No Edge, No Falling: after Elizabeth Bishop
- No Edge, No Fallingafter Elizabeth Bishop
Here not waterfalls: scrubby plats of gorse and heather —a few stray dabs of yellow torn by stinging winds. We’ve come cross rutted track and granite stiles, along the apertures of fields, “to stare at some inexplicable old stonework”— nineteen huddled rocks, nineteen obelisks, a ring of stones in ancient reformation.
Stark and pricked, wayward: every footpath this late autumn leads to stonework ruins draped by fog-ghosts —the lanky beauties rising cross the heath not oak but chimney stacks, hearth-less and chill. If hungering for anything, we’re hungering for fire— a burst of red to break the endless heath, a bonfire to warm these age-old stones. But listen, in the wind there is a voice— it isn’t only hardship that I offer.
Not only, but ocean dusted blue which crests against striated crops of granite, a rocky, disbelieving headland; and there, beyond, a horizon line so far, so smudged there is no edge or falling. [End Page 6]
Geri Doran is the author of two poetry collections, Sanderlings (Tupelo Press, 2011) and Resin (Louisiana State University Press, 2005). Recipient of the Walt Whitman Award and the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, she currently teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Oregon. Most recently, her poems have appeared in Poetry International, Image, and Subtropics.
