Driven To The Dram By Carol Ann Duffy

“Whisky you’re me darlin’ you’re leadin’ me astray
over hills and mountains and very far away” to the extent
that I was reading a poem of Carol Ann Duffy’s two days
nay nights ago already had my quota of the craythur

rose up from the chair went to the cabinet and extracted
another wee drop just one more for the short little
roads of the poem there in the lap just one more
for the twists and turns of the poet’s mind

‘tis not enough to turn the page one has to twist the cork
and release the geni from his long glass cave oh green
is the window in my foe’s prison tower we let him
out of an evening and that’s why the hills go dark

sure it’s the smoke of his fingertips reaching into
your brain and when the light comes he’s back
in his tunnel again pacing the walls there’s no ceiling
craning his neck to the neck to the butt end of that stopper

ah the grammar and the consonants and the high
stepping music now she’s got the gift our poet
and my eyes drink in the slantwise light of her letters
as the flood subsides and my headlands soft at last

go warm in the gloaming ah we’ll go roaming if we like
dear Byron so put away your pistols and your black
carriage and lay your head down before the world
burns itself alive with no end amen let the poet out

dear man open the door and let her grow tall in the night
she’ll come down to earth by morning the soles of her feet
smelling of owl scat and dried sedge she’s a bird she’s a cat
she’s the spider in the hall writing and writing

she’s plucking the old alphabet
for all the music it’s got left