I don’t learn much, I’m a man
of no improvements. My nose still snuffs the air
in an amateurish way. My profoundest ideas
were once toys on the floor, I love them, I’ve licked
most of the paint off. A whisky glass
is a rattle I don’t shake. When I love
a person, a place, an object, I don’t see
what there is to argue about.
I learned words, I learned words: but half of them
died for lack of exercise. And the ones I use
often look at me
with a look that whispers, Liar.
How I admire the eider duck that dives
with a neat loop and no splash and the gannet that suddenly
harpoons the sea. – I’m a guillemot
that still dives
in the first way it thought of: poke your head under
and fly down.
I nod and nod to my own shadow and thrust
A mountain down and down.
Between my feet a loch shines in the brown,
Its silver paper crinkled and edged with rust.
My lungs say No;
But down and down this treadmill hill must go.
Parishes dwindle. But my parish is
This stone, that tuft, this stone
And the cramped quarters of my flesh and bone.
I claw that tall horizon down to this;
And suddenly
My shadow jumps huge miles away from me.
I don’t like this, being carried sideways
through the night. I feel wrong and helpless – like
a timber broadside in a fast stream.
Such a way of moving may suit
that odd snake the sidewinder
in Arizona: but not me in Perthshire.
I feel at rightangles to everything,
a crossgrain in existence. – It scrapes
the top of my head and my footsoles.
To forget outside is no help either –
then I become a blockage
in the long gut of the train.
I try to think I’m an Alice in Wonderland
mountaineer bivouacked
on a ledge five feet high.
It’s no good. I go sidelong.
I rock sideways ... I draw in my feet
to let Aviemore pass.
At my age, I find myself
making a mountainous landscape
of the bedclothes. A movement
of knee and foot
and there’s Cul Mor and a hollow
filled with Loch Sionascaig.
I watch tiny sheep stringing along
a lower slope.
Playing at God.
One day, when I go back to Assynt,
this could frighten me, this could make me
have to drive from my mind
a leg stretching out under ground, the collapse
of Cul Mor, the shedding
in every torrential direction
of Loch Sionascaig. But now
I cock up my left foot and create
Suilven. I watch myself
fishing from a rocky point.
– I think, At my age! – and
stretch out. My image vanishes.
God has destroyed himself again.
Those who recognise my mask and recognise
my words – all to be found in the dictionary –
shall I scare them, bore them
with a truth? Shall I distort
the words to be found in the dictionary
in order to say what they mean
when they mean me?
How my friends would turn away
from the ugly sounds coming from my mouth.
How they would grieve for
that comfortable MacCaig whose
small predictions were predictable.
How they would wish back
the clean white bandages
that hid these ugly wounds.
Heartless, musical Ariel,
does everyone prefer Caliban to you,
as I do?
Supersonic Ariel, go zip round the world
or curl up in a cowslip’s bell.
I’d rather be visited by Caliban.
As I am, I am. I chat with him
helplessly spilling out of an armchair,
scaly on the carpet.
I’m teaching him to smoke. It soothes him
when he blubbers about Miranda and
goes on about his mother.
Phone a bat, Ariel. Leave us
to have a good cry – to stare at each other
with recognition and loathing.
My only country
is six feet high
and whether I love it or not
I’ll die
for its independence.
He’s obsessed with clocks, she with politics,
He with motor cars, she with amber and jet.
There’s something to be obsessed with for all of us.
Mine is lochs, the smaller the better.
I look at the big ones – Loch Ness, Loch Lomond,
Loch Shin, Loch Tay – and I bow respectfully,
But they’re too grand to be invited home.
How could I treat them in the way they’d expect?
But the Dog Loch runs in eights when I go walking.
The Cat Loch purrs on the windowsill. I wade
Along Princes Street through Loch na Barrack.
In smoky bars I tell them like beads.
And don’t think it’s just the big ones that are lordlily named.
I met one once and when I asked what she was called
The little thing said (without blushing, mind you)
The Loch of the Corrie of the Green Waterfalls.
I know they’re just H2O in a hollow.
Yet not much time passes without me thinking of them
Dandling lilies and talking sleepily
And standing huge mountains on their watery heads.
I’m waiting for the moment
when the train crosses the Border
and home creeps closer
at seventy miles an hour.
I dismiss the last four days
and their friendly strangers
into the past
that grows bigger every minute.
The train sounds urgent as I am,
it says home and home and home.
I light a cigarette
and sit smiling in the corner.
Scotland, I rush towards you
into my future that,
every minute,
grows smaller and smaller.
It’s acquired a French look – parasols
and bikinis and beach balls and
surf boarding and bullying speedboats.
When I was a boy, it was proletarian Scotch –
cloth caps, donkeys, Fun City,
the Salvation Army, beery faces
snoring under the Daily Record.
I’d like to make a gesture. Dare I paddle
with my trousers rolled up to the knee
and my shoes hanging round my neck?
I watch a birdwatcher. He steals
a gull from the air and imprisons it
in his binoculars, as I do
with the year 1920.
– And I see my father
six feet two of him; St. Vitus dancing
along the cakewalk;
and into my mouth steals the taste
of sand and icecream and salty fingers.
Travelling’s fine – the stars tell me that,
and waves, and wind, and trees in the wind
tugging to go farther than their feet will let them.
Poor feet, clogged with the world.
Travelling’s fine – when she’s at the end of it,
or mountains breathing their vivid Esperanto,
or ideas flashing from
their always receding headlands.
There are other bad journeys, to a bitter place
I can’t get to – yet. I lean towards it,
tugging to get there, and thank God
I’m clogged with the world. It grips me,
I hold it.
There’s something I want to forget,
though I forget what it is.
... My mind niggles and grits
like the sand under my feet.
I used to know things I didn’t know.
Not any more. Now I don’t know
even the things I know, though I think I do.
... Little waves slide up the beach and slide back,
lisping all the way. The moon
is their memory. In my head
there’s no moon.
What I don’t know I don’t even think I know.
That was Socrates, conceited man.
I’m trying to remember
what I’ve remembered to forget.
Twenty yards away, a seal’s head
looks at me
steadfastly
then tucks itself
under the surface, leaving
no ripple.
The dust silvers and a wind from the corner
brings a dream of clarinets
into the thick orchestra. There’s a place
sending messages across the river of people;
and the sullen wharves of buildings
begin to smell of bales and distances.
I have a sad place that nobody enters
but a ragged man hooking the air
with skinny fingers. I sit beside him sometimes,
feeling his despair. His loneliness
infects me.
But today’s a day of clarinets and silver
under the lucky horseshoe of the sky.
I leave him and go into the whirlpools of light,
through a jazz of gardens and heliograph windows.
– That house is my monkish cell, my fortress.
I put the key in the door and stop,
terrified that the ragged man
is sitting in my chair with his skinny fingers
tangled in his lap.
The stars go out one by one
as though a bluetit the size of the world
were pecking them like peanuts out of the sky’s string bag,
A ludicrous image, I know.
Take away the gray light.
I want the bronze shields of summer
or winter’s scalding sleet.
My mind is struggling with itself.
approaching me. It’s a secret
coming out of another one.
I want to know the first one of all.
Everything’s in the distance,
as I am. I wish I could flip that distance
like a cigarette into the water.
I want an extreme of nearness.
I want boundaries on my mind.
I want to feel the world like a straitjacket.
They went away, the sad times.
It wasn’t I who turned them out of doors,
but another.
The swifts have returned. They’ve dropped
their burden of long journeys. With what joy
they scream over the rooftops.
Pour the coffee. Sit by the fire
that says home. Tomorrow we’ll welcome
all the tomorrows there are to be.
Do you hear the swifts? They tie together
the bright light. They nest
in secret places.
Tangled in weeds.
Far from home.
On an ocean
I’ve nothing to do with.
who leave their Sargasso and drift
across the Atlantic.
So many will find
the river I know best.
How eagerly they swim
against its rushing torrent
that brings them news
from high places
I once visited
long ago.
I sit, trying to look like a heather bush –
hoping to see
a mewing buzzard or a vole or a dragonfly.
How quickly the days slide away
into where they came from.
It’s hard to change anything.
I look into my hand to see
if there’s an idea there
giving birth to a strenuous baby.
Only a life-line that’s not long enough.
An obstinate old rowan tree
stands on a tiny island.
So many storms, yet there it is
with only a few berries, each determined
to be the last one to drop into the water.
And the light floods down
revealing mountains and flowers
and so many shadows. If only
a merlin would hurtle past, that atom
of speed, that molecule of life.
When he speaks a small sentence
he is a man
who presses a plunger that will
blow the face off a cliff.
Or: one last small penstroke –
and the huge poem rides
down the slipway, ready
for enormous voyages.
He does more than he does.
When he goes hunting
he aims at a bird and
brings a landscape down.
Or he dynamites a ramshackle
idea – when
the dust settles,
what structures shine in the sun.
for Hugh MacDiarmid
It turned out
that the bombs he had thrown
raised buildings:
that the acid he had sprayed
had painfully opened
the eyes of the blind.
Fishermen hauled
prizewinning fish
from the water he had polluted.
enjoying the shade
of the vicious words he had planted.
The government decreed that
on the anniversary of his birth
the people should observe
two minutes pandemonium.
She balances things – a brick upon a brick:
a ring in one hand, a spoon in the other:
and the two nine months she’s lived.
Her home is warmed by the steady
glow of electric fires; but here
she holds a brick over another brick
to stare at the flames jumping
in the grate. With what concentration
she stares at them.
Soon she’ll unbalance
that first nine months with nine years,
with nineteen years: her left hand won’t know
what her right hand is doing; and who can guess
what fires she will stare at,
sitting in a scatter of forgotten toys?
My 3 year old, after being a seal
and a daffodil and a frog
demanded – Glampa!
Be a leaf!
To hang nicely on a twig tip or snug
in a bosomly branch, to rockabye, to entertain
a star or two ...
A caterpillar loops in my mind, a goat snatches,
the wintry earth
draws my blood from me.
And the tree of my veins
is an aspen trembling.
I hold her, pulling out
the softest of thorns.
Honey and salt – land smell and sea smell,
as in the long ago, as in forever.
The days pick me up and carry me off,
half-child, half-prisoner,
on their journey that I’ll share
for a while.
They wound and they bless me
with strange gifts:
the salt of absence,
the honey of memory.