Three Winter Tales
After Kenneth MacLeod
I
In the year of the dead birds
Saint Kenneth fed some sparrows
as a last rite under an oak.
In the watching man’s heart
something else crystallised
where usually waterfalls froze.
His eyes misted over –
and that was the true miracle:
now the mountains melt and grow.
II
Saint Bride’s bird saved
the Christ from his enemies
– covered him in sea yarn.
Down they came from the mountain
but couldn’t find anyone,
saw no trace of god or man.
So the bird daubed white
by Michael for her sins,
went back to catching oysters
And saving children’s souls,
bringing them in in a boat
from the brink of the other world.
III
The black fiddler on the boat on fire,
the village watching from a darkened shore
his ship still hurtling as pyres of foam
Leap and lick at the man in flame
whose grin is the gleam their watching eyes
catch from the cliff like a bad sunrise,
The speed of everyone’s madness set
in time to the tune in their blood,
and the cold wail of some poor soul
Long held groaning down in the hold,
bound for the black life under his sail
where no more songs prevail.
Allan Donn
‘Ailein Duinn ò hì shiubhlainn leat’
My Allan Donn, where do you lie
in foam white as an alb?
Your pillow now a mermaid’s purse,
your bed of kale and gorse
unseen beneath the sea,
Oh, Allan, who can comfort me?
The seals kept faith with every soul
that fell from Hurkar rocks;
their mothers watched them from the doors
but no one made the shore,
and all of us were torn,
Oh, Allan, may we be reborn?
So talk with them, my Allan dear,
as we would in the dawn,
our little boat with anchored dreams
of other ways and times
warm by the harbour side,
Oh, Allan, have we lost the tide?
Then pity us, sea kings and queens,
the orphans of your race;
whose fathers wash ashore like shells,
and all the stories tell
of hearts lost in the sound,
Oh, Allan, sorrow’s in our hands,
My Allan, when will we be found?
Cnoc Rannoch Retreat
In the byre by the new extension,
next to cuts of fresh-faced pine,
I found a sack of peat croquettes
tight like shite from sheep in winter,
left to smoke the hearth bricks,
scent me stronger than coal.
Then a shock: two hides, intact
on rough shelving – deer and fox.
She as shapely as a hill-throne queen
without her trophy head on;
the thin diamonds of the fox’s eyes,
his soft-fold ears, his snout wanting a lick.
These Highland rooms are fucking cold,
the wind’s a tumult down the stack;
all you can do is huddle and burn
against the time your hands might have to learn
the troubled craft that steals the skin
from another animal’s back.
In Connemara
Driven outdoors by restlessness
that would not be ignored,
I climbed a hill in Galway
where Blake spoke to me
from his experience of mercy.
So I asked, “What is mercy?”
thinking, “Whatever its qualities
I am unadorned, waiting always
for something to end.”
Then I took to my heels,
descended from the heights to hear
locusts in the grass and crickets’ wings
give the day, the sun, and the air
a rattle like the coming of fear:
and there I found a badger.
Coat still wet from last night’s rain;
fresh-hit and laid with care
by the roadside, the solemn driver
carrying him like a drowned boy
in his bundle of soiled clothes.
A big animal, worked on now by flies
that disappeared into his ears
while the crickets kept the wake,
and the badger’s eye had the glistening look
of all salvations we will not understand,
as my road turned exultant along the lee
of the hill, then on towards the Atlantic.
Turning a Corner
Round the back of the church hall
snail tracks riddle their moonlight
across the top of a wall.
This spell will heal the cracks
between the bricks, turn mortar weeds
to herbs that dispel all sorrow.
Touch the wall and a dark mercury
enters your veins; midnight crumbles
but remains moved by these curious
messengers in some other time:
their slow revelations, manifesting
words that are only felt for, never found.
Asking for Rain
The Buddhist pilgrim Jojin, passing through the Chinese capital in 1073, became the first Master from Japan to be commanded by the Emperor to pray for rain.
I
Let me begin with the crab-apple tree
in September: half-green, half-red,
its unripe and ripening fruits
and the delicate twine of clematis;
the grass is littered with apple stunts
and the wasps are rising off them –
there is incense burning somewhere,
there is mist come down from the hills
to the garden, and I wait afraid.
II
I’ve been praying here for thirteen days –
the birds are praying for me: a vye-
and-echo sunset-lung menagerie
alive with taunts and blossom talk…
I envy them their opportunity to mock
as stubborn clouds resist my weak-
heart refrains, and only one of us is breaking.
Their presence in the bowery
tends and seasons me another way,
as it has done for everyone religiously
called to play these games at twilight;
they whistle what they see, each allotted
note a notification for the dead:
if I say one more word they might just call it.
III
My tent is full of mysteries.
I lie awake and listen to the wind
and wonder if the rain will come tonight,
whether it will please the Emperor
and leave him happy with my work,
which I cannot contain and
he cannot possess alone;
we both know this, so I remain.
Our silence has its history:
listening in respective palaces
filled with conversations, empty cares;
then when the wind drops
each of us discerns the other
attending and immeasurably divine.
I think he will permit himself
a smile in my direction.
IV
In this old kingdom
nothing lasts but mist:
it holds sway over everything,
so everything – these trees, that hut,
this plot of dirt – is lost then found
and newly formed in looking,
eyes releasing all phenomena,
their nature learned
across the milky way.
The world as breath,
its presence saturating,
takes its life from bird calls
and the shouts of early risers
twisting down the valley,
so its voice, inborn and rich
and palpable, condenses there
in morning throats, warms
and weathers hearts.
In her palace the Empress wakes
and seeks her favourite slippers;
wrapped in cloud she stands out
on her balcony and lets the air
wash over her like lines of silk,
lip to thigh, longing for the sun…
I should not linger there; he stirs:
The Emperor with his concubine;
my master, dreaming always of the rain.
V
Lobelia
Honeysuckle
Coltsfoot
Lady smock
Lady slipper
Mistress, I will use the Lotus Flower
to bring you rain: a billion showered
petals scenting darkness from your halls,
and ivy stalks to undermine his walls.
Lupins, curl us safely in your bells,
ferns, turn us silver with your pools,
fronds and stems drown us where you bend
so surely we will come to understand
Bees’ words blurry with sweet juice,
and our voices be renewed
with a taste like blackbird honey,
restoring dawn to harmony
As distant swans and marsh crakes
break the world awake
Red Dragon Lady
Green Dragon Lady
Rise up from the earth
Red Dragon Lady
Green Dragon Lady
Come down from the sky
Red Dragon Lady
Green Dragon Lady
Meet me in the thundering air
The Butterfly Net
Caught:
One member of a family,
something truly original –
word or thought –
apprehends us in our frailty
if we wait; a whole pending
swarm of colour chaos in it
so our eye may be trapped
by wanting into belief.
Its wings are like the judgements
behind kindness, its presence
makes us afraid; we hear
its brothers hurry with a locust stir,
the air whirring with heartbeats
where there is no heart;
and when their thrown net descends
we have only time to blink in the sunlight:
Then let go.
John Lammie Comes Home
He is made of moss,
he is made of stones
wet from the rain
and the river.
He diverts the stream
with his hands, replaces
old boundaries felt blind,
bowed in the cold flow-down.
Walking back he knows
where the mud is,
and the rough quality of its churn –
deer churn, sheep or cow;
how the hill seeps
bringing mist to the night
like curlews’ breaths,
stags running down the twilight.
He sees the last day-shapes of all
he has brought back to himself –
then goes inside to fight the damp
and the concrete’s long neglect;
squares off measured numbers,
builds things out of ink:
the way the world builds months,
the sky makes a moon.
Little Plastic Bag of Chicken Organs
My dad retrieved from up the chicken’s arse,
and I played with on the counter,
squishing blood in the bag against the melamine,
shaking giblets in the trapped air
of their little balloon, listening
to the heart drum against the side
like a leather ball being kicked.
My dad fried it up, excited but reserved
in what was being revealed; chopped the heart
and passed one half to me: I nibbled –
strong taste of iron – then ate my half whole.
We shared the kidneys, and the liver of a calf:
velvet of liver under fingers,
a sharp knife’s need for slicing;
our cuts still red with blood while
kidneys and heart turned pink and brown.
It is autumn now, so it is autumn then:
my father dead in two years,
and the plucked skin of the chicken
cold and clammy under my hand
as a freshly shaved head,
palpable boned and slightly yellowing.
Forgive us, great animal helpers,
that we did not kill you ourselves.
New Territories
I
They have cut back the reeds
for a quarter of a mile; the air
lies scrubbed with coconut breezes
from the gorse, the road here
yellow with its spiky balm
like memory pricking the palm.
They are clearing new territories,
maps redrawn as if going back to when
the world was a work in progress
so we might find some freedom in the scene
as each step sinks through scythe-work
down to what the stalk bed covered over.
Only wild daffodils remain, old life-markers
in ones and twos invulnerable as clover.
II
The reeds dry in bundles on the ground
like top-knots on a row of scalps
in the warm afternoon after the battle.
I suddenly see myself exhilarant,
alive in all the inner places now,
opened to a penetrating glory:
Aeneas coursing his waterways,
whole new Romes being offered…
It’s more like badly translated Ulysses
Stood in a ditch talking to the dead,
but they tell him where to go; these marshes
let you in, then they belong to the birds.
III
Some forgotten tracks no longer flood
just find their end: thus-far-and-no-furthers
where the elements and we are led,
each born reflected in the other;
land condensing and dissolving underfoot
bringing us back in time to be renewed.
Perhaps to watch in places made like this
is to partake enough: trying to guess
the names of trees out loud, as one redress
for sorrow, works as worship, more or less.
The reeds stand still guarding the horizon,
protect the paths that lead to the heron,
maintain their silent aspirations,
draw their breath from the sun.
IV
The rushes too were culled to ankle height;
but one big bull missed in the bed
is already busy re-seeding the night
with a spring wind in his head.
Here is where the boy has always been:
crossing boardwalks carrying his shoes,
sat on a caulked plank pulled from the fen
like a piece of Charon’s lost canoe.
A bear might come to him out of the forest,
deer might come to him under the moon,
telling him tales of what he lost
from long years being inhuman.
He gathers these thoughts and puts them
on the grass so the earth soaks them in;
then sits not moving, his story resumed,
waiting for a harvest to begin.