Sport 8: Autumn 1992
♣ Edwin Morgan
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– 82 –
♣ Edwin Morgan
Two Instamatic Poems
GLASGOW 15 JUNE 1990
Nosing greyly up the Clyde on a calm summer evening
a frigate and its tug make a faint skein of ripples
and are reflected
(like trees on the bank and clouds above)
in lazy estuary pewter.
Unlazily, a man with an air-gun
has fired at HMS Plymouth to give her
a Scottish welcome; on the bridge
a figure clutches his stomach. The frigate,
having survived four bombs in the Falklands,
finds out not everyone loved that war.
NEW YORK STATE JULY 1990
A man fishing an upstate reservoir
has caught a sleeping-bag, opened it,
starts back in horror, stared at
by a livid body with strangle-marks.
Young, stocky, lapped by waters
that did not need to drown him,
he has come thousands of miles to die.
The American fisherman tries to piece together
three tattoos, right arm, right breast, right leg:
a SCOTLAND THE BRAVE flag,
a spiky thistle,
a jester.
– 83 –
Stein on Venus
Where I stand, there I reign.
What is not subject is objectless.
Who knows how far my train of skirts
skirts other craters, on their knees
without evening or morning? When it is
there could ever be an end to power
I do not need to stride to tell you
or straddle a rock with a slap or scoop
fistfuls of dust to stiffen the sift—
it is all time down the red drain
to me, planted here in full pluck,
my grizzle bald as a dollar, set,
I said set, and who is going to move me?
—Only the great god Venus who
dibbled me into the rubble, saying
Water yourself! He laughed and left,
but trails his grim throne still, I know,
without servants, through sulphur, over slag,
endlessly I would say. Who loves him?
Some are standing stones, like me.
Some lie flat as dolmans. All
wait for nothing but the hiss of storms,
the crimson seething, the particle clatter,
the lightning-shattered smog of ochre,
the settling down and the rising up,
the impregnated immobilities!
God of the sun and ash, I take you
as you take me, I breathe, I sweat,
I dash my invisible waves as every
stone does, squeezing its roused seas
up and out as if they could find
beaches of meanest marram long dreamed.
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