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The Cormorants
If I could be whisked away most warmly
from this spinning sack of sleep
I would rise through the hollow rain-wet night
past the soft-touching leaves of trees
and travel beyond this cosy land.
With arms stretching out through the cold
I would come to the dark salt sea
chopping remorselessly at the moon,
and finally to Iona of peace,
and the unnamed rocks about it.
And there I would find the cormorants,
with
black bills hunched in a cloak of grey, watching
watching what? as they soak
with rain and briny spray, watching for
the tides which make and seek them.
Scarecrow
The crow is not itself
just as I am not myself alone
some of me is stolen
by that shrewd, wheeling eye.
What do I look like in crow?
Dumb, slow, stumbler on a field
of plenty, just trouble enough
to keep an eye on.
It sits there on my fencepost,
careless that it
contravenes the good of me.
Watching me, utterly
unafraid of me.
My enemy, watching me.
Watching me as I pierce
the slopping, inert earth with my cross
and dress its stick arms with shredded sacks.
And it doesn't caw or blink
as I settle on the upright pole a pumpkin
and on that a black, shapeless hat.
The light on the winter field fails.
The crow's wings stretch out,
pass up through me
as I walk, unsteadily, home.
Leaving my scarecrow in the field.
Alone with the crow.
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