1 Sunlight
There was a sunlit absence.
The helmeted pump in the yard
heated its iron,
water honeyed
in the slung bucket
and the sun stood
like a griddle cooling
against the wall
of each long afternoon.
So, her hands scuffled
over the bakeboard,
the reddening stove
sent its plaque of heat
against her where she stood
in a floury apron
by the window.
Now she dusts the board
with a goose’s wing,
now sits, broad-lapped,
with whitened nails
and measling shins:
here is a space
again, the scone rising
to the tick of two clocks.
And here is love
like a tinsmith’s scoop
sunk past its gleam
in the meal-bin.
2 The Seed Cutters
They seem hundreds of years away. Breughel,
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.
Ο 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 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
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.
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 behindbacks
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
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,
&
nbsp; 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 crocks
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