Crossley-Holland: Do You Ken?

SALT- COMPOUNDS

salt-scythe
sweeps onshore, corrosive and hissing; pins back
ears; rifles each stay, shroud and halyard.

creek-wood
the old ones, clinker-built and always thirsty;
noses blunt and bottoms glaucous; still quivering.

sea-garment
roseate spinnaker, light-breasted; no less
stiff canvas, often split and mended, grey with salt.

herring-haunt
see-through escarpments toppling and barking
as they dive through themselves into ghosts of flint.

mauve-mist
delicate as breath suspended over marsh grass;
summer carpet, wiry and tide-beaten, knotted in mud.

wave-arms
without joints, creaking and groaning; like wings
their strange spade hands salute and dip and rise.

mud-runes
ribbon-casts, blow-holes, keel-scrapes, anchor-spikes,
darts of the stitchers and strutters and mincers.

--Kevin Crossley-Holland

from his Selected Poems,
London: Enitharmon Press, 2001

Heaney's "Bone Dreams"

 BONE DREAMS

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 at 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. 

--Seamus Heaney

Poem from Seamus Heaney's North, Faber & Faber, London & Boston: 1975.

The clay pieces: Works in progress.  Viking Coin ornament and Ship & Hammer: sculpture mix; green glaze, unfired.  (We shall see how these pieces look after their firing.)

On The Kelp-Road, Annotated

Or, Foggy Arch Beckons.

I like the slanty bit of swell lifting up here with the arch-rocks straight and steady in the background.

Look at the satiny texture of that water too.  The kelp has smoothed out that swell so well.  Note also the splash of a breaking wave behind and to the right of the wave face in front of us.  There's some of the energy that the kelp is leveling out.  (Though "leveling out" may seem a strange phrase when we are looking at the rolling incline, yes?)