The Circle and the Line

Circle and line intersect and part Here and now, never and always. The one cannot know the pain of the other; How can it, without end or start? In Kirk Bay two cousins of time and space Approach but never quite will meet. A glance, a stare, of incomprehension; Guarded retreat of quickening pace. Tystie skull, salt-bleached and mute, Proudly placed on a rug of kelp. Its squalid ledge; time served, bereft Has only thrift for a pale salute. Naked ripples of Orcadie sand Pressed close in the album of a different time. A family portrait of unknown faces Thrown down before me from Devonian band. Father, farmer, boy, man; The line pursued him and imposed its end. The immortality of hopeful boyhood Lives on in a fragment of bone, if it can. And yet, in one, the line and the circle Dance and smile, hand in hand. The loaf on the hearth, whether past or present Is the gift of the circle to the lines in the sand.