Donald Davie

A queer thing about those waters: there are no Birds there, or hardly any.
I did not miss them, I do not remember
Missing them, or thinking it uncanny.

The beach so-called was a blinding splinter of limestone,

Chemicals ripen the citrus; There are rattlesnakes in the mountains,
And on the shoreline
Hygiene, inhuman caution.

Beef in cellophane

No moss nor mottle stains My parents’ unmarked grave;
My word on them remains
Stouter than stone, you told me.

“Martyred to words”, you have thought,

X, whom society’s most mild command, For instance evening dress, infuriates,
In art is seen confusingly to stand
For disciplined conformity, with Yeats.

Taxed to explain what this resentment is

Northward I came, and knocked in the coated wall At the door of a low inn scaled like a urinal
With greenish tiles. The door gave, and I came

Home to the stone north, every wynd and snicket
Known to me wherever the flattened cat

When it is cold it stinks, and not till then. The seasonable or more rabid heats
Of love and summer in some other cities
Unseal the all too human: not in his.
When it is cold it stinks, but not before;

“stooped to truth and moralized his song” Spring pricks a little. I get out the maps. Time to demoralize my song, high time.