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Andrew McNeillie

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Cormorant (Phalacrocorax carbo)

for Ian McNeillie

I remember the day the old man shot one
high over the house and how it folded,
like a winded umbrella, and came down
in a thorn bush, stone dead, neck collapsed,
wings hooked up to dry for the last time.
But why still, that nervous, apprehensive wonder, 
the word skart on my tongue for pleasure?
Why couldn’t I settle to sleep that night
for thinking about it? I wasn’t upset.
I didn’t weep. It got what was coming to it.
It was the devil, the thief on the cross, of fish
that we might catch. Way out of range it swerved,
but the old man was a dead-eyed dick.
I’d seen him perform such miracles before.
And even if I smiled, when he laid it out
for my education in the life and death
of birds, and distinguished it from the SHAG,
I kept my school-yard smirk to myself, so he had
no cause to curse me for a tom fool.
Perhaps it was just those three dabs,
the size of half-a-crown, that came
flipping from its gullet alive, alive O
O, O as moist as eyes?... Maybe.

 

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