The Cormorant

for Eunice

Up through the buttercup meadow the children lead

their father. Behind them, gloom

of spruce and fir, thicket through which they pried

into the golden ruckus of the field, toward home:

this rented house where I wait for their return

and believe the scene eternal. They have been out

studying the economy of the sea. They trudged to earn

sand-dollars, crab claws, whelk shells, the huge debt

repaid in smithereens along the shore:

ocean, old blowhard, wheezing in the give

and take, gulls grieving the shattered store.

It is your death I can't believe,

last night, inland, away from us, beyond

these drawling compensations of the moon.

If there's an exchange for you, some kind of bond,

it's past negotiation. You died alone.

Across my desk wash memories of ways

I've tried to hold you: that poem of years ago

starring you in your mater dolorosa phase;

or my Sunday picnic sketch in which the show

is stolen by your poised, patrician foot

above whose nakedness the party floats.

No one can hold you now. The point is moot.

I see you standing, marshalling your boats

of gravy, chutney, cranberry, at your vast

harboring Thanksgiving table, fork held aloft

while you survey the victualling of your coast.

We children surged around you, and you laughed.

Downstairs, the screen door slams, and slams me back

into the present, which you do not share.

Our children tumble in, they shake the pack

of sea-treasures out on table, floor, and chair.

But now we tune our clamor to your quiet.

The deacon spruces keep the darkest note

though hawkweed tease us with its saffron riot.

There are some wrecks from which no loose planks float,

nothing the sea gives back. I walked alone

on the beach this morning, watching a cormorant

skid, thudding, into water. It dove down

into that shuddering darkness where we can't

breathe. Impossibly long. Nothing to see.

Nothing but troughs and swell

over and over hollowing out the sea.

And, beyond the cove, the channel bells.

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by Rosanna Warren, 1990

The Idea

for Nolan Miller


For us, too, there was a wish to possess
Something beyond the world we knew, beyond ourselves,
Beyond our power to imagine, something nevertheless
In which we might see ourselves; and this desire
Came always in passing, in waning light, and in such cold
That ice on the valley's lakes cracked and rolled,
And blowing snow covered what earth we saw,
And scenes from the past, when they surfaced again,
Looked not as they had, but ghostly and white
Among false curves and hidden erasures;
And never once did we feel we were close
Until the night wind said, "Why do this,
Especially now? Go back to the place you belong;"
And there appeared, with its windows glowing, small,
In the distance, in the frozen reaches, a cabin;
And we stood before it, amazed at its being there,
And would have gone forward and opened the door,
And stepped into the glow and warmed ourselves there,
But that it was ours by not being ours,
And should remain empty. That was the idea.

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by Mark Strand, 1990

In the Secular Night

In the secular night you wander around
alone in your house.  It's two-thirty.
Everyone has deserted you,
or this is your story;
you remember it from being sixteen,
when the others were out somewhere, having a good time,
or so you suspected,
and you had to baby-sit.
You took a large scoop of vanilla ice cream
and filled up the glass with grapejuice
and ginger ale, and put on Glenn Miller
with his big-band sound,
and lit a cigarette and blew smoke up the chimney,
and cried for awhile because you were not dancing,
and then danced, by yourself, your mouth circled with purple.

Now, forty years later, things have changed,
and it's baby lima beans.
It's necessary to reserve a secret vice.
This is what comes from forgetting to eat
at the stated mealtimes. You simmer them carefully,
drain, add cream and pepper,
and amble up and down the stairs,
scooping them up with your fingers right out of the bowl,
talking to yourself out loud.
You'd be surprised if you got an answer,
but that part will come later.

There is so much silence between the words,
you say. You say, the sensed absence
of God and the sensed presence
amount to much the same thing,
only in reverse.
You say, I have too much white clothing.
You start to hum.
Several hundred years ago
this could have been mysticism
or heresy. It isn't now.
Outside there are sirens.
Someone's been run over.
The century grinds on.

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by Margaret Atwood, 1995

Domination of Black

At night, by the fire,
The colors of the bushes
And of the fallen leaves,
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks
Came striding.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

The colors of their tails
Were like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
In the twilight wind.
They swept over the room,
Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
Down to the ground.
I heard them cry - the peacocks.
Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
Turning as the flames
Turned in the fire,
Turning as the tails of the peacocks
Turned in the loud fire,
Loud as the hemlocks
Full of the cry of the peacocks?
Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?

Out of the window,
I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

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by Wallace Stevens, 1916

"Hemlock" by Joan Mitchell, 1956; inspired by "Domination of Black"

Crossing Kansas by Train

The telephone poles
Have been holding their
Arms out
A long time now
To birds
That will not
Settle there
But pass with
Strange cawings
Westward to
Where dark trees
Gather about a
Waterhole this
Is Kansas the
Mountains start here
Just behind
The closed eyes
Of a farmer's
Sons asleep
In their workclothes

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by Donald Justice, 1967