[Scottish]
Although the journey of stars
Were between you and me
The thread of silk will not decay
That bound you to me
That tied me to you,
and tonight you being from me
I am in darkness
sending words to you
my heart’s cargo
heavy dark words without shape,
vowel and consonant
Multiplying to sense
as the foliage of trees
bends their branches
in darkness
in the breeze
leaves sporting their green
first flicker of dawn.
Source: Macneachail, A 1996, A Proper Schooling, Polygon.
Knowing our love is salty makes me think:
In ocean towns, love is part of the weather,
the wide hands of the breeze fanning it in from the sea.
In ocean towns, love gets inside your mouth when you yawn,
until you have to brush your teeth again, and it hangs in the air
above your food, and you can smell it in your clothes,
and somewhere are smells of crab meat and suntan lotion,
but you can’t find them because all the love’s around.
And the salt hangs like a love letter on the fridge,
reminding you so much that the charm gets as redundant as the waves.
And you wish to God that for just one minute of your saline life
you didn’t have to be so damn happy!
But our love stays next to the pepper, and near it are smells
of shoes and cat hair so thick our eyes water.
Our love is contained. We keep it in a porcelain sailboat and take it
in small sprinkles with French fries and watermelon because it gags us straight.
But there are times when you come in from the wet air of July,
I can taste love on you, like drinking from the ocean.
And there’s the smell of hair, and the smell of shoes,
and of watermelon and French fries and the wet air of July.
And we all crawl in bed, seasoning it, shoes underneath,
and the cat curled like a seashell near the window, unaware he is an ingredient.
Source: www.poetry.com, 2004.
[American]
One summer afternoon, I learned my body
like a blind child leaving a walled
school for the first time, stumbling
from cool hallways to a world
dense with scent and sound,
pines roaring in the sudden wind
like a huge chorus of insects.
I felt the damp socket of flowers,
touched weeds riding the crest
of a stony ridge, and the scrubby
ground cover on low hills.
Haystacks began to burn,
smoke rose like sheets of
translucent mica. The thick air
hummed over the stretched wires
of wheat as I lay in the overgrown field
listening to the shrieks of small rabbits
bounding beneath my skin.
Source: Cummings, D 2006, The Artist as Alice: From a Photographer’s Life, Bright Hill Press.
