On our way to a loch, two miles from Inveruplan,
Three of us (keepers) read the landscape as
I read a book. They missed no word of it:
Fox-hole, strange weed, blue berry, ice-scrape, deer’s hoof-print.
It was their back yard, and fresh as the garden in Eden
(Striped rock ‘like a Belted Galloway’). They saw what I
Saw, and more, and its meaning. They spoke like a native
The language they walked in. I envied them, naturally.
Coming back, we dragged the boat down to Inveruplan,
Lurching and slithering, both it and us. A stag
Paused in the thickening light to see that strange thing,
A twelve-legged boat in a bog. Angie roared at it
Like a stag in rut. Denying its other senses
It came and paused and came – and took itself off,
A text, a chapter and verse, into its gospel.
We took up the rope and hauled on, sweating and gasping.
We left the boat in the hayfield at Inveruplan:
The tractor would get it. A moon was coming up
Over the roof and under it a Tilley lamp
Hissed in its yellow self. We took our noise
Into the room and shut it in with us
Where, till light broke on a boat foundered in dew,
I drank down drams in a company of scholars
With exploding songs and a three-days ache in my shoulder.
Wine-coloured, Homer said, wine-dark ...
The seaweed on the stony beach,
Flushed darker with that wine, was kilts
And beasts and carpets ... A startled heron
Tucked in its cloud two yellow stilts.
And eiderducks were five, no, two –
No, six. A lounging fishbox raised
Its broad nose to the moon. With groans
And shouts the steep burn drowned itself;
And sighs were soft among the stones.
All quiet, all dark: excepting where
A cone of light stood on the pier
And in the circle of its scope
A hot winch huffed and puffed and gnashed
Its iron fangs and swallowed rope.
The nursing tide moved gently in.
Familiar archipelagos
Heard her advancing, heard her speak
Things clear, though hard to understand
Whether in Gaelic or in Greek.
A man’s boots with a woman in them
Clatter across the floor. A hand
Long careless of the lives it kills
Comes down and thwacks on newspapers
A long black fish with bloody gills.
The kettle’s at her singsong – minor
Prophetess in her sooty cave.
A kitten climbs the bundled net
On the bench and, curled up like a cowpat,
Purrs on the Stornoway Gazette.
The six hooks of a Mackerel Dandy
Climb their thin rope – an exclamation
By the curled question of a gaff.
Three rubber eels cling like a crayfish
On top of an old photograph.
Peats fur themselves in gray. The door
Bursts open, chairs creak, a hand reaches out
For spectacles, a lamp flares high ...
The collie underneath the table
Slumps with a world-rejecting sigh.
Night stirs the trees
With breathings of such music that they sway,
Skirts, sleeves, tiaras, in the humming dark,
Their highborn heads tossing in disarray.
A floating owl
Unreels his silence, winding in and out
Of different darknesses. The wind takes up
And scatters a sound of water all about.
No moon need slide
Into the sky to make that water bright;
It ties its swelling self with glassy ropes;
It jumps from stones in smithereens of light.
The mosses on the wall
Plump their fat cushions up. They smell of wells,
Of under bridges and of spoons. They move
More quiveringly than the dazed rims of bells.
A broad cloud drops
A darker darkness. Turning up his stare,
Letting the world pour under him, owl goes off,
His small soft foghorn quavering through the air.
Neglected graveyard, Luskentyre
I wade in the long grass,
Barking my shins on gravestones.
The grass overtops the dyke.
In and out of the bay hesitates the Atlantic.
A seagull stares at me hard
With a quarterdeck eye, leans forward
And shrugs into the air.
The dead rest from their journey from one wilderness to another.
Considering what they were,
This seems a proper disorder.
Why lay graves by rule
Like bars of a cage on the ground? To discipline the unruly?
I know a man who is
Peeped at by death. No place is
Atlantics coming in;
No time but reaches out to touch him with a cold finger.
He hears death at the door.
He knows him round every corner.
No matter where he goes
He wades in long grass, barking his shins on gravestones.
The edge of the green sea
Crumples. Bees are in clover.
I part the grasses and there –
Angus MacLeod, drowned. Mary his wife. Together.
A mountain is a sort of music: theme
And counter theme displaced in air amongst
Their own variations.
Wagnerian Devil signed the Coigach score;
And God was Mozart when he wrote Cul Mor.
You climb a trio when you climb Cul Beag.
Stac Polly – there’s a rondo in seven sharps,
Neat as a trivet.
And Quinag, rallentando in the haze,
Is one long tune extending phrase by phrase.
I listen with my eyes and see through that
Mellifluous din of shapes my masterpiece
Of masterpieces:
One sandstone chord that holds up time in space –
Sforzando Suilven reared on his ground bass.
Donald roared and ran and brandished
his stick and swor
e in all the languages
he knew, which were
some.
Pollóchan sauntered, stood
six feet three silent: with a small
turn of the hand
he’d send the collie flowing
round the half-mile-long arc
of a towsy circle.
Two poets –
Dionysian,
Apollonian
and the sheep in the pen.
Aunt Julia spoke Gaelic
very loud and very fast.
I could not answer her –
I could not understand her.
She wore men’s boots
when she wore any.
– I can see her strong foot,
stained with peat,
paddling with the treadle of the spinningwheel
while her right hand drew yarn
marvellously out of the air.
Hers was the only house
where I’ve lain at night
in the absolute darkness
of a box bed, listening to
crickets being friendly.
She was buckets
and water flouncing into them.
She was winds pouring wetly
round house-ends.
She was brown eggs, black skirts
and a keeper of threepennybits
in a teapot.
Aunt Julia spoke Gaelic
very loud and very fast.
By the time I had learned
a little, she lay
silenced in the absolute black
of a sandy grave
at Luskentyre. But I hear her still, welcoming me
with a seagull’s voice
across a hundred yards
of peatscrapes and lazybeds
and getting angry, getting angry
with so many questions
unanswered.
His drifter swung in the night
from a mile of nets
between the Shiants and Harris.
My boy’s eyes watched
the lights of the fishing fleet – fireflies
on the green field of the sea.
In the foc’sle he gave me a bowl
of tea, black, strong and bitter,
and a biscuit you hammered
in bits like a plate.
The fiery curtain came up
from the blackness, comma’d with corpses.
Round Rhu nan Cuideagan
he steered for home, a boy’s god
in seaboots. He found his anchorage
as a bird its nest.
In the kitchen he dropped
his oilskins where he stood.
He was strong as the red bull.
He moved like a dancer.
He was a cran of songs.
The Red Well has gone.
Thirty years ago I filled pails from it
with a flashing dipper and floated
a frond of bracken in each
so that no splash of water should escape
from its jolting prison.
blinked from the ground
now stands a gray house
filled with voices.
The house is solid. But
nothing will keep the children
in its happy prison
from scattering abroad, till
the house at last stands empty –
one drained well
on top of another.
The room whirled and coloured
and figured itself with dancers.
Another gaiety seemed born of theirs
and flew as streamers
between their heads and the ceiling.
I gazed, coloured and figured,
down the tunnel of streamers –
and there, in the band, an old fiddler
sawing away in the privacy
of music. He bowed lefthanded and his right hand
was the wrong way round. Impossible.
But the jig bounced, the gracenotes
sparkled on the surface of the tune.
The odd man out, when it came to music,
was the odd man in.
There’s a lesson here, I thought, climbing
into the pulpit I keep in my mind.
But before I’d said Firstly brethren, the tune
ended, the dancers parted, the old fiddler
took a cigarette from the pianist, stripped off
the paper and chewed the tobacco.
The ferry wades across the kyle. I drive
The car ashore
On to a trim tarred road. A car on Scalpay?
Yes, and a road where never was one before.
The ferrymen’s Gaelic wonders who I am
(Not knowing I know it), this man back from the dead,
Who takes the blue-black road (no traffic jam)
From by Craig Lexie over to Bay Head.
A man bows in the North wind, shaping up
His lazybeds,
And through the salt air vagrant peat smells waver
From houses where no house should be.
The sheds At the curing station have been newly tarred.
Aunt Julia’s house has vanished. The Red Well
Has been bulldozed away. But sharp and hard
The church still stands, barring the road to Hell.
A chugging prawn boat slides round Cuddy Point
Where in a gale
I spread my batwing jacket and jumped farther
Than I’ve jumped since. There’s where I used to sail
Boats looped from rushes. On the jetty there
I caught eels, cut their heads off and watched them slew
Slow through the water. Ah – Cape Finisterre
I called that point, to show how much I knew.
While Hamish sketches, a crofter tells me that
The Scalpay folk,
Though very intelligent, are not Spinozas ...
We walk the Out End road (no need to invoke
That troublemaker, Memory, she’s everywhere)
To Laggandoan, greeted all the way –
My city eyeballs prickle; it’s hard to bear
With such affection and such gaiety.
Scalpay revisited? – more than Scalpay. I
Have no defence,
For half my thought and half my blood is Scalpay,
Against that pure, hardheaded innocence
That shows love without shame, weeps without shame,
Whose every thought is hospitality –
Edinburgh, Edinburgh, you’re dark years away.
Scuttering snowflakes riddling the hard wind
Are almost spent
When we reach Johann’s house. She fills the doorway,
Sixty years of size and astonishment,
Then laughs and cries and laughs, as she always did
And will (Easy glum, easy glow, a friend would say) ...
Scones, oatcakes, herrings from under a bubbling lid.
Then she comes with us to put us on our way.
Hugging my arm in her stronger one, she says,
Fancy me
Walking this road beside my darling Norman!
And what is there to say?... We look back and see
Her monumental against the flying sky
And I am filled with love and praise and shame
Knowing that I have been, and knowing why,
Diminished and enlarged. Are they the same?
You won’t let me forget you. You keep nudging me
With your hairpin bends or, without a Next, please,
Magic-lanterning another prodigious view
In my skull where I sit in the dark with my brains.
You turn up your nose above Loch Hope,
That effete low-lier where men sit comfy
In boats, casting for seatrout, and whisper
Up the hill, round the crag – there are the Crocachs.
You’re an acrobat with a bulrushy spine,
Looping in air, turning to look at yourself
And faultlessly skidding on your own stones
Round improbable corners and arriving safe.
When the Crocachs have given me mist and trout
And clogs of peat, how I greet you and whirl
Down your half-scree zigzags, tumbling like a peewit
Through trembling evenings down to Loch Eriboll.
She was a small dog, neat and fluid –
Even her conversation was tiny:
She greeted you with bow, never bow-wow.
Her sons stood monumentally over her
But did what she told them. Each grew grizzled
Till it seemed he was his own mother’s grandfather.
Once, gathering sheep on a showery day,
I remarked how dry she was. Pollóchan said, ‘Ah,
It would take a very accurate drop to hit Lassie.’
She sailed in the dinghy like a proper sea-dog.
Where’s a burn? – she’s first on the other side.
She flowed through fences like a piece of black wind.
But suddenly she was old and sick and crippled ...
I grieved for Pollóchan when he took her a stroll
And put his gun to the back of her head.
The Bateau Ivre and the Marie Celeste,
The Flying Dutchman hurdling latitudes –
You could make a list (sad ones like the Lusitania
And brave puffed-up ones like the Mayflower).
Mine’s called the boat. It’s a quiet, anonymous one
That needs my two arms to drag it through the water.
It takes me huge distances of a few miles
From its lair in Loch Roe to fishy Soya.
It prances on the spot in its watery stable.
It butts the running tide with a bull’s head.
It skims downwind, planing like a shearwater.
In crossrips it’s awkward as a piano.
And what a coffin it is for haddocks
And bomb-shaped lythe and tigerish mackerel –
Though it once met a basking shark with a bump
And sailed for a while looking over its shoulder.
When salmon are about it goes glib in the dark,
Whispering a net out over the sternsheets –
How it crabs the tide-rush, the cunning thing,
While arms plunge down for the wrestling silver.
Boat of no dreams, you open spaces
The mind can’t think of till it’s in them,
Where the world is easy and dangerous and
Who can distinguish saints and sinners?
Sometimes that space reaches out
Till I’m enclosed in it in stony Edinburgh
And I hear you like a barrel thumping on head waves
Or in still water gurgling like a baby.
You’ve taken your stand
between Christy MacLeod’s house
and the farthest planet.
The ideal shape of a circle
means nothing to you: you’re all
armpits and elbows a
nd scraggy fingers that hold so delicately
a few lucid roses. You are
an encyclopedia of angles.
At night you trap stars, and the moon
fills you with distances.
I arrange myself to put
one rose in the belt of Orion.
When the salt gales drag through you
you whip them with flowers
and I think –
Exclamations for you, little rose bush,
and a couple of fanfares.
I leaned on the bar, not thinking, just noticing.
I read the labels thumbed on the bright bottles.
(To gallop on White Horse through Islay Mist!
To sail into Talisker on Windjammer Rum!)
Above my head the sick TV trembled
And by the dartboard a guitar was thrumming
Some out of place tune ... Others have done this
Before me. Remember, in one of the Russias,
Alexander Blok drunk beyond his own mercy –
How he saw, through the smoke and the uproar,
His ‘silken lady’ come in and fire
The fire within him? I found myself staring
For mine, for that wild, miraculous presence
That would startle the world new with her forgivingness.
But nothing was there but sidling smokewreaths
And through the babble all I heard was,
(Sounding, too near, in my dreadful silence)
A foreign guitar, the death clack of dominoes.
Flat sea, thin mist
and a seal singing.
– And the world’s an old man in his corner
telling a folktale.
Haddock goggle up, are
swung aboard. Gray as the sea mist.
They drown in air.
In the fishbox they
have nothing to do with death. They’ve become
a fine-line drawing
in the art gallery
of the world.
We make for home.
Near Soya
Seven seals oilily slide off a skerry
into the silky gray. Norman tells me
if he puts the engine into reverse
they turn
a back somersault.
And he does.
And they do.
She sits all day by the fire.
How long is it since she opened the door and
stepped outside, confusing
the scuffling hens and the collie
dreaming of sheep?
Her walking days are over.
She has come here through centuries
of Gaelic labour and loves
and rainy funerals. Her people
She’s their summation. Before her time
has almost no meaning.
When neighbours call
she laughs a wicked cackle
with love in it, as she listens
to the sly bristle of gossip,
relishing the life in it,
relishing the malice, with her hands
lying in her lap like holy psalms
that once had a meaning for her, that once
were noble with tunes
she used to sing long ago.
In the Culag Bar a fiddler is playing
fast-rippling tunes with easy dexterity.
How do I know? I’m in Edinburgh
On the pier, sun-scorched tourists
hang their bellies over improbable shorts.
How do I know? I’m in Edinburgh.
In the Veyatie burn a man
hooks a trout. It starts rampaging.
And I’m in Edinburgh.
Or so I say. How easy to be
two men at once.
One smiling and drinking coffee
in Leamington Terrace, Edinburgh.
The other cutting the pack of memories
and turning up ace after ace after ace.