Alchemisland

Day is muggy, has us both sulky

Pasty Irishers not made for sun

Kissing your poisoned lips at the megalith

Enormous light-eclipsing capstone

Sits strangely angled, how was it lifted into place in ancient day

I imagine cow-tramped trails, movable log ramps along which longstones travelled

Burnt offerings and the bones of chieftains interned within

Selfsame beneath my skin, I make an offering of my interest

Trace the stone’s face in hope of courting blessing

Wrest from that place, where I would forever stay

May heat in August, a year before I’m 33, brightness squint to see 

The degree and inclination of those stones invite a solar perplexity

Aligned mathematically to the rhymathic amazements of sun and sky

We are vexed by these historical anomalies, which cannot be explained honestly

Among earthworks and liths finding little uniformity, all manner form and valence

Evincing the talent of these ancient masons in hide aprons, working stone with stone

Too much dogma surrounds these dolmens, nothing can be older than six thousand years

Deer bones worked into pins, awls, beads and brooches, chalices constructed to hold potions

A sense of astral motion in their terrestrial stillness, long-dead ancestors well met

I drank ten pints of water from Mimir’s well, mimicking well those delvings of Odin

Wellsprings whence I spring, the code which is the ode of my singing blood

Jars of Somme mud, sprinkled with millionblood, a powerful ritual unguent

I inhale the grenadine vapours to go under, the fragrant coils of induction

I am initiated, sleeping like I turned my cheek to a swinging truncheon

I pray before a locked gate, the keys hang on a bunch at my waist

What’s left of it, I am wasting away, a sunhit photograph fading

So that vision of me in visage pales to a greyling, elapsating

Whispering ancient prayers, the nightmare lead in a black bay

Mane and tail sable, a man tells his tale at the tavern table

Of his going to Tartarus, of his time betwixt veils, mere fable

Babel talk available only when his tankard is like a milkless cow’s pail.