North
Page 2
In the coffered
riches of grammar
and declensions
I found ban-bus,
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.
Come to the Bower
My hands come, touched
By sweetbriar and tangled vetch,
Foraging past the burst gizzards
Of coin-hoards
To where the dark-bowered queen,
Whom I unpin,
Is waiting. Out of the black maw
Of the peat, sharpened willow
Withdraws gently.
I unwrap skins and see
The pot of the skull,
The damp tuck of each curl
Reddish as a fox's brush,
A mark of a gorget in the flesh
Of her throat. And spring water
Starts to rise around her.
I reach past
The riverbed's washed
Dream of gold to the bullion
Of her Venus bone.
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 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.
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,
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.
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
opening at my feet
like a shed skin,
the shaft wettish
as I sank it upright
and beginning to
steam in the sun.
And now they have twinned
that obelisk:
among the stones,
under a bearded cairn
a love-nest is disturbed,
catkin and bog-cotton tremble
as they raise up
the cloven oak-limb.
I stand at the edge of centuries
facing a goddess.
IV
This centre holds
and spreads,
sump and seedbed,
a bag of waters
and a melting grave.
The mothers of autumn
sour and sink,
ferments of husk and leaf
deepen their ochres.
Mosses come to a head,
heather unseeds,
brackens deposit
their bronze.
This is the vowel of earth
dreaming its root
in flowers and snow,
mutation of weathers
and seasons,
a windfall composing
the floor it rots into.
I grew out of all this
like a weeping willow
inclined to
the appetites of gravity.
V
The hand-carved felloes
of the turf-cart wheels
buried in a litter
of turf mould,
the cupid's bow
of the tail-board,
the socketed lips
of the cribs:
I deified the man
who rode there,
god of the waggon,
the hearth-feeder.
I was his privileged
attendant, a bearer
of bread and drink,
the squire of his circuits.
When summer died
and wives forsook the fields
we were abroad,
saluted, given right-of-way.
Watch our progress
down the haw-lit hedges,
my manly pride
when he speaks to me.
VI
And you, Tacitus,
observe how I make my grove
on an old crannog
piled by the fearful dead:
a desolate peace.
Our mother ground
is sour with the blood
of her faithful,
they lie gargling
in her sacred heart
as the legions stare
from the ramparts.
Come back to this
'island of the ocean'
where nothing will suffice.
Read the inhumed faces
of casualty and victim;
report us fairly,
how we slaughter
for the common good
and shave the heads
of the notorious,
how the goddess swallows
our love and terror.
Ocean's Love to Ireland
I
Speaking broad Devonshire,
Ralegh has backed the maid to a tree
As Ireland is backed to England
And drives inland
Till all her strands are breathless:
'Sweesir, Swatter! Sweesir, Swatter!'
He is water, he is ocean, lifting
Her farthingale like a scarf of weed lifting
In the front of a wave.
II
Yet his superb crest inclines to Cynthia
Even while it runs its bent
In the rivers of Lee and Blackwater.
Those are the plashy spots where he would lay
His cape before her. In London, his name
Will rise on water, and on these dark seepings:
Smerwick sowed with the mouthing corpses
Of six hundred papists, 'as gallant and good
Personages as ever were beheld.'
III
The ruined maid complains in Irish,
Ocean has scattered her dreams of fleets,
The Spanish prince has spilled his gold
And failed her. Iambic drums
Of English beat the woods where her poets
Sink like Onan. Rush-light, mushroom-flesh,
She fades from their somnolent clasp
Into ringlet-breath and dew,
The ground possessed and repossessed.
Aisling
He courted her
With a decadent sweet art
Like the wind's vo
wel
Blowing through the hazels:
'Are you Diana...?'
And was he Actaeon,
His high lament
The stag's exhausted belling?
Act of Union
I
To-night, 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.
II
And I am still imperially
Male, leaving you with the pain,