And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos

Poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory and defeat.

The way that it appeared and disappeared gave it the mysterious intimacy of a household god. I have always thought that household gods were animals. Sometimes visible and sometimes invisible, but always present

Thus in man two times coexist, corresponding with these two events. T

Imagining the constellations did not of course change the stars, nor did it change the black emptiness that surrounds them. What it changed was the way people read the night sky.

have always thought that household gods were animals. Sometimes visible and sometimes invisible, but always present.

The visible implies an eye. It is the stuff of the relation between seen and seer. Yet the seer, when human, is conscious of what his eye cannot and will never see because of time and distance. The visible both includes him (because he sees) and excludes him (because he is not omnipresent). The visible consists for him of the seen which, even when it is threatening, confirms his existence, and of the unseen which defies that existence. The desire to have seen—the ocean, the desert, the aurora borealis—has a deep ontological basis.

your island
does the night fall later?
Am I walking a little ahead of you
so that no snake will bite
your sandalled foot?
The balance is never made.
This is why the stars are silent
offering no account.
How to measure
a season
against
the calendar of your absence?
How to measure
the stream
of my tangled light
in the mountain
of what has been
and will be?
The balance is never made.
Yet in the night your eyes and mine
sounding one another
show no trace of vertigo.

There are castles, there are lines which could be and have been defended, deaths, but there are no final barriers. This is why herring can be fished from water surrounded by brackened hills. This is why the sky can appear to have more flesh on it, to be more hospitable, than the land. Here between the land and sky it is like a shore. And as the seashore smells of seaweed, so this shore smells of uncounted time.

The crofters’ cottages crouch like animals sheltering on the ground for the night. Everything moves on, the larches, the bracken, the caledonian pines, the heather, the juniper bushes, the scrap grass. And then moving into the land, water: the rivers running to the sea, the sea with its tides filling lochs. And across both land and water the wind. And, above all, the northwest wind. The honking of the wild geese in the sky is like a fleeting measure, a counting in another algebra, of all this movement.

singer may be innocent
never the song. With its instantaneous eyes
opened on to the world
and its heart laid bare,
the song is brazen,
the song is newborn.
Only when it has quietened
can listeners resume by habit
the innocence of their age.
When a great singer sings, the skin of space and of time go taut,