They sit at their long table
in a room so long it’s a tunnel,
in a tunnel with a green roof
on which sometimes a flower nods
as if to remind them of something.
They talk about everything
except Death, but they don’t listen
to each other. They talk, staring
straight in front of them.
And they tremble.
The only time they notice each other
is when Death sweeps past them
with his keys clinking and a long pen
in his hand.
Then they look shyly at each other
for a moment before staring ahead
and talking, talking, trying to remember
what a flower is,
trying to remember
why they are here.
Hard to remember how the water went
Shaking the light,
Until it shook like peas in a riddling plate.
Or how the islands snored into the wind,
Or seemed to, round
Stiff, plunging headlands that they never cleared.
Or how a trout hung high its drizzling bow
For a count of three –
Heraldic figure on a shield of spray.
Yet clear the footprint in the puddled sand
That slowly filled
And rounded out and smoothed and disappeared.
The climb’s all right, it’s the descent that kills you.
Knees become fists that don’t know how to clench
And thighs are strings in parallel.
Gravity’s still your enemy; it drills you
With your own backbone – its love is all to wrench
You down on screes or boggy asphodel
And the elation that for a moment fills you
Beside the misty cairn’s that lesser thing
A memory of it. It’s not
The punishing climb, it’s the descent that kills you
However sweetly the valley thrushes sing
And shadows darken with the peace they’ve brought.
Everywhere she dies. Everywhere I go she dies.
No sunrise, no city square, no lurking beautiful mountain
but has her death in it.
The silence of her dying sounds through
the carousel of language, it’s a web
on which laughter stitches itself. How can my hand
clasp another’s when between them
is that thick death, that intolerable distance?
She grieves for my grief. Dying, she tells me
that bird dives from the sun, that fish
leaps into it. No crocus is carved more gently
than the way her dying
shapes my mind. – But I hear, too,
black words that make the sound
of soundlessness, that name the nowhere
she is continuously going into.
Ever since she died
she can’t stop dying. She makes me
her elegy. I am a walking masterpiece,
a true fiction
of the ugliness of death.
I am her sad music.
Oars, held still, drop
on black water
tiny roulades
of waterdrops.
With their little sprinkling
they people
a big silence.
You who are long gone,
my thoughts of you are like that:
a delicate, clear population
in the big silence
where I rest on the oars and
my boat
hushes ashore.
Notes on a winter journey, and a footnote
1
The snow’s almost faultless. It bounces back
the sun’s light but can do nothing with
those two stags, their cold noses, their yellow teeth.
2
On the loch’s eye a cataract is forming.
Fistfuls of white make the telephone wires
loop after loop of snow buntings.
3
So few cars, they leave the snow snow.
I think of the horrible marzipan
in the streets of Edinburgh.
4
The hotel at Ullapool, that should be a bang of light,
is crepuscular. The bar is fireflied
with whisky glasses.
5
At Inchnadamph snow is falling. The windscreen wipers
squeak and I stare through
a segment of a circle. What more do I ever do? ...
6
(Seventeen miles to go. I didn’t know it, but when
I got there a death waited for me – that segment
shut its fan: and a blinding winter closed in.)
I went to the landscape I love best
and the man who was its meaning and added to it
met me at Ullapool.
The beautiful landscape was under snow
and was beautiful in a new way.
Next morning, the man who had greeted me
with the pleasure of pleasure
vomited blood
and died.
Crofters and fishermen and womenfolk, unable
to say any more, said,
‘It’s a grand day, it’s a beautiful day.’
And I thought, ‘Yes, it is.’
And I thought of him lying there,
the dead centre of it all.
He went through a company like a lamplighter –
see the dull minds, one after another,
begin to glow, to shed
a benificent light.
He went through a company like
a knifegrinder – see the dull minds
scattering sparks of themselves,
becoming razory, becoming useful.
He went through a company
as himself. But now he’s one
of the multitudinous company of the dead
where are no individuals.
The benificent lights dim
but don’t vanish. The razory edges
dull but still cut. He’s gone: but you can see
his tracks still, in the snow of the world.
Black collie, do you remember yourself?
Do you remember your name was Mephistopheles,
though (as if you were only a little devil)
everyone called you Meph?
You’d chase everything – sea gulls, motor cars,
jet planes. (It’s said you once set off
after a lightning flash.) Half over a rock,
you followed the salmon fly arcing
through the bronze water. You loved everything
except rabbits – though
you grinned away under the bed
when your master came home
drink taken. How you’d lay your head
on a visitor’s knee and look up, so soulfully,
like George Eliot playing Sarah Bernhardt.
... Black Meph, how can you remember yourself
in that blank no-time, no-place where
you can’t even greet your master
though he’s there too?
On that stormy night
a top branch broke off
on the biggest tree in my garden.
It’s still up there. Though its leaves
are withered black among the green
the living branches
won’t let it fall.
For this once I force myself
to write down the word light.
So many times in the last cloudy months
I’ve tried to and my mouth
said dark.
For the waters of Babylon
sound in my friendly river, my harp
hangs in a familiar tree.
I used not to care
that there never were unicorns
and that a phoenix was only
a metaphor on fire.
I knew that, but I loved them.
But truth has been stripped of its flesh,
its eyes, its gentle hands.
It reaches out an arm and lays
five cold bones on my knee.
It never stops smiling
with a changed smile.
1
I’m exiled from what used to be
my country. It welcomed me
with gifts of peace and of storms,
with heights of mountains
and altitudes of joy.
Not now.
No, says the wall, and I turn back.
No, says the mountain
and I sit sad in the valley
listening to the river that says
Trespasser, trespasser, trespasser.
I stubbornly say, All the same
it’s still beautiful.
And I know that’s true
but I know also
why it fails to recognise me.
Myself after her death
2
That boulder beside Loch na Barrack,
stuck all over with tiny pebbles,
its costume jewellery
– that’s what I’m like.
I have a hardness in me too
of a human kind and –
look close and you’ll see
the costume jewellery I’ve stolen
from the past,
more precious to me
than opals and diamonds
and emeralds.
3
When she was alive
I had no need for hope,
When she was dying
hope never visited us.
In this cold city snow is falling.
But life works underground and over it
at the endless toil of creation.
Little comfort for me.
But I have blessings; I count them.
They have the names of people.
There are others. But above all
they have the names of people.
They will die, as she did.
They will die, as I will.
And I look at the face of death
and say, I hate you, to destroy such wonders.
To this day, poor swimmer as I am,
it grieves me
that I watched the little sandpiper drown.
When I passed the nest
shoulder high on a bank of Loch Lurgain
the young ones cheeped-cheeped out of it
to flop in the heather twenty yards away.
Except that one. It flew over the water,
lower and lower, then tried to fly in the water:
and drowned.
I’ve watched friends, strong fliers among mountains,
who flew lower and lower
and drowned in the uncaring water
they had soared above.
Little sandpiper, you left me
accused of what
I have no defence against.
Friends, I ask your forgiveness.
I ask for something
I don’t deserve. And I ask for it
too late.