Quintus Ennius tria corda habere sese dicebat, quod loqui Graece et Osce et Latine sciret. "Quintus Ennius said that he had three hearts, because he spoke Greek and Oscan and Latin." -Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae 17.17
The first hundred poems in Peter Riley's Excavations are meditations on prehistoric burials described by J.R. Mortimer in Forty Years’ Researches in British and Saxon Burial Mounds in East Yorkshire (1905); text in italics is mostly verbatim citation of Mortimer’s reports.
It’s impossible to read without wanting to contort one’s body into the positions of the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age deceased described within—preferably with a compass in hand, pointing one’s head north-northeast and facing south-southeast, toward imagined origins. Conceivable too the desire to dislocate one’s jaw to gorge on repasts prepared for eternity: