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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
    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.

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 b ā n-h ū s,  
    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