Norden 1 csillagozás

The 'voice of sanity' is getting hoarse.

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.

Each afternoon, in the casserole heat
Of the flat, as I sweated my way through
The life of Joyce, stinks from the fishmarket
Rose like the reek off a flax-dam.

And in my mind's eye saw
A world-tree of balanced stones,
Querns piled like vertebrae,
The marrow crushed to grounds.

The longship's swimming tongue
was buoyant with hindsight—
it said Thor's hammer swung
to geography and trade…

This is the reward of faith
In rest eternal. Even death
Lies. The void deceives.
We do not fall like autumn leaves
To sleep in peace.

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.

Bone Dreams IV.

I have begun to pace
the Hadrian's Wall
of her shoulder, dreaming
of Maiden Castle.

I stand at the edge of centuries
facing a goddess.

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.