under my nails,

the vital hoard reducing

in the crock of the pelvis.

   

 

My diadem grew carious,

gemstones dropped

in the peat floe

like the bearings of history.

   

 

My sash was a black glacier

wrinkling, dyed weaves

and phoenician stitchwork

retted on my breasts’

   

 

soft moraines.

I knew winter cold

like the nuzzle of fjords

at my thighs –

   

 

the soaked fledge, the heavy

swaddle of hides.

My skull hibernated

in the wet nest of my hair.

   

 

Which they robbed.

I was barbered

and stripped

by a turfcutter’s spade

   

 

who veiled me again

and packed coomb softly

between the stone jambs

at my head and my feet.

   

 

Till a peer’s wife bribed him.

The plait of my hair,

a slimy birth-cord

of bog, had been cut

   

 

and I rose from the dark,

hacked bone, skull-ware,

frayed stitches, tufts,

small gleams on the bank.

As if he had been poured

in tar, he lies

on a pillow of turf

and seems to weep

   

 

the black river of himself.

The grain of his wrists

is like bog oak,

the ball of his heel

   

 

like a basalt egg.

His instep has shrunk

cold as a swan’s foot

or a wet swamp root.

   

 

His hips are the ridge

and purse of a mussel,

his spine an eel arrested

under a glisten of mud.

   

 

The head lifts,

the chin is a visor

raised above the vent

of his slashed throat

   

 

that has tanned and toughened.

The cured wound

opens inwards to a dark

elderberry place.

   

 

Who will say ‘corpse’

to his vivid cast?

Who will say ‘body’

to his opaque repose?

   

 

And his rusted hair,

a mat unlikely

as a foetus’s.

I first saw his twisted face

   

 

in a photograph,

a head and shoulder

out of the peat,

bruised like a forceps baby,

   

 

but now he lies

perfected in my memory,

down to the red horn

of his nails,

   

 

hung in the scales

with beauty and atrocity:

with the Dying Gaul

too strictly compassed

   

 

on his shield,

with the actual weight

of each hooded victim,

slashed and dumped.

I can feel the tug

of the halter at the nape

of her neck, the wind

on her naked front.

   

 

It blows her nipples

to amber beads,

it shakes the frail rigging

of her ribs.

   

 

I can see her drowned

body in the bog,

the weighing stone,

the floating rods and boughs.

   

 

Under which at first

she was a barked sapling

that is dug up

oak-bone, brain-firkin:

   

 

her shaved head

like a stubble of black corn,

her blindfold a soiled bandage,

her noose a ring

   

 

 to store

the memories of love.

Little adulteress,

before they punished you

   

 

you were flaxen-haired,

undernourished, and your

tar-black face was beautiful.

My poor scapegoat,

   

 

 I almost love you

but would have cast, I know,

the stones of silence.

I am the artful voyeur

   

 

 of your brain’s exposed

and darkened combs,

your muscles’ webbing

and all your numbered bones:

   

 

 I who have stood dumb

when your betraying sisters,

cauled in tar,

wept by the railings,

   

 

 who would connive

in civilized outrage

yet understand the exact

and tribal, intimate revenge.

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.

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 of eastern coast

And arms and legs are thrown

Beyond your gradual hills. I caress

The heaving province where our past has grown.

I am the tall kingdom over your shoulder

That you would neither cajole nor ignore.

Conquest is a lie. I grow older

Conceding your half-independent shore

Within whose borders now my legacy

Culminates inexorably.