DOUGLAS DUNN
Land Love
We stood here in the coupledom of us.
I showed her this — a pool with leaping trout,
Split-second saints drawn in a rippled nimbus.
We heard the night-boys in the fir trees shout.
Dusk was an insect-hovered dark water,
The calling of lost children, stars coming out.
With all the feelings of a widower
Who does not live there now, I dream my place.
I go by the soft paths, alone with her.
Dusk is a listening, a whispered grace
Voiced on a bank, a time that is all ears
For the snapped twig, the strange wind on your face.
She waits at the door of the hemisphere
In her harvest dress, in the remote
Local August that is everywhere and here.
What rustles in the leaves, if it is not
What I asked for, an opening of doors
To a half-heard religious anecdote?
Monogamous swans on the darkened mirrors
Picture the private grace of man and wife
In its white poise, its sleepy portraitures.
Night is its Dog Star, its eyelet of grief
A high, lit echo of the starry sheaves.
A puff of hedge-dust loosens in the leaves.
Such love that lingers on the fields of life!
From Elegies (Faber, 1985)
Also available from Amazon.co.uk:
New Selected Poems: 1964-1999 (Faber, 2003)
The Donkey's Ears (Faber, 2000)
The Year's Afternoon (Faber, 2000)
Dante's Drum Kit (Faber, 1993)
The Faber Book of 20th century Scottish Poetry: editor (Faber, 1993)
Northlight (Faber, 1988)
St Kilda's Parliament (Faber, 1981)
Barbarians (Faber, 1979)
Love or Nothing (Faber, 1974)
Terry Street (Faber, 1969)