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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.

Bog Queen
    I lay waiting
    between turf-face and demesne wall,
    between heathery levels
    and glass-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 spawn
    fermenting underground
    dreams of Baltic amber.
    Bruised berries under my nails,
    the vital hoard 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 stitchwork
    retted on my breasts’
    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 stitches, 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 compassed
    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