Part 8 (2/2)

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, h.o.a.rders 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 a.s.sessors 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 gra.s.s a small s.h.i.+p-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 tw.a.n.g, the iron flash of consonants cleaving the line.

III.

In the coffered riches of grammar and declensions I found bn-hs, its fire, benches, wattle and rafters, where the soul fluttered a while in the roofs.p.a.ce.

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 gra.s.s.

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 pa.s.ses.

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 gra.s.s and grain running south.

Bog Queen

I lay waiting

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