More Moya Cannon--I am going to a conference at Loras College, which features a presentation on Moya Cannon. The presentation considers "place" in her poetry.

Scríob

Start again from nothing and scrape
since scraping is now part of us;
the sheep's track, the plough's track
are marked into the page,
the pen's scrape cuts a path on the hill.

But today I brought back
three bones of a bird,
eaten before it was hatched
and spat or shat out with its own broken shell
to weather on the north cliffs of Hoy.

This is an edge
where the pen runs dumb.
The small bleached bones of a fulmar or gannet
have nothing to tell.
They have known neither hunger nor flight
and have no understanding of the darkness
which came down and killed.

Tracks run to an end,
sheep get lost in the wet heather.
There are things which can neither be written, nor spoken, nor
read;
thin wing bones which cannot be mended.

Too fragile for scraping,
the bones hold in their emptiness
the genesis of the first blown note.

She has wedded genesis-death in a "coincidence of contraries" (Joyce and the thought of Bruno).