Mindful
Mary Oliver


Everyday
I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for —
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world —
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant —
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these —
the untrimmable light

of the world,
the ocean's shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

The Finished House
George Mackay Brown


In the finished house a flame is brought to the hearth.
Then a table, between door and window
Where a stranger will eat before the men of the house.
A bed is laid in a secret corner
For the three agonies — love, birth, death —
That are made beautiful with ceremony.
The neighbours come with gifts —
A set of cups, a calender, some chairs.
A fiddle is hung at the wall.
A girl puts lucky salt in a dish.
The cupboard will have its loaf and bottle, come winter.
On the seventh morning
One spills water of blessing over the threshold.

Nostalgia
Don Paterson


I miss when I could drop down on all fours
and flick the ground away from under me.
I miss the wire I ran into the earth.
I miss when I was the bloom on the sea
and we slept forever under the warm clouds
till something spoiled in us twitched with design
and woke the clock. So we arose and went.
Last night I rowed out to the beeless glade
and lay down on the grass to listen
to the water eating at the edge of things.
My sister taught me to watch the stars this way
lest I think that heaven was up, or heaven,
lest I forget the stars are also under us
where they sink and sail into the dark like cinders.

Little Aster
Don Paterson

after Gottfried Benn


We hauled the drayman onto the slab.
He'd drowned in the canal. Some wag
had set a small blue flower between his teeth.

When I went below his skin with my long knife
and reached up along through the chest
to cut out the tongue and the soft palate

I must have touched the stem and dislodged the thing;
it'd slipped from his mouth and into the brain
I'd set beside him in a steel bowl.

I packed the flower with the woodshavings
back into his empty chest
and stitched him up again.

Drink your fill of that great vase!
Sleep well, my little aster!

Francesca Woodman
Don Paterson


                        i
At the heart there is a hollow sun
by which we are constructed and undone

                        ii
Behind the mirror. Favourite place to hide.
I didn't breathe. They looked so long I died.

                        iii
What's shown when we unveil, disclose, undress,
is first the promise, then its emptiness

                        iv
Ghost-face. Not because I turned my head,
but because what looked at me was dead.

                        v
— We don't exist — We only dream we're here —
This means we never die — We disappear —

                        vi
We'd met 'in previous lives', he was convinced.
Yeah, I thought. And haven't spoken since.

                        vii
All rooms will hide you, if you stand just so.
All ghosts know this. That's really all they know.

Radka Toneff
Don Paterson


I'll let you go, if you'll let this come good.
I'm speaking it as quietly as I can
a mile or so into the Bygdøy wood
where you lost your voice. So much for the plan
to master the sounds closest to silence, sing
piano. Though I know now what you meant.
When the ear lights on the half-said thing
it leans into its distance, and is sent
out into those spectral fires that play
between the inner world and outer dark
as we are, to this zone of breath and blue
between the world and the dark. Radka, skylark,
you rose too far; though as it died away
I heard right through the song to what sung you.

The Air
Don Paterson


What is this dark and silent caravan
that being nowhere, neither comes nor goes;
that being never, has no hour or span;
of which we can say only that it flows?
How was it that this empty datastream,
this cache of dead light could so lose its way
it wandered back to feed on its own dream?
How did that dream grow to the waking day?
What is the sound that fades up from the hiss,
like a glass some random downdraught had set ringing,
now full of its song to keep it singing?
When will the air stop breathing? Will it all
come to nothing, if nothing came to this?

The Wave 
Don Paterson


For months I'd moved across the open water
like a wheel under its skin, a frictionless
and by then almost wholly abstract matter
with nothing in my head beyond the bliss
of my own breaking, how the long foreshore
would hear my full confession, and I'd drain 
into the shale till I was filtered pure.
There was no way to tell on that bare plain
but I felt my power run down with the miles
and by the time I saw the scattered sails,
the painted front and children on the pier
I was nothing but a fold in her blue gown
and knew I was already in the clear.
I hit the beach and swept away the town.