milling and dowses

[haruhichan]

"milling dark your skeleton
dowses from this afternoon scan
out of the hammering MRI machine,
its reverb and yammer." I

I don't understand this stanza. is milling suppose to be a verb also here? if so, it doesn't make sense. Thank u

[ann_h]

You are right, it doesn't make sense. If I could see the whole "poem" it might help, but you would have to copy it exactly.

[haruhichan]

This is the whole poem

Deep Water

Water levels still rising as thousands hit by worst floods
in modern British history. - The Guardian 24/7/07


While rain thrums on the roof
of the Cobalt Unit

you lie motionless, as directed,
in its womb-tight scanner.

The young radiologist counts down
and you think, I�m flying �

your rick-rack bones opening,
their long-drawn white

becoming pinions,
everything ratcheting out, peg after peg

into wing-tips,
afloat
on streaming black.

That black thuds and races
between your ribs �

and a pillow bunches hard against the ear
where blood roars
like floodwater
rising between contour-lines �

the floods you must get home through.

Milling dark your skeleton
dowses from this afternoon scan,

out of the hammering MRI machine,
its reverb and yammer.

*

[haruhichan]

A chalk spine
lies above these collapsed roads and trees,

choric bystanders
and cars doomed to muddy rivers.

Continually in sight, the Downs
slash a transverse elevation

through levelled fields
and water �

The high hills,
always with us
like inequity, mauvais chance,

the clatter of bad news
in a consulting room.

In limestone pastures, though,
everything shifts with the water table

whose grit slips yellow
from your tap,

stinks when you open the car bonnet
to the sun.

*

Imagine the spine�s
fossil curve:
how it sinks a hook into the dark.

Seahorse remnant, residual ammonite.

Seep, silt, the pelvic crescent�s
alluvial sex smell �

darknesses, compressed

as fear compresses,
to drift-shapes, fish mouthed

on ocean floors,
half-recognisable
in some black-and-white dream.

The mineral spine
ground feather-thin,


eroded by air-stream dark
to an archaic lace,

like figures raised in grainy stone
among alders �

whose dark silhouettes
stud the flood-water �

spires prayer climbs past,

breath
floating free of everything mineral,

rising from this bedroom:
where curtains

keep out the night-whisper of rain
and gather a flexible dark.

[Catron]

I am sorry but there is part of this poem missing - the relevant portion is this:

Milling dark your skeleton dowses
out of this afternoon�s scan,

out of the hammering MRI machine,
its reverb yammer.

The world inside the skin
appearing
smudge by fine smudge

in black-and-white
on the X-ray printout.

[ann_h]

It's tricky - this is what I have come up with (by twisting the syntax a bit)

"milling dark"
- the grinding noise of the scanner
- the gradual "shaping" of the image as if by lathework
- it is dark in the scanner, the image is revealed by light/xray producing a white image out of black film
"dowses"
- dowsing being the finding of water or other things of value from underground, through (mystical) connection with the earth/ley lines/magnetism so the scanner is dowsing for the skeleton and the information in it.

[haruhichan]

thank u:)