Bone Dreams - Seamus Heaney
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.
Big Book Of Poetry
... link (no comments) ... comment
Prospecting - A.R. Ammons
Coming to cottonwoods, an
orange rockshelf,
and in the gully
an edging of stream willows,
I made camp and turned my mule loose to graze in the dark evening of the mountain.
Drowsed over the coals and my loneliness like an inner image went out and shook hands with the willows,
and running up the black scarp tugged the heavy moon up and over into light,
and on a hill-thorn of sage called with the coyotes and told ghost stories to a night circle of lizards. Tipping on its handle the Dipper unobtrusively poured out the night.
At dawn returning, wet to the hips with meetings, my loneliness woke me up and we merged refreshed into the breaking of camp and day.
Note: The day was spent in the tiresome business of buying stuff, swimming among the endless shoals of Christmas shoppers. There is no worse place to shrivel the human soul than the typical multi-chromatic American mall (which makes me wonder if Whitman would have been able to include it in his sprawling American catalouges?) To compensate, I am in bed reading poetry, and this poem made me remember my own multi-day hikes in the Appalachians. I should head back there one of these days, to howl with the foxes and wade through rhododendron "hells".
Big Book Of Poetry
... link (no comments) ... comment
Morning Bird Songs - Tomas Tranströmer
I wake up my car;
pollen covers the windshield.
I put my dark glasses on.
The bird songs all turn dark.
Meanwhile someone is buying a paper at the railroad station not far from a big freight car reddened all over with rust. It shimmers in the sun.
The whole universe is full.
A cool corridor cuts throught the spring warmth; a man comes hurrying past describing how someone right up in the main office has been telling lies about him.
Through a backdoor in the landscape the magpie arrives, black and white, bird of the death goddess. A blackbird flies back and forth until the whole scene becomes a charcoal drawing, except for the white clothes on the line: a Palestrina choir.
The whole universe is full!
Fantastic to feel how my poem is growing while I myself am shrinking. It's getting bigger, it's taking my place, it's pressing against me. It has shoved me out of the nest. The poem is finished.
Translated from the Swedish by Robert Bly
Note: I have nothing to scribble here today; I ate a big Christmas-y dinner with a glass (or two) of merlot, and a big serving of chocolate truffles. When the night is a chilled moonlit lampshade, I turn to Tranströmer's poetry for his knife edged images, which read more like Biblical revelations. For some years now, he is rumoured to be in the running for the Nobel, and I, for one, would be cheering if and when he gets it.
Big Book Of Poetry
... link (no comments) ... comment