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.