Grauballe Man

Lying about. Pondering my afterlife as a display itemAs if he had been poured in tar, he lies on a pillow of turf and seems to weepthe black river of himself. The grain of his wrists is like bog oak, the ball of his heellike 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 throatthat 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 facein 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 compassedon his shield, with the actual weight of each hooded victim, slashed and dumped. -Seamus Heaney