Alistair Elliot

Behind the voices of di Stefano And Callas, others sing. I seem to hear In the same stream an earlier Lucia Filling another room with love and woe.

The fire, the sons, their parents smell of peat, The fume of family; their chairs scrape, on flags Awkwardly covered with the skins of stags; Is the wax cylinder too near the heat?

The sextet or the summers of their glen Stored up and now released...

We met a school, a family, or, we guessed, a little university of dolphins, that rolled around us, looking up with interest at the full sails that pulled us by so fast, with a sweet tickling, not the rub of engines.

I talked to them, but what have we to say to the smiling scholars of the Scottish coast? I was rude or boring. They took their children away

into the endless heaven of the sea,...

My favourite lavatory was on Ischia. It was a small round tower on a flat roof, Covered with plaster, vines and happy bees. The humming might have been the sun, its rays Shuffled in by the winking of a leaf In the arrow-slit, or else mild snoring from a Calmly-digesting-upside-down lucertola. It was a shit-house nothing could improve. It was my first Mediterranean summer.

If I could...

Sunday October 26, 1986

How do these things become us? – orange juice as we cast off, fudge as we meet the ocean funnelling into the inlet of Cape May, then boiled chestnuts, grey and wrinkled as the seas our stomachs ride (the heaving field of Delaware Bay) all morning, and for lunch a chocolate kiss and an apple from the pollen of two trees sensibly rooted, restaurants of bees ...

...

On the Town Moor the butchers keep their cows, A healthy hospice near the abattoirs. Something is strange here, but they calmly browse, Flicking flies with the nameplate in their ears, And ruminate without conclusion, till I cross the skyline.

                   In my grey and blue They recognise me...