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This poem is taken from PN Review 160, Volume 31 Number 2, November - December 2004.

Three (or Four) Poems Robert Gray

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.
...


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