Opened Ground Part 9

between turf-face and demesne wall, between heathery levels and gla.s.s-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 sp.a.w.n fermenting underground dreams of Baltic amber.

Bruised berries under my nails, the vital h.o.a.rd 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 st.i.tchwork retted on my b.r.e.a.s.t.s'

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 turf-cutter'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 st.i.tches, 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 compa.s.sed 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, the stones of silence.

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, mora.s.s: 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 G.o.ddess.

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 appet.i.tes 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, G.o.d 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 G.o.ddess swallows our love and terror.

Act of Union

I.

Tonight, 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.