I lay waiting
Between turf-face and demesne wall,
Between Heathery levels
And glass-toothed stone.

My body was Braille
For the creeping influences:
Dawn suns groped over my head
And cooled at my feet,

Through my fabrics and skins
The seeps of winter
Digested me,
The illiterate roots

Pondered and died
In the cavings
Of stomach and socket.
I lay waiting

On the gravel bottom,
My brain darkening,
A jar of spawn
Fermenting underground

Dreams of Baltic amber.
Bruised berries under my nails,
The vital hoard reducing
In the crock of the pelvis.

My diadem grew carious,
Gemstones dropped
In the peat floe
Like the bearings of history.

My sash was a black glacier
Wrinkling, dyed weaves
And phoenician stichwork
Retted on my breasts’

Soft moraines.
I knew winter cold
Like the nuzzle of fjords
At my thighs –

The soaked fledge, the heavy
Swaddle of hides.
my skull hibernated
in the wet nest of my hair.

Which they robbed.
I was barbered
And stripped
By a turfcutter’s spade

Who veiled me again
And packed coomb softly
Between the stone jambs
At my head and my feet.

Till a peer’s wife bribed him.
The plait of my hair,
A slimy birth-cord
Of bog had been cut

And I rose from the dark,
Hacked bone, skull-ware,
Frayed stitches, tufts,
Small gleams on the bank.

What can I say.  This is Heaney pandering to me, specifically.  Fiber-arts, a bit of gross, archeology, amber, gorgeous language.  He had me at the title, because of this nickname I have, but that’s another story. 

This poem is about a body that was unearthed from an Irish bog in the late 18th C. but was not preserved.  We have knowledge of this particular burial through the historical record.  For me, the fact that this find was not preserved is particularly galling, because she was apparently still fully clothed, bejeweled, and her hair was styled.  According to the surviving account, the local landowner demanded that the turf-cutter who found her deliver up the fabrics and jewels and braids to the manse.  All are lost now.  Grumble grumble. 

So what say you?  Liking my gross favorites, or turned off by it?

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