Lochhead Liz - Three Scottish Poets

Were life. Lets round the sunset up and milk it Into a jug and drink it off. Or in the hawthorn let us tangle Our dreary look like gossamer To shudder with that sparrows chirping And when the dew falls be on fire. Or drag the distance home and chain it There in the corner of the room To charm us with its savage howling And beg for fragments of our dream. Theres a clue somewhere. Can you find it? Can you say over and over again Love, till its incantation makes us Forget how much we are alone?

Green as glass The water in the horse-trough shines. Nine ducks go wobbling by in two straight lines. A hen stares at nothing with one eye, Then picks it up. Out of an empty sky A swallow falls and, flickering through The barn, dives up again into the dizzy blue. I lie, not thinking, in the cool, soft grass. Afraid of where a thought might take meas This grasshopper with plated face Unfolds his legs and finds himself in space.

Self under self, a pile of selves I stand Threaded on time, and with metaphysic hand Lift the farm like a lid and see Farm within farm, and in the centre, me.

And I thought, The first to be fattened, the first to be dead, Till my gestures enlarged, wide over the darkening land.

And kittens miaow in circles, stalking With tail and hindleg one straight line.

We were going through the darkness and the breathing cornfields from one important place to another. We broke the hares neck and made that place, for a moment, the most important place there was, where a bowstring was cut and a bow broken for ever that had shot itself through so many darknesses and cornfields. It was left in that landscape. It left us in another.

I will not feel, I will not feel, until I have to. Nurses walk lightly, swiftly, here and up and down and there, their slender waists miraculously carrying their burden of so much pain, so many deaths, their eyes still clear after so many farewells. Ward 7. She lies in a white cave of forgetfulness. A withered hand trembles on its stalk. Eyes move behind eyelids too heavy to raise.

Into an arm wasted of colour a glass fang is fixed, not guzzling but giving. And between her and me distance shrinks till there is none left but the distance of pain that neither she nor I can cross. She smiles a little at this black figure in her white cave who clumsily rises in the round swimming waves of a bell and dizzily goes off, growing fainter, not smaller, leaving behind only books that will not be read and fruitless fruits.