As a matter of convenience, we don't speak of dying gardens

I picked up Seamus Heaney's newest collection, District and Circle, yesterday afternoon in Winchester. Out of all its contents, I think I have fallen in love with "The Tollund Man in Springtime," a sequence of six sonnets in which the famous bog body—like any proper greenman—awakes ("to revel in the spirit / They strengthened when they chose to put me down / For their own good"), collects himself, and proceeds to wander through the modern world:

"The soul exceeds its circumstances." Yes.
History not to be granted the last word
Or the first claim . . . In the end I gathered
From the display-case peat my staying powers,
Told my webbed wrists to be like silver birches,
My old uncallused hands to be young sward,
The spade-cut skin to heal, and got restored
By telling myself this. Late as it was,
The early bird still sang, the meadow hay
Still buttercupped and daisied, sky was new.
I smelled the air, exhaust fumes, silage reek,
Heard from my heather bed the thickened traffic
Swarm at a roundabout five fields away
And transatlantic flights stacked in the blue.

You can see why this sort of thing makes me happy.

I also inflicted one of last night's dreams on greygirlbeast this afternoon, so that's under the lj-cut for those of you who might or might rather not find out what my subconscious is like these days.
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