“Cuween Chambered Cairn” and other poems by Tim Miller

Cuween Chambered Cairn   I should go on my hands and knees to you, you farmers from five thousand years ago. Even though your skulls are no longer here or the small skulls of your two dozen dogs, in retrospect I realize how wise I was, dipping in and out of your dark —the familiar main chamber and three rooms— to never pause in all my picture-taking to never stop and extinguish the light to have found you at the end of the day, so that we were tired and a bit rushed. Something like the terror at what went on here would have overwhelmed me in the moment, the seriousness of generations which I only became aware of later: like an ancient fireplace still smudged with smoke, our shoulders were soiled from the gloom on your hands.   Horses on Orkney   Horses curled in the flaming spiral of sleep, the huge immensity of their bodies   belied by the blankets they wear, or the tight scroll they twist themselves into on the ground,   an enormity suddenly made small or at least passive, compact, the coiled braid   of body closer to tree or landscape, the tilted, chiseled head nearer to stone   or steel or something pulled from the fire, some monument to just how this place works   that you do not escape the wind, but dream in it.   Dedalus & Icarus   The old craftsman came to Cumae after a long life of art and flight, love and theft, came alone to the Sibyl’s Italian shore wasted with age and reputation   to the one who knew every alphabet, the seeress who saw the future in driven leaves. And warped with the same old age as him, she asked that he carve her sanctuary.   His bent wrinkled body covered in dust, he hammers and carves and polishes away all of the horrors let loose from his hands: his dead nephew; the bull-impregnated   woman and its awful issue; the youths brought from Mycenae for its food; the slave girl’s love that bore him a son, and the love he took pity on that imprisoned them both—   he strikes them away and leaves them on the wall, all of them and so much more envy and revenge and awe at his talents, hammered forgotten. But not his son. Twice he’s tried   to let him go, as the sky did before the sea took him; twice he’s tried to fashion his face or his descent or his youthful limbs or just his eyes, and twice he’s stopped in tears.   Skara Brae   Follow the alley of flagstones to a slab door of wood or rock, locked with a shaped bar of whalebone. Inside, opposite the door, a dresser stacked with pottery, wool, beads of bone and shell, or pendants of whale’s teeth or the ivory tusks of walrus or boar. The hearth is central, the hearth is heat and light and the cooking of all that’s caught: mutton and venison, gannet and golden plover and lobster, eel and salmon and mussel, cod and crab and pork, gull and scallop. Wild berries fill the belly too, wild cherries, hazelnut, honey, some form of fermented plant for beer, or the richness of cows and goats. Near the hearth, a tank for fish bait, while beds and shelves curl around, around the fire fueled by seaweed, and beneath the rafters of whale ribs.   There’s one building with no bedding, but still a hearth, always a hearth, no metal yet and only stone, only wood and bone: blades, mattocks, whistles, fine points or polishers, all undertaken so near the sea (but not so near as the sea is now), generations of food-waste, ash, dung, bones, broken pottery, shells, or rope of crowberries—centuries of families, layers of houses stacked like rock atop each other, farmers farming, hunters hunting, a nameless North Sea and a still nameless wind giving sound and flavor to the landscape and the prized lives that prompted those circles of stone, that made an occasion of a hill or loch, coast or height or isthmus.   Through the unknown, unremembered gate we found the village and the bay another excuse for green and blue, five thousand years to our first world, having flown far to propitiate those who may have sailed from the south to this true north, treeless and edged like a blade.   Robert Oppenheimer   Now I come to write in light and fire, in a language of power we all know, beyond every letter and poetry and all the dithering of philosophy, all the prevarication of politics. The physicists have known sin, it’s true, but also the brilliance of a burden overcome in the brittle mountains, a foul display that was beyond awesome, beyond my conscience but still atop it: in less than a second tens of thousands turned to piles of boiled organs and black char, the burnt but still living running for the cisterns or the boiled, dead-crowded rivers.   News of a flood or an earthquake makes me think of myself, since the questions usually given to heaven are now tendered to me, and its silence is something like my own: any remorse is just ridiculous and any warning is usefully late, since I’ve already handled God’s fuel. I cannot keep from swagger, or from mourning: this knowledge a weight you will never know, and with it a satisfaction, a pride: numbers and elements resolved into a thing that worked, but never should again.   ⊕ Bone Antler Stone (Museum Pieces) by Tim Miller “Cuween Chambered Cairn” and other poems are © Tim Miller

Tim Miller’s most recent book is the long narrative poem, To the House of the Sun (S4N Books). His novel Bearing the Names of Many is forthcoming from Pelekinesis, and he also write about poetry, history and religion at www.wordandsilence.com.