The slope - Poem

Literary Review, Wntr, 2002 by Roderick Watson

The Slope

   to start in the middle of the sentence running down
   the slope towards the incoherent rubble of the shore:
   where I told how each scored surface keeps
   its own record of the forces crossed on the journey
   to bring it there--names signs single
   words broken cries and whole lines
   torn from different histories--all going
   the same way--all tilted into the sea;

   where we turned our faces to the sun as waves of light
   marched down in concentric rings ordered and neat
   as the dykes that curve across the brae to say
   `You can live here. You can't stay'; where Christopher
   found a shattered sprig of cast-iron curled
   like ivy around a name--it spelled `The Singer'-
   so we hung it from the branches of an oak whose trunk
   was bent by air blowing for years on a single theme.

   In a house on the hill towards the end of the day
   my father stands with his back to the sky and a book
   in his veined hand. I cannot see my mother's face
   for she turns away to watch a little girl
   rolling on the yellow grass towards the door
   the tree the shore the sun. Joanna shrieks
   and laughs at the power of the world to draw her down
   to join the discrete things at the bottom of the slope.

   And I think of those spearing repeated notes
   that call from tiny wavering tracks and fill my room
   with your lost presence: where the tenor swoops
   and climbs its way beyond the edge of the phrase
   tearing sheets of sound from the unfinished sentence
   --and floating through--down down down.
   And down and down and down and down and down
   down and down and down and down and down

   --until there's nothing else to say at all ...

Roderick Watson is Professor of English Studies and Head of the Department at the University of Stirling and is also Director of the Stirling Centre for Scottish Studies. His poetry has appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies, and he has published a book of verse, True History on the Walls. He has published extensively on modern Scottish literature and is editor of the essential anthology, The Poetry of Scotland: Gaelic, Scots and English. Watson also has been General Editor of the Canongate Classics series since it was established in 1987.

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The slope - Poem

Literary Review, Wntr, 2002 by Roderick Watson

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