Roger Mitchell

Two Poems

THE DEATHS OF WILLIAM BRAINE

Look at the face. His, one of three corpses
they went all that way to dig up, one for whom
a descendant somewhere in the west of England
flew to the disinterment on his own.
His last gasp preserved, as if he had died
yesterday. Just the shirt gives him away.
His coffin might, as well, joined by a craft
so exact one would have to go to school
to learn the terms. And who still binds big toes
together with torn bedsheet or shirttail?
No one is sure why they abandoned ship,
shuffled along the coast, dying piecemeal,
driven to hacking their dead into chunks
of meat, which they carried, boiled, in the boots
of the same. Bones have begun to show up,
screened, measured, in the scientific journals,
photos of fibulas along which the tiny
knife nicks still stand out after a hundred
and fifty winters in the open. Yes,
they were still able, at his death, to bury
their dead, still sure they had come to this place
for a reason. Though some were starting to drop
their reflexes, others dragged down into fogs
of fatigue so deep they could not sleep free of it.
And so could neither hunt nor cart, could not
stand, for long, leaned against the ship’s gunwhales
or one another till they leaned so far out
they fell. Where we find them among the fears
of surviving relatives, all dead of course,
in stories told by Inuit hunters
for generations, hunters who stood by
when they passed, listless, could not help without
dying themselves. The distant descendant looks
down at the face in the box, the teeth bared
in a greeting, a smile like a blow to the head.
He says something we can’t quite hear, steps back.
The lid is hammered into place again.

THE STONES AT CALLINISH,
ISLE OF LEWIS

A boarded-up hotel beside
a fishing pier, a pub. Above them both,
a church crouched on a hill. Whoever brought
Christ to this desolate coast, did it
with sword and fire, and it’s not clear today
whether it took, or whether the slow seep
of centuries, the long winter nights,
would ever let anything be that wasn’t
as sullen as the hill. The village
is that way, too. When you step outside,
there it is, the universe, all of it,
the glare of it pure, God’s unshaven face
so close your skin rasps. Whoever raised
these stones did a good job of vanishing, too,
though the longer I stand here, the more
it seems it was deeper into the genes
they went, not just into the air.