New and Selected Poems (6 page)

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

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.

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.

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.’

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.

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.