and raised in Ireland, Eamon Grennan returns there from his current home in Poughkeepsie for yearly "voice transfusions." He attributes his "amphibian" sensibility to this dual life. "I have a double sense of things, but I tend to write about what's under my nose. I write about here when I'm here and when I go back to Ireland I write about what's there. I regard myself not as in exile, but as a migrant. That's what attracted me, in some of my early poems, to birds. My becoming a poet -- in this particular incarnation anyway -- was not unconnected to someone giving me the present of a pair of binoculars." Grennan writes in both the ancient tradition of mournful remembrance in attention to the natural world and the modern impulse to seize and preserve the moment. "In the poetry I write there's a certain attempt at reanimation. Particularly if you're a lapsed Catholic, you look for versions of reconciliation, consolation, something to hold onto in the face of disappearance. . . As far as I'm concerned, poetry is about elegy. Every poem is a memory of some kind, a celebratory elegy. Poems are like shells. Something is gone and that's why you write." Unable to change our bodies into birds we move on the ground, feeling each pebble, the pressure of every bend: at blind corners we keep calling out Who's there? and run for it. A snipe explodes against the bus window: hard knock of the head first, then a burst of brown feathers. Signs everywhere, but we go on, your civil tongue in my mouth, the mountain's back a ripple under its skin of scutchgrass, your arm weighting my shoulderblades, cool your fingertips pressing, indenting, my sunburnt neck. Those great grief-carriers, the clouds, are casting shadows then wiping them clean as we pass the clicketing sheep who parade their speckled shins and sooty kneecaps through sepia light: almost everything from here on will be in whispers. We speed by a small shed in flames and before we can say a thing it's ash. Then the bones are burning under your skin in my hands. Later you're cool as a handful of scallions, your only warm part the tongue in the live cave of your mouth, its wet muscle pulsing the way a shellfish must just before it's opened, tasting salt. Eamon Grennan's book, "So It Goes", is published by Graywolf Press. photograph by Kelly Wissman '95