Excerpt from Waterlight

Perfect Day

I am just a woman of the shore
wearing your coat against the snow
that falls on the oyster-catchers’ tracks
and on our own; falls
on the still grey waters
of Loch Morar, and on our shoulders
gentle as restraint: a perfect weight
of snow as tree-boughs
and fences bear against a loaded sky:
one flake more, they’d break.


Frogs

But for her green
palpitating throat, they lay
inert as a stone, the male
fastened like a package
to her back. They became,

as you looked, almost
beautiful, her back
mottled to leafy brown,
his marked with two stripes,
pale as over-wintered grass.

When he bucked, once,
neither so much as blinked;
their oval, gold-lined eyes
held to some bog-dull
imperative. The car

that would smear them
into one—belly
to belly, tongue thrust
utterly into soft brain—
approached and pressed on.

Oh how we press on—
the car and passengers, the slow
creatures of this earth,
the woman by the verge
with her hands cupped.




The Puddle

A week’s worth of rain
gathers in swing-parks;
pools in hollow
low-lying fields

give the come-hither
to oystercatchers; curlews
insert like thermometers
their elegant bills.

What is it to lie so
level with the world,
to encourage the eye-
for-the-main-chance

black-headed gulls,
goal-posts, willows,
purple-bellied clouds
to inhabit us, briefly

upside down?
Is it written that we
with some life left,
must stake our souls

upright within us
as the grey-hackled heron
by a pond’s rim,
ever forbidding

the setting winter sun
to scald us beautifully
ruby and carnelian?
Flooded fields, all pulling

the same lustrous trick,
that flush in the world’s light
as though with sudden love—
how should we live?  


From Ultrasound (for Duncan)

iii.  Thaw

When we brought you home in a taxi
through the steel-grey thaw
after the coldest week in memory
—even the river sealed itself—
it was I, hardly breathing,
who came through the passage to our yard
welcoming our simplest things:
a chopping block, the frost-
split lintels; and though it meant a journey
through darkening snow,
arms laden with you in a blanket,
I had to walk to the top of the garden,
to touch, in a complicit
homage of equals, the spiral
trunks of our plum trees, the moss,
the robin’s roost in the holly.
Leaning back on the railway wall,
I tried to remember;
but even my footprints were being erased
and the rising stars of Orion
denied what I knew: that as we were
hurled on a trolley through swing doors to theatre
they’d been there, aligned on the ceiling,
    ablaze with concern
for that difficult giving,
before we were two, from my one.

From Waterlight: Selected Poems. Copyright 2007 by Kathleen Jamie. All rights reserved.