On Foot with Oppen | Muckle Roe
to altar what we cannot alter
unlimited drift stone-on-stone
impenetrable if true this
resistant ounce adapted to the order
of islands their waves & drongs
inhuman lives of the wind
I had hoped to arrive at an actuality
its boundary or prediction point
a single balance forced from three
directions : to north (now rare)
a turning or a setting out
—arrival not in the definition—
deeps of granite broken
bloomed cliff path turns
to trace a lochan bench
a hill the stacks cleft
by water govern water
as waves divide then cross
like a wrinkled cloth blue-silver
surface inshore green an arc
which awaits nothing
the fact bewildered bewildering
as each wave beaches returns
its water to water : between
red-granite sand & cliff
a pale drift wind-blown shell-light
a fold-within-fold that does not
repeat does not begin
to shield us from open time
a singular wreck of rock
& step cold wind above
the footpath unsteadily moves
& changes : astonishment
that if it strikes us we are truly
here a state of matter
impenetrable as lichen jigsaws
a boulder’s face the force
of days light of three seas
to rescue the image bereft
on its chosen ledge
Kettla Ness | ‘Between Walking & Watching
The Whole World Slips
goes missing’ as cloud-light
drains through schist
& granite a vanishing path
of sun-snow wadder-ga
wakening wind to a noon
dark original skin
of loch water riffled black
then silver-black misspelled
to a clean thread
pull to unravel or pull
up path from mix
& mire as boot slips
into waste & waiting
into waar sea & gravity
gathering to wag & wary
wail & wares as waves
like words alliterate
begin in sameness break
on rocks who
is listening who will gather
fail & falter watch & wander
wadder/watter wagtail wan
at waa see run a sea
unraveled in false sun
of wadder-bitter war & warn
as wind wasters clears Foula
whitens waves in the West Geo
washes salt to the watter-land
where words & steps
wind into one another until they don’t
Skaw Beach | A Turbidite
phrased by reading
vertically
what had been laid down
horizontally—deposition
sequential, upended
its graded layers
a form apart
from itself
track of motion
within motion
of riverbed
on ocean bed
line, mark, shadow, mark
each weight & texture
ledged, aslant
reared up
through sand :
land as a vessel
of vertigo
duration a figure
for grief, grief
a figure for matter
itself, each point
of shatter echoing
a sea before
this sea—
its syntax cut, suffused
by quartz veins
a violence now
within itself
a gleam, a glimpse
of what
we cannot know :
land before fear
as in prior
or how
to speak before
a planet’s
broken
openness
Notes
Drongs = offshore stacks. Ness = a headland.
“Kettla Ness | Between Walking & Watching the Whole World Slips” takes its title from Brian Teare’s “Olivine, Quartz, Granite, Carnelian” (Doomstead Days. Nightboat Books, 2019) & pays homage to the fall narrated there, in dialogue with Shaetlan weather words: wadder (weather); watter (water); wadder-ga (a sun dog); war (worse); a waar sea (heavy sea that brings waar—large-leaf seaweed—to the rocks); & waster (to wester; of wind, to turn westerly). A geo (pron. “gyo”) is a deep cleft worn into cliffs by the sea.
In “Skaw Beach | A Turbidite” italicized phrases are metamorphics formed by coring through E. Tracy Grinnell’s portrait of a lesser subject (Ellis Press, 2015).
Susan Tichy is the author of six books, most recently The Avalanche Path in Summer (poems, mountains) and Trafficke, a mixed-form investigation of family, race, and language, both from Ahsahta Press. Her work has been included in the National Poetry Series and recognized by numerous awards, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. These poems are from North|Rock|Edge: Shetland 2017/2019, f/c from Free Verse Editions. Now Professor Emerita at George Mason University, she resides in Colorado.