Old Croghan Man, and: In the Bode-Museum, and: Ta Prohm, and: Lapwings, and: Adoration

Old Croghan Man

… their nipples were cut, thus rendering them ineligible for kingship … the suckling of a king's nipples was an important gesture of submission.

—Eamonn P. Kelly, "An Archaeological Interpretation of Irish Iron Age Bog Bodies"

Only a torso now, the headlong severed from the neck, pelvistwisted off like a stubborn root.

Remember the worn jacketof his body pressedin the bog; above, the galaxies

of cotton grass turnedinside out, like little soulsamong the eyebrights,

the stitchwort. No placeto leave a man alone.And under each nipple

a deep incision, blade width.Even then, they needed boyslike me—to leave power

in our wake, to dip our headsand take to the softpink mound. I would have felt,

then, the making of a king;known God, through my lips,entering the body.

In the Bode-Museum

On a narrow plinth in the cornerof the gallery, a stone portrait:a man, his mouth unlipped

by fire, marble of the facepeeled off in the blaze. But the clotheswere spared somehow, as though

above the neck he was hungon a noose of flame. And stillone unburnt eye, looking up

over the broken shoulderto where his sculptor stood.But hush. No one is coming.

We are handed our livesby a fierce work. Onto whichblank space will I lock my gaze

when my fatheris gone? How am I to wearhis love's burning mantle?

Ta Prohm

A stifling heat—the air heavy—and all around the loud, wet forestknotting the gaps in its own sound.

A peace long earned, then broken;and you, far off in the hospice bed.Silk cotton, strangler fig

fastened here on the templeas though it grew down from heaven,was sent to hold in place

all this human work. And later,through the house of fire, the fallengalleries, I climbed in blue smoke

to where the god satringed with incense. And yes,I knelt to her. And yes, I prayed

through unbelief. Perhaps now,father, only something oldand impossible can save us.

Lapwings

A March sky pinned with stars—purple, almost, and a blue mist in the wheat stubble.Under the laburnum, we waited—the chains of leaf, its cascades of gold flowergone, and the whole tree droopinglike an open hand, loose at the wrist.And in the far field—what?The dun mare wickering, shiftingher weight; the trough half-frostedand glittering. This might be

the last year, we thought, before the landwas sold; the nests with their four-pointed eggsin the scrape, the square plot peaked,all those mothers, and who knows what elsebefore the year was out?What losses? Until, near the tracks, a spark—a dark firework lit in a flickering noteand us hushed to hear it, to follow the jetof its firing, its leap upand then the tumbling

fall: black sparks, the showerof embers gashed and the Catherine wheelflourish as the sound was dropped,caught, then dashed to earth.And what of it?All beyond night's blind—hardly even a shadow, but the airjust then, picked up, shaken to static—cheee-o-wit of something like life whipping upwardand the dying nerve shot along the bright rod of the spine.

Adoration

St. Stephen's Day: home unsettled,a rupture, and here the ruchedbranch has turned itself outward,

its soft, bright innards held upalong the path. At first, a goldenlobe on the oak, leaking

in the mist—fungus, "yellowtremble," translucent and half-aglowwith its own light; then more

appearing as I walk. A strange thingbeing birthed alone out hereon the edges of the town,

the slow year becoming fleshin amniotic color; its soft fruithung...