Because I see the world poisoned
by cant and brutal self-seeking,
must I be silent about
the useless waterlily, the dunnock’s nest
in the hedgeback?
Because I am fifty-six years old
must I love, if I love at all,
only ideas – not people, but only
the idea of people?
Because there is work to do, to steady
a world jarred off balance,
must a man meet only a fellow-worker
and never a man?
There are more meanings than those
in text books of economics
and a part of the worst slum
is the moon rising over it
and eyes weeping and
mouths laughing.
I see an adder and, a yard away,
a butterfly being gorgeous. I switch the radio
from tortures in foreign prisons
to a sonata of Schubert (that foreigner).
I crawl from the swamp of nightmare into
a glittering rainfall, a swathing of sunlight.
Noticing you can do nothing about.
It’s the balancing that shakes my mind.
is the weight of joy in my right hand
and the weight of sadness in my left.
All they see is MacCaig being upright,
easy-oasy and jocose.
I had a difficulty in being friendly
to the Lord, who gave us these burdens,
so I returned him to other people
and totter without help
among his careless inventions.
The streams fall down and through the darkness bear
Such wild and shaking hair,
Such looks beyond a cool surmise,
Such lamentable uproar from night skies
As turn the owl from honey of blood and make
Great stags stand still to hear the darkness shake.
Through Troys of bracken and Babel towers of rocks
Shrinks now the looting fox,
Fearful to touch the thudding ground
And flattened to it by the mastering sound.
And roebuck stilt and leap sideways; their skin
Twitches like water on the fear within.
Black hills are slashed white with this falling grace
Whose violence buckles space
To a sheet-iron thunder. This
Is noise made universe, whose still centre is
Where the cold adder sleeps in his small bed,
Curled neatly round his neat and evil head.
A bird’s voice chinks and tinkles
Alone in the gaunt reedbed –
Tiny silversmith
Working late in the evening.
I sit and listen. The rooftop
With a quill of smoke stuck in it
Wavers against the sky
In the dreamy heat of summer.
Flowers’ closing time: bee lurches
Across the hayfield, singing
And feeling its drunken way
Round the air’s invisible corners.
And grass is grace. And charlock
Is gold of its own bounty.
The broken chair by the wall
Is one with immortal landscapes.
Something has been completed
That everything is part of,
Something that will go on
Being completed forever.
The hospital smell
combs my nostrils
as they go bobbing along
green and yellow corridors.
What seems a corpse
is trundled into a lift and vanishes
heavenward.
feel, until
I have to.
Nurses walk lightly, swiftly,
here and up and down and there,
their slender waists miraculously
carrying their burden
of so much pain, so
many deaths, their eyes
still clear after
so many farewells.
Ward 7. She lies
in a white cave of forgetfulness.
A withered hand
trembles on its stalk. Eyes move
behind eyelids too heavy
to raise. Into an arm wasted
of colour a glass fang is fixed,
not guzzling but giving.
And between her and me
distance shrinks till there is none left
but the distance of pain that neither she nor I
can cross.
She smiles a little at this
black figure in her white cave
who clumsily rises
in the round swimming waves of a bell
and dizzily goes off, growing fainter,
not smaller, leaving behind only
books that will not be read
and fruitless fruits.
The dwarf with his hands on backwards
sat, slumped like a half-filled sack
on tiny twisted legs from which
sawdust might run,
outside the three tiers of churches built
in honour of St Francis, brother
of the poor, talker with birds, over whom
he had the advantage
of not being dead yet.
A priest explained
how clever it was of Giotto
to make his frescoes tell stories
that would reveal to the illiterate the goodness
of God and the suffering
of His Son. I understood
the explanation and
the cleverness.
A rush of tourists, clucking contentedly,
fluttered after him as he scattered
the grain of the Word. It was they who had passed
the ruined temple outside, whose eyes
wept pus, whose back was higher
than his head, whose lopsided mouth
said Grazie in a voice as sweet
as a child’s when she speaks to her mother
or a bird’s when it spoke
to St Francis.
Watch him when he opens
his bulging words – justice,
fraternity, freedom, internationalism, peace,
peace, peace. Make it your custom
to pay no heed
to his frank look, his visas, his stamps
and signatures. Make it
your duty to spread out their contents
in a clear light.
Nobody with such luggage
has nothing to declare.
The hare we had run over
bounced about the road
on the springing curve
of its spine.
Cornfields breathed in the darkness.
We were going through the darkness and
the breathing cornfields from one
important place to another.
We broke the hare’s neck
and made that place, for a moment,
the most important place there was,
where a bowstring was cut
and a bow broken for ever
that had shot itself through so many
darknesses and cornfields.
It was left in that landscape.
It left us in another.
We raised the lid. The cold spring water was
So clear it wasn’t there.
At the foot of its non-depth a grave toad squatted
As still as Buddha in his non-place. Flaws
Breathed on the water – he trembled to no-where
Then steadied into being again. A fretted
Fern was his Bo-tree. Time in that delicate place
Sat still for ever staring in its own face.
We filled the jam-jar with bright nothing and
Drank down its freezing light
That the sun burned us with (that raging planet
That will not stand and will not understand)
And tried to feel we were each one a bright
And delicate place with a philosopher in it –
And failed; and let the hinged lid slowly fall.
The little Buddha hadn’t moved at all.
Notations of ten summer minutes
A boy skips flat stones out to sea – each does fine
till a small wave meets it head on and swallows it.
The boy will do the same.
The schoolmaster stands looking out of the window
with one Latin eye and one Greek one.
A boat rounds the point in Gaelic.
Out of the shop comes a stream
of Omo, Weetabix, BiSoDol tablets and a man
with a pocket shaped like a whisky bottle.
Lord V. walks by with the village in his pocket.
Angus walks by
spending the village into the air.
A melodeon is wheezing a clear-throated jig
on the deck of the Arcadia. On the shore hills Pan
cocks a hairy ear; and falls asleep again.
The ten minutes are up, except they aren’t.
I leave the village, except I don’t.
The jig fades to silence, except it doesn’t.
The way the water goes is blink blink blink.
That heap of trash was once
a swan’s throne. The swans now lean their chests
against the waves that spill on Benbecula.
On the towpath a little girl
peers over the handle of the pram she’s pushing.
Her mother follows her, reading a letter.
Everything is winter, everything
is a letter from another place, measuring
absence. Everything laments
the swan, drifting and dazzling on a western sealoch.
– But the little girl, five years of self-importance,
walks in her own season, not noticing
the stop-go’s of water, the mouldering swan-throne,
the tears turning cold in the eyes of her mother.
More like a raft than a boat
the world I sail on.
I say I’m not troubled – I accept
the powerful hospitality of the tides.
But I write little communications and float them off
to anywhere.
Some are Ophelias witless and singing
among the foam flowers.
But others are Orpheus lamenting
a harbour, a house there, and a girl in it.
I think of Lycidas drowned
in Milton’s mind.
How elegantly he died. How languorously
he moved
in those baroque currents. No doubt
sea nymphs wavered round him
in melodious welcome.
And I think of Roddy drowned
off Cape Wrath, gulping
fistfuls of salt, eyes bursting, limbs thrashing
the ponderous green. – No elegance here,
nor in the silent welcome
of conger and dogfish and crab.
MacDiarmid found a pigeon’s skull
on the bright shore turf of a Hebridean island.
I found the skull of a dogfish
on the sand at Cleethorpes.
His: the skull of a twirler and staller,
a rocketer, a headlong grace, symbol of peace.
Mine: hooverer of the sea’s floor, sneak thief
of herrings from nets, corpse-eater, emblem of nightmare.
After death the one is as beautiful as the other
(but not to a pigeon, not to a dogfish).
I hate death, the skull-maker, because he proves
that destroying and making happen together.
He’ll be no friend of mine, as long as I’m still
a feathery pigeon or a scrapeskin dogfish.
– I mean a man, whose skull contains
ideas death never thought of.
They’ll cheat him, for they’ll lodge in another skull
– or become nothing, that comfortable absolute.
Beside one loch, a hind’s neat skeleton,
Beside another, a boat pulled high and dry:
Two neat geometries drawn in the weather:
Two things already dead and still to die.
I passed them every summer, rod in hand,
Skirting the bright blue or the spitting gray,
And, every summer, saw how the bleached timbers
Gaped wider and the neat ribs fell away.
Time adds one malice to another one –
Now you’d look very close before you knew
If it’s the boat that ran, the hind went sailing.
So many summers, and I have lived them too.
When a clatter came,
it was horses crossing the ford.
When the air creaked, it was
a lapwing seeing us off the premises
of its private marsh. A snuffling puff
ten yards from the boat was the tide blocking and
unblocking a hole in a rock.
When the black drums rolled, it was water
falling sixty feet into itself.
When the door
scraped shut, it was the end
of all the sounds there are.
You left me
beside the quietest fire in the world.
I thought I was hurt in my pride only,
forgetting that,
when you plunge your hand in freezing water,
you feel
a bangle of ice round your wrist
before the whole hand goes numb.
He picked up a pebble
and threw it into the sea.
And another, and another.
He couldn’t stop.
He wasn’t trying to fill the sea.
He wasn’t trying to empty the beach.
He was just throwing away,
nothing else but.
Like a kitten playing
he was practising for the future
when there’ll be so many things
he’ll want to throw away
if only his fingers will unclench
and let them go.
The alder tree
shrivelled by the salt wind
has lived so long
it has carried and sheltered
its own weight
of nests.