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.

In the coffered riches of grammar and declensions I found bān-hūs,

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 ar 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." touched small distant: Pennines, a pelt of grass and grain running south.

Note: One of the pleasures of reading Heaney's poetry is his sheer exultation of all the registers available to poets writing in English, especially those which buzz with Old English Norse and Anglo-Saxon tones. And in "Bone Dreams", a found piece of bone triggers a magnificient leap in Heaney's mind to the kenning (a lovely word that I first came to in a transcribed lecture of J.L. Borges on metaphor) bān-hūs, bone-house, the body. Joseph Brodsky, Heaney's comrade-in-arms, once commented that reading and writing poetry is akin to accelerating human consciousness towards escape velocities; in this poem Heaney enables the reader to just do that.