for Stephen Edgar and Judy Beveridge
If it’s possible
as you travel
you should turn north and see Glencoe.
Some will say no—
keep a sense
of the Renaissance
about you. I know that you are not among those
who choose
to ignore what history’s shown us to be,
beneath a grandeur or grandiosity.
Be sure to go
late of a long afternoon (although
it is dark there in the blaze of noon).
The tourist buses have moved on
at that hour
when you arrive by bike or car;
and as you stand alone
in the ravine
you will experience the Sublime,
which Burke defined
as Nature that is ‘terrible’
(but which enlivens, if the watcher is safe for a while).
Hard to tell
the lie of the land—
those three long ridges incline, each to its mound
that is a misshapen, bloated globule
in a swamp, or on murky sump-oil.
The hills are stolid,
a cold lava, stone-naked,
or they can appear
to rear
at the angle
of a bull seal
when it plunges ashore.
There is a constantly seeping water
that is silver,
striated on each billowing slope.
What I want to evoke
is the summer—how it seems to have let fall a sodden cloak.
In winter, there hove
closely above,
from out of murk,
the Flying Dutchman’s hulk,
but with April, a stream is gibbering its way
in the floor of the valley.
Such a place
was like a man who had a ‘gallows face’,
of whom they’d have said
he invited
his involvement in tragedy.
The light at the time I say
is on the loins
of these stocky mountains,
like the sword blade they would clean
beneath the arm, on their linen,
but not on plaid,
and carried lowered.
The MacDonald clan was hospitable
to a rabble
in the pit of winter,
1692, as required by honour.
At their hamlet of whitewashed stone,
through the vale, they’d taken in
each steaming cow and pig and hen,
and the 129
mercenaries, who outnumbered them,
come to proclaim
William as king, imposed upon
Scotland, too. The chieftain
had been loath
or tardy about the oath,
who lay down
with arthritis and chilblain,
and now must pay a fine.
The interlopers sprawled
along the bench, in each household,
watching the children fed from a spoon,
and drank the whisky, with its fume
like the mist above a loch.
What a piece of work
is man—how devious
in the spontaneous
refined high level
of his devilishness.
Not one of the troop betrayed its intent;
and nothing was meant
for the hosts, on turning up
a card. They noticed only the hearth fire leap
in a drowsy pupil.
Ten days passed (an ordeal
of itself) before the signal
at dawn—a bonfire, in which the families woke
and saw how murder broke
out of those faces. A sword went in
the servant girl, where the soldiers had lain.
The stranded or fleeing were chopped down—
they shed a limb
as they tried to climb
on the salt-packed snow,
or saw a sword-tip throw
about them the watery
loop of blood. Blood flew away
like the flight of the galaxy.
Some were allowed
to escape, who’d have to wade
thigh-deep, with just a shawl—
like broken crows they crawled, their call
flapping. When you come into this region
you won’t need to summon
what you should feel—
our old disquiet, of betrayal,
will overwhelm. I have thought
on what is meant
by the dark sisters, those immemorial
mourners, in their veil.
Whatever level
of existence, however deep we plumb,
things come
in packages, are separate;
they co-operate, or assert
themselves, to annihilate
what constricts them. All things, we find, will fluctuate
on this scale. It is said the truth can set us free,
if only of the illusory.—
When you are there, you might feel
that evil is in the molecule.