Celtic Metamorphoses

 

A horned god stands back to back with a second self. 
You pass the gatekeeper, into a field of metamorphoses. 
You turn into the curl of a wave, or a waterbird in flight. 
Fish becomes man, dog becomes dragon.
You reach for a flagon of unmixed wine
and the handle becomes the hound that is chasing the duck
that swims into your mouth on a red river. 

Long-beaked bird-men are alive on a Shetland cross.
Gold and silver and bronze glint at the throats
and on the forearms of queens and heroes.
Here everything is in connected, everything in flux,
vital energies change form and surge beyond form. 
A technology of enchantment captures minds
and binds them in tendrils, endlessly looping,
making knots without end, no strings you can pull. 

Are those the antlers of an ancient elk, bigger than moose.
on the head of that statue they brought from a warrior grave?
You try them on and look with his sight over a fertile valley,
proud of your kin, ready to fight for the deer and the forest.
You reach under the leaf-shaped shield that covers his abdomen.
You turn, as he did, the unseen handle that gathers the force
to embody and release your spirit double for its excursions.

The boar is everywhere, before you and around you. 
Be careful. You pause to hear the hot howl of war
from the throat of a boar-headed carnyx.
Swords and shields, iron and oak, ash and bronze.
Shields that are plain at the front but have hidden powers
at the back and in the coiling serpents at the grip.
Shields with glaring eyes and hidden faces of raging bulls.    

You find your end at last, craning over the cauldron from the bog,
braving the fierce stare of all those gods you cannot name.
You swim in bull's blood, plunging down to the scene of passion
where a naked woman warrior exults, sword in hand,
over the great body of the dying bull whose potency will pass,
with the rush of his blood, to the one who is called this way.

- Lines inspired by an exhibition of Celtic art at the British Museum

Photo: the base of the Gundestrup Cauldron, in the National Museum of Denmark. The silver cauldron, an immensely valuable offering in the society of the time, was dropped in a bog in Jutland but had been made somewhere far away.