The poems are from Waterlight
published by Graywolf Press.
Editor's note: Every month GT features the work of a national poet in our online edition. This month we spotlight Kathleen Jamie, who was born in Scotland in 1962. Her poetry has appeared in seven collections, and in the London Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere. She teaches at St. Andrew’s University and lives in Fife, Scotland.
The Glass-hulled Boat
First come the jellyfish:
mauve-fringed, luminous bowls
like lost internal organs,
pulsing and slow.
Then in the green gloom
swaying sideways and back
like half-forgotten ancestors
—columns of bladderwrack.
It’s as though we’re stalled in a taxi
in an ill-lit, odd
little town, at closing time,
when everyone’s maudlin
and really, ought just to go
home, your sorry inclining
pillars of wrack, you lone
vaguely uterine jellyfish
—whom I almost envy:
spun out, when our engines churn,
on some sudden new trajectory,
fuddled, but unperturbed.
Mrs McKellar, her martyrdom
Each night she fills, from the fabled
well of disappointment, a kettle
for her hottie. Lying
in his apportioned bed:
Mr McKellar—annulled
beside his trouser press.
Who mentions, who defers to whom
on matters concerning
redecorating the living room,
milk delivery, the damp
stain spreading on the ceiling
when a word is a kind of touch?
Speaking of which, and they don’t,
the garden needs attention
and the bedroom window frames,
exquisitely, the darkening hills,
a sky teased with mauve.
But he won’t notice, or smell her burning
fix it! fix it!
won’t look up the number
of Roofer and Son about that
slightly bewildering stain,
and she’ll keep schtum.
Medieval in a dressing gown,
she’d rather display
toward an indifferent world
the means of her agony:
a broken toilet seat,
or die, lips sealed, regarding
the rotting window sills, that
wobbling shelf, which she could
as it happens, repair herself,
but won’t, on principle.
Wee Wifey
I have a demon and her name is
WEE WIFEY
I caught her in a demon trap—the household of my skull
I pinched her by her heel throughout her wily transformations
until
she confessed
her name indeed to be WEE WIFEY
and she was out to do me ill.
So I made great gestures like Jehovah: dividing
land from sea, sea from sky,
my own self from WEE WIFEY
(There, she says, that’s tidy!)
Now I watch her like a dolly
keep an eye,
and mourn her:
For she and I are angry/cry
because we love each other dearly.
It’s sad to note
that without
WEE WIFEY
I shall live long and lonely as a tossing cork.
Swallows and Swifts
Twitter of swallows and swifts:
‘tickets and visas, visas and tickets’—
winter, and cold rain
clears the milky-way of birdshit
where wires cross the lane.
Frogs
But for her green
palpitating throat, they lay
inert as a stone, the male
fastened like a package
to her back. They became,
as you looked, almost
beautiful, her back
mottled to leafy brown,
his marked with two stripes,
pale as over-wintered grass.
When he bucked, once,
neither so much as blinked;
their oval, gold-lined eyes
held to some bog-dull
imperative. The car
that would smear them
into one—belly
to belly, tongue thrust
utterly into soft brain—
approached and pressed on.
Oh how we press on—
the car and passengers, the slow
creatures of this earth,
the woman by the verge
with her hands cupped.
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