Two Poems

Pen

Point to plane. Point to line.
Behold the literal abstraction.
Draw the quill from her left wing: 
I’m after some capillary action.

Swan for broad and crow for fine.
Eagle, no. For lutes. For mine? 
An e-pen on an e-ink pad 
much like my father’s slate on slate.

The first script wasn’t law or lore 
or poem or prayer, but plain receipt 
for what was placed in common store.
The second, hock. The reckoning

is what we do: we keep the word,
the books, the warrant ironclad.
Hence our golden rule: All men 
must have a voice. But not a pen.

Well

i.m. John Burnside

. . . Her hair the colour of wells. Half a line 
the black-haired girl told me you didn’t use,
so I kept it for myself. Its day would come.
Thirty years. O the rewards of patience. 

Last night I started with that line of Sorleys
when the radio called, the day Mackay Brown died.
Long pause. ‘Lovely poem.’ ‘What do you mean?’
‘Lovely poem. You know. That poem he wrote.’

So was yours, that lovely poem you wrote
with its grass and snow, its ghost, its one lit window,
the goldenrod, the suns late honeying angle 
a well you drew on daily, easily,

its waters crystal, magnifying, charmed,
the well you left us neither dry nor lower
but lost, and even if we’d lucked upon it
its one-starred black disk far below our reach.