Heaney+Grauballe+Man

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The Grauballe Man

As if he had been poured in tar, he lies on a pillow of turf and seems to weep

the black river of himself. The grain of his wrists is like bog oak, the ball of his heel

like a basalt egg. His instep has shrunk cold as a swan's foot or a wet swamp root.

His hips are the ridge and purse of a mussel, his spine an eel arrested under a glisten of mud.

The head lifts, the chin is a visor raised above the vent of his slashed throat

that has tanned and toughened. The cured wound opens inwards to a dark elderberry place.

Who will say 'corpse' to his vivid cast? Who will say 'body' to his opaque repose?

And his rusted hair, a mat unlikely as a foetus's. I first saw his twisted face

in a photograph, a head and shoulder out of the peat, bruised like a forceps baby,

but now he lies perfected in my memory, down to the red horn of his nails,

hung in the scales with beauty and atrocity: with the Dying Gaul too strictly compassed

on his shield, with the actual weight of each hooded victim, slashed and dumped.



=The Dying Gaul=



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