Opened Ground (7 page)

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. 

Now as news comes in

of each neighbourly murder

we pine for ceremony,

customary rhythms:

the temperate footsteps

of a cortège, 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 muffled 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 grassy boulevard,

the procession drags its tail

out of the Gap of the North

as its head already enters

the megalithic doorway. 

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.

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-hoard, 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.’

It could be a jaw-bone

or a rib or a portion cut

from something sturdier:

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

Come fly with me,

come sniff the wind

with the expertise

of the Vikings –

neighbourly, scoretaking

killers, haggers

and hagglers, gombeen-men,

hoarders 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 assessors

of feuds and of sites

for ambush or town.

‘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.

White bone found

on the grazing:

the rough, porous

language of touch

and its yellowing, ribbed

impression in the grass –

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. 

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

twang, the iron

flash of consonants

cleaving the line. 

In the coffered

riches of grammar

and declensions

I found
b
ā
n-h
ū
s,
 

its fire, benches,

wattle and rafters,

where the soul

fluttered a while

in the roofspace.

There was a small crock

for the brain,

and a cauldron

of generation

swung at the centre:

love-den, blood-holt,

dream-bower. 

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. 

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. 

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 turf-cutter’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.