from Ultrasound (i)

(for Duncan)

Oh whistle and I’ll come to ye,
my lad, my wee shilpit ghost
summonsed from tomorrow.

Second sight,
a seer’s mothy flicker,
an inner sprite:

this is what I see
with eyes closed;
a keek-aboot among secrets.

If Pandora
could have scanned
her dark box,

and kept it locked—
this ghoul’s skull, punched eyes
is tiny Hope’s,

hauled silver-quick
in a net of sound,
then, for pity’s sake, lowered.

From Waterlight: Selected Poems. Copyright © 1999 by Kathleen Jamie. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org. All rights reserved.

I stand neither in the wilderness nor fairyland but in the fold of a green hill the tilt from one parish into another. To look at me through a smirr of rain is to taste the iron in your own blood because I hoard the common currency of longing: each wish each secret assignation. My limbs lift, scabbed with greenish coins I draw into my slow wood fleur-de-lys, the enthroned Brittania. Behind me, the land reaches toward the Atlantic. And though I’m poisoned choking on the small change of human hope, daily beaten into me look: I am still alive— in fact, in bud.

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from Ultrasound (i)

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The Wishing Tree

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