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 grammer
and declensions
I found ban-hus,
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.
—Seamus Heaney
SHARKPACK Poetry Review 