Bee Journal
Human Work
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Epub ISBN: 9781473546196
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VINTAGE
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Copyright © Sean Borodale 2018
Cover photograph © Mark Ollis
Sean Borodale has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published by Jonathan Cape in 2018
penguin.co.uk/vintage
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
for Orlando and Louis
ANTIGONE: Speak, for you are reaching the last extremity
Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus
What is this odd sensation?
Why do I feel more invisible, mere memory
as I dip under stone?
Having entered the swallet,
having dammed up the stream,
how do I blind my way in, and touch,
bridge my way down with knees on one side?
Isn’t this odd;
heels pressing the vertical dark
going down out of attention
from the thin world of the bubble of air;
the gleaming skull’s sutures,
its crown whispering.
Why do I feel more dark,
out of the sights of any bird, the sounds also?
Why do I prevail in emptiness,
cut from the tension of speed and appetite;
carrying this odd death with me down
under roads like spears scattered across miles?
Why do I have to forget what I love;
carrying its core in an urn of sound?
Why do I have to go on
slithering out of the lit Anthrocene, like this;
to slough off the sun, its cadence of distance;
with my hunt for the answers, my lit skin,
all it is now: the last collapsed tunnel?
Why am I buried in close-fitting rock?
Am I insured? I may have forgotten.
It comes to light,
walking over the grass, kicking molehills
with that sense: they know more.
The seclusion, look around at it:
topsoil, subsoil, below that, the water line;
below that, the depth of persistence out of every storm;
long plots of burial.
Uphill in the churchyard,
bright heaps of heavy red soil;
the grass, thin.
Each of us fixedly developing our own thoughts,
tilting horizons to the churchyard earth.
The long double-roots of teeth –
canine, incisor;
the scatter of rib bones, arm bones.
They could not have forecast: glancing back at them,
her relatives’ faces dredging a hole’s spare form,
lowering a Plenty Price.
Glancing back: they could not have foreseen
the wash of her litter; bones like wave-spume
drifting up discharged and naked,
like anthers of flowers.
Her pieces, here, scaring the now.
Her panoply, lit:
her post-self’s inner furniture
like broken chairs between black graveyard yews;
dipping their red wood
into the same bother of planting,
same publishing of headstones; the same marked plots
which have erupted their principle of eternal sleep,
risen as flamed out of burial and gone awry,
wreaking jigsaws of havoc.
The brief order of a corpse
stapled in with sods and soil weight.
The coffins must have been soft, you say.
They must have been soft coffins.
Curved porcelain-cup pieces of brain-mantle.
Her ordinary skull broken at every suture.
Her yellows porous.
Teeth and vertebrae on tumbled-up soil;
of Hannah Plenty Price, teeth that still shine.
The spongy hard crust of a bone
mealy with fragments;