A. E. Stallings

So long I have been carrying myself Carefully, carefully, like a small child With too much water in a real glass Clasped in two hands, across a space as vast As living rooms, while gazes watch the waves That start to rile the little inland sea And slap against its cliffs' transparency, Revise and meet, double their amplitude, Harmonizing doubt from many ifs. Distant frowns like clouds begin to brood. Soon there is overbrimming. Soon the child Looks up to find a face to match the scolding, And just as he does, the vessel he was holding Is almost set down safely on the bookshelf.

After Seferis Since we still had a little Of the rusk left, what fools To eat, against the rules, The Sun’s slow-moving cattle, Each ox huge as a tank — A wall you’d have to siege For forty years to reach A star, a hero’s rank. We starved on the back of the earth, But when we’d stuffed ourselves, We tumbled to these delves, Numbskulls, fed up with dearth.

Something has come between us— It will not sleep. Every night it rises like a fish Out of the deep. It cries with a human voice, It aches to be fed. Every night we heave it weeping Into our bed, With its heavy head lolled back, Its limbs hanging down, Like a mer-creature fetched up From the weeds of the drowned. Damp in the tidal dark, it whimpers, Tossing the cover, Separating husband from wife, Lover from lover. It settles in the interstice, It spreads out its arms, While its cool underwater face Sharpens and warms: This is the third thing that makes Father and mother, The fierce love of our fashioning That will have no brother.

For Craig The blackbird sings at the frontier of his music. The branch where he sat marks the brink of doubt, is the outpost of his realm, edge from which to rout encroachers with trills and melismatic runs sur- passing earthbound skills. It sounds like ardor, it sounds like joy. We are glad here at the border where he signs the air with his invisible staves, “Trespassers beware”— Song as survival— a kind of pure music which we cannot rival.

The barnacle is rather odd — It’s not related to the clam Or limpet. It’s an arthropod, Though one that doesn’t give a damn. Cousin to the crab and shrimp, When larval, it can twitch and swim, And make decisions — tiny imp That flits according to its whim. Once grown, with nothing more to prove It hunkers down, and will remain Stuck fast. And once it does not move, Has no more purpose for a brain. Its one boast is, it will not budge, Cemented where it chanced to sink, Sclerotic, stubborn as a grudge. Settled, it does not need to think.

The land is full of what was lost. What's hidden Rises to the surface after rain In new-ploughed fields, and fields stubbled again: The clay shards, foot and lip, that heaped the midden, And here and there a blade or flakes of blade, A patient art, knapped from a core of flint, Most broken, few as coins new from the mint, Perfect, shot through time as through a glade. You cannot help but think how they were lost: The quarry, fletched shaft in its flank, the blood Whose trail soon vanished in the antlered wood, Not just the meat, but what the weapon cost— O hapless hunter, though your aim was true— The wounded hart, spooked, fleeting in its fear— And the sharpness honed with longing, year by year Buried deeper, found someday, but not by you.

Sleep, she will not linger: She turns her moon-cold shoulder. With no ring on her finger, You cannot hope to hold her. She turns her moon-cold shoulder And tosses off the cover. You cannot hope to hold her: She has another lover. She tosses off the cover And lays the darkness bare. She has another lover. Her heart is otherwhere. She lays the darkness bare. You slowly realize Her heart is otherwhere. There's distance in her eyes. You slowly realize That she will never linger, With distance in her eyes And no ring on her finger.

Ουδέν μονιμότερον του προσωρινού We’re here for the time being, I answer to the query— Just for a couple of years, we said, a dozen years back. Nothing is more permanent than the temporary. We dine sitting on folding chairs—they were cheap but cheery. We’ve taped the broken window pane. tv ’s still out of whack. We’re here for the time being, I answer to the query. When we crossed the water, we only brought what we could carry, But there are always boxes that you never do unpack. Nothing is more permanent than the temporary. Sometimes when I’m feeling weepy, you propose a theory: Nostalgia and tear gas have the same acrid smack. We’re here for the time being, I answer to the query— We stash bones in the closet when we don’t have time to bury, Stuff receipts in envelopes, file papers in a stack. Nothing is more permanent than the temporary. Twelve years now and we’re still eating off the ordinary: We left our wedding china behind, afraid that it might crack. We’re here for the time being, we answer to the query, But nothing is more permanent than the temporary.

The hounds, you know them all by name. You fostered them from purblind whelps At their dam’s teats, and you have come To know the music of their yelps: High-strung Anthee, the brindled bitch, The blue-tick coated Philomel, And freckled Chloe, who would fetch A pretty price if you would sell— All fleet of foot, and swift to scent, Inexorable once on the track, Like angry words you might have meant, But do not mean, and can’t take back. There was a time when you would brag How they would bay and rend apart The hopeless belling from a stag. You falter now for the foundered hart. Desires you nursed of a winter night— Did you know then why you bred them— Whose needling milk-teeth used to bite The master’s hand that leashed and fed them?