Opened Ground

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Opened Ground Page 6

by Seamus Heaney

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-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.’

  Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces

  I

  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.

  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,

  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.

  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 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.

  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

  twang, the iron

  flash of consonants

  cleaving the line.

  III

  In the coffered

  riches of grammar

  and declensions

  I found bān-hūs,

  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.

  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.

  Bog Queen

  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.

  The Grauballe Man

  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.

  Punishment

  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.

  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.

&nbs
p; 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

 

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