as a dry sea-urchin's, hoisted his flour-sack
sail
on its bamboo spar, and scanned the opening line
ofour epic horizon; writing I look back
to rocks that see their own feet when light nets the waves,
as the long dugouts set out with their carved captains,
since it was your name that startled the sunlit wharves
when schooners swayed, idly moored to their cold capstans,
and wind turned the harbour's pages back to the voice
that hummed in the vase ofa girl's throat: "Omeros."
Anne Stevenson
INVERKIRKAIG
Bloodshed cries
Ai Ai
For Dorothy and jonathan Brett Young
September 1986
in
the colour of rowan berries.
Birds will eat wounds all winter.
Flayed hills keep breathing
through the slashing-
waterfall, fighterplane, waterfall.
The salmon leaps and fails.
Drowned to his thigh,
the man praises courage with a hook.
Six men, twelve wings, and the sky cracks
successfully. The squadron
is out ofheaing when it falls.
With its gentian eye, the lock
praises gleaming and burnishing.
The salmon leaps and fails.
The man goes on casting and reeling.
A late rain erases in pitiless mercy
home, story, arterial berry.
