Three (or Four) Poems

Joan Eardley in Catterline

The black-faced sheep
are tilted in the storm-light and they face the black-faced
North Sea
on the long decline

of the swollen
pastures. Across all of this, a similar
inertia. The weeds and fence posts come down and hang
above the lane

and we pass underneath
the banks that ooze like a luminous, wrung-out kitchen cloth. A barn
opens on a corner
its tunnel

directly out of the gravel
kerb; we slide
by in a car, swishing over mashed cow manure and sliding water.
...