"You know it by the northern look of the shore,
by the salt-worried faces,
by an absence of trees, an abundance of lighthouses.
It's a serious ocean."
Looking over some poetry papers I wrote in college (the aim being to help my students with the fine art of poetic analysis), I accidentally discovered Anne Stevenson's Scottish poems - poems with a "rare weather of aloneness . . . which conjure the landscape and climate of eastern Scotland with its chilly coast and chastened atmosphere" (Ray Parini).
"Fire struggles in the chimney like an animal.
It's caught in a life,
as when the tide pulls the Tay out
scarring predictable mudscape—
seawater's knifework
notching quick runnel and channel.
That's how you remember
the alternative lives.
You saw them, could never have lived them.
A ribbon of birds is pulled raggedly over November.
You're pulled between now and the way you will not escape."
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