From the northbound train
white flecks on the brown ploughland
like flakes of fine snow –
they are birds, gulls,
suddenly flying. Across
winter fields somehow
I missed the white horse
on the hill that was boyhood,
all of it gone now.
Playing fields some place
that was some place once, goal posts
moved and again moved.
I’m on the run, hours,
days of the one bitter thought
on the narrow road
to my life’s deep north,
in my pocket a ticket:
ADULT. ADMIT ONE.
weeping and weeping
over the north, for my dead,
for all my lost ones,
they who will not come
my way again, them we won’t
see again, ever.
The dry northern air,
the white wind will sort it out,
and the rain, the rain.
And everywhere birds
in a glitter of flying,
the landscape dancing.
At Culloden larks
that are dust in the tall air,
black flags of the crows.
Barefoot some, kilted,
charging through juniper, thorns,
thistles, their faces
set to the wind, sleet,
shrapnel, grapeshot, bayonets,
Cumberland’s well trained
Hessian butchers –
hungry and down hearted, fell
all the wild flowers
of Scotland. Exeunt
clansmen, croftsmen, fishermen.
Bonnie Prince Dickhead,
says Billy, days away
on Skye, in the old mates’ club,
and a dram to go.
under deep white snow,
and the Hebridean yes
begins no, no, no,
and no again no
till the yes of it at the
sentence’s finish:
aye a wee dram then.
This is for you Jim,
whose garden is the battlefield.
This is for you, Con,
that you stay upright
and vertical in Tarbert,
this god forsaken
hole. That the Wee Free
tether the goat, the rooster,
that the seventh day
is all cold meat, is
fact friend, in the Good Black Book
you will find mention
of boats but never
a bicycle. Things the heart
will no longer hold,
and bursts with, thoughts
on the waves and the west wind,
the long birds overhead,
heron, Brent Goose, swan,
their distant migrations,
continents their shores.
The best monuments
belong to the defeated,
and always anyway
and after a while
all the bartenders look alike
and your man goes off
the rails, refreshments
sounds in his ear like fresh mints
and on the rolling
bar on the rocking
boat asking for chewing gum
what he hears: tuna.
Let the light bleed out.
Let there be me and the landscape
and the moon, dreamer
when the dream goes out
into the next and the next,
following the tongue,
the eye, lone white house
on the hilltop, why don’t I
live there?
I ran away to
Scotland, the people there to
see, and found a pound
was as round and soon
spent, home again home again,
jiggety-jig.
And again gulls’ cries,
tern, bittern, the heart’s last blips
on the monitor.
Time to go home.
The yellow dock gate
comes down and the town bell rings
two, two. From the dock
a woman calls her farewells
to her man and a voice shouts
Kenny, Kenny, but
it ain’t me Sunshine,
we roll in the water’s heave
on The Isle of Mull,
on passage, the land
fading to mist and distance,
on the dark water
black snouts of dolphins,
up from their own deep places,
breathing in ours.