Digging

Break the sod with spade's sharpened edge;
kick it in & push it through that first resisting
skin of earth. Eternal geology of podsol

where a few sparse inches of topsoil (if you're lucky)
give way to ruptured rock, metamorphosed strata,
schist & gneiss drilled and broken by bracken root –

elongated, blackened, questing fingers which ease
& push themselves caressingly around the crumbling,
buried layers.

What is this turf I cast away so seemingly carelessly
but Dürer's own? When Man's Renaissance mind saw & drew
reality — what was really there. 

To celebrate the 'ordinary' & find such beauty in a blade of grass.

~~~

It seemed like millennia I lay there,
absorbing and being absorbed by 
the black-brown acid of the moss.

Millennia watched me as my skin, bones and teeth
yellowed, tanned and creased under that weight 
of time, history, expectation.

I waited under those rushing, big skies
as they opened to a blue heaven or closed
under a freighted, laden mist & gale.

How heavy is this sodden, retting mass of
sphagnum, heather, trefoil, orchid...
how light the touching, waving bog-cotton

set up under the sky-lark's invisible song.
This earth-mass of new geology is pressing my bones;
my femur dislodged, my knuckles snapped.

I walked here in a pine forest – felt willow,
Rowan, caress my face; while looking down on forest
floor sensed dry needles under leathery feet.

I am ghosted by my own presence in the graveyard
of stumps & roots where my only birk is stained, shrivelled -
betula. My bones are sunk in time; the last time

I saw the wolk-pack bring down the three-year-old stag,
his velvet antlers no match for jaw on foreleg and throat.
Geology is bone; the dark & softening peat, flesh;

Turf & sod the skin. I am écorché, flayed, my bones 
bleached as schist. The tairsgeir's blade angles a cut,
kniving down & through, sharply jolted to & fro

the peat torn from its sod-bed, tossed on the bank to lie.
To be wind blown, the abandoned bodach to one side
the fresh and new-cut like bleeding flesh.

There's my history, down here with me
in my ghost forest, the cutting blades scraping my shins
where families work, men-in-eights, cut & stack & throw:

Thumb prints solidify to stone on the weather-cured peats.

GILES SUTHERLAND
June 2010