Heaney - North

So, her hands scuffled over the bakeboard, the reddening stove sent its plaque of heat against her where she stood in a floury apron by the window. Now she dusts the board with a gooses wing, now sits, broad-lapped, with whitened nails and measling shins: here is a space again, the scone rising to the tick of two clocks. And here is love like a tinsmiths scoop sunk past its gleam in the meal-bin.

To lift the lid of the peat And find this pupil dreaming Of neolithic wheat! When he stripped off blanket bog The soft-piled centuries Fell open like a glib: There were the first plough-marks, The stone-age fields, the tomb Corbelled, turfed and chambered, Floored with dry turf-coomb. A landscape fossilized, Its stone-wall patternings Repeated before our eyes In the stone walls of Mayo. Before I turned to go He talked about persistence, A congruence of lives, How, stubbed and cleared of stones, His home accrued growth rings Of iron, flint and bronze. So I talked of Mossbawn, A bogland name. 'But moss?' He crossed my old home's music With older strains of Norse. 'But the Norse ring on your tree?' I passed through the eye of the quern, Grist to an ancient mill, And in my mind's eye saw A world-tree of balanced stones, Querns piled like vertebrae, The marrow crushed to grounds.

They had been laid out in tainted rooms, their eyelids glistening, their dough-white hands shackled in rosary beads. Their puffed knuckles had unwrinkled, the nails were darkened, the wrists obediently sloped. The dulse-brown shroud, the quilted satin cribs: I knelt courteously, admiring it all, as wax melted down and veined the candles, the flames hovering to the women hovering behind me. And always, in a corner, the coffin lid, its nail-heads dressed with little gleaming crosses. Dear soapstone masks, kissing their igloo brows had to suffice before the nails were sunk and the black glacier of each funeral pushed away.

I would restore the great chambers of Boyne, prepare a sepulchre under the cupmarked stones. Out of side-streets and bye-roads purring family cars nose into line, the whole country tunes to the muffled drumming of ten thousand engines. Somnambulant women, left behind, move through emptied kitchens imagining our slow triumph towards the mounds. Quiet as a serpent in its grassy boulevard, the procession drags its tail out of the Gap of the North as its head already enters the megalithic doorway.

I faced the unmagical invitations of Iceland, the pathetic colonies of Greenland, and suddenly those fabulous raiders, those lying in Orkney and Dublin measured against their long swords rusting, those in the solid belly of stone ships, those hacked and glinting in the gravel of thawed streams were ocean-deafened voices warning me, lifted again in violence and epiphany. The longship's swimming tongue was buoyant with hindsight-- it said Thor's hammer swung to geography and trade, thick-witted couplings and revenges, the hatreds and behindbacks of the althing, lies and women, exhaustions nominated peace, memory incubating the spilled blood. It said, 'Lie down in the word-hoard, burrow the coil and gleam of your furrowed brain. Compose in darkness. Expect aurora borealis in the long foray but no cascade of light. Keep your eye clear as the bleb of the icicle, trust the feel of what nubbed treasure your hands have known.'

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.