Authors: Kathleen Jamie
her mate on the ground
began to fade,
till hill and sky were empty,
and I was afraid.
This is the multitude, the beasts
you wanted to show me, drawing me
upstream, all morning up through wind-
scoured heather to the hillcrest.
Below us, in the next glen, is the grave
calm brotherhood, descended
out of winter, out of hunger, kneeling
like the signatories of a covenant;
their weighty, antique-polished antlers
rising above the vegetation
like masts in a harbour, or city spires.
We lie close together, and though the wind
whips away our man-and-woman smell, every
stag-face seems to look toward us, toward,
but not to us: we’re held, and hold them,
in civil regard. I suspect you’d
hoped to impress me, to lift to my sight
our shared country, lead me deeper
into what you know, but loath
to cause fear you’re already moving
quietly away, sure I’ll go with you,
as I would now, almost anywhere.
Another landscape,
another swept glen,
more roadside wildflowers
breezing through their season
and round the next bend
– lo! another sea-loch
shot with nets of aquamarine …
We’re old enough, dear friend,
not to need to explain, not,
at least, to each other:
– sufficient years between us
to recognize, raked
down the threadbare hillsides
long-forsaken lazy-beds
where a crop was raised.
– We don’t make love,
we read a while,
leaf through a book
of 19th century photographs:
hands like stones,
shy, squinting faces
admonish us.
We really ought to rouse ourselves
to greet some weather –
now westlin’ winds, now shrouded bens
now a late sklent of sunlight to the heart.
– of course, that’s what –
a plain of stones, perfectly
smooth and still
showing the same slight
ridges and troughs
as thousands of years ago
when the sea left.
– It
is
a sea – even grey
stones one can
walk across: not a
solitary flower, nor a single
blade of grass –
I know this place
– all with one face
accepting of the sun
the other … Moon,
why have you turned to me
your dark side, why am I
examining these stones?
Our friendship lapsed.
– And sea, dear mother,
retreating with long stealth
though I lie awake –
Ah, you’re a grown-up now
I’ve sung to you
quite long enough.
When we first emerged, we assumed
what we’d entered
was the world,
and we its only creatures.
Soon, we could fly; soon
we’d mastered its grey gloom,
could steal a single
waterdrop
even as it fell.
Now you who hesitate,
fearful of the tomb-smell,
fearful of shades,
look up – higher!
How deft we are,
how communicative, our
scorch-brown wings almost
translucent against the blue.
Deserts, moonlit oceans, heat
climbing from a thousand coastal cities
are as nothing now
,
say our terse screams.
The cave-dark we were born in
calls us back.
When I appear to you
by dark, descended
not from heaven, but the lowest
branch of the walnut tree
bearing no annunciation,
suspended like a slub
in the air’s weave
and you shriek, you shriek
so prettily, I’m reminded
of the birds – don’t birds also
cultivate elaborate beauty, devour
what catches their eye?
Hence my night shift,
my sulphur-and-black-striped
jacket –
poison
– a lie
to cloak me while, exposed,
I squeeze from my own gut
the one material.
Who tore the night?
Who caused this rupture?
You, staring in horror
– had you never considered
how the world sustains?
The ants by day
clearing, clearing,
the spiders mending endlessly –
The minute the men
ducked through the bothy door
they switched to English.
Even among themselves
they spoke English now,
out of courtesy,
and set about breakfast:
bread, bacon and sweet tea.
And are we enjoying
this weather, and whose
boat brought us, and what
part of the country – exactly –
would we be from ourselves?
– The tenant, ruddy-faced;
a strong bashful youngster,
and two old enough
to be their uncles,
who, planted at the wooden table
seemed happy for a bit crack:
– one with a horse-long,
marvellous weather
and nicotine-scored face
under a felt fedora,
whose every sentence
was a slow sea-wave
raking unhurriedly back
through the rounded
grey stones
at the landing place
where their boat was tied.
Beyond the bothy
– mended since the last gales –
the sea eased west
for miles toward the parishes,
hazy now,
the men had left early.
A sea settled for the meanwhile,
Aye, for the meanwhile!
Then, knocking their tea back,
they were out
round the gable end,
checking the sheep fanks, ready.
High on the island,
uninhabited these days, sheep
grazed oblivious,
till the dogs – the keenest
a sly, heavy-dugged bitch –
came slinking behind them.
Then men appeared, and that
backwash voice:
will you move
you baa-stards!
Bleating in dismay
the animals zig-zagged down
the vertiginous hill
to spill onto the shore
where they ran, panicked,
and crammed into the fank:
heavy-fleeced mothers
and bewildered lambs,
from whom a truth,
(they now realized)
had been withheld.
‘
Ewe-lamb
’, ‘
tup-lamb
’,
each animal was seized,
its tail, severed with one snip,
shrugged through the air
to land in a red plastic pail;
each young tup,
upturned, took two men -
doubled over, heads together,
till the lamb’s testicles
likewise thumped softly
into the tub, while we joked:
‘Oh, will they no’ mak a guid soup?’
No – we will deep-fry them
,
like they do in Glaa-sgow
with the Maa-rs bars!
Then thrust, one by one
to the next pen, the lambs
huddled in a corner,
and with blood dribbling
down their sturdy
little thighs, they jumped
very lightly, as though in joy.
Summer was passing:
just above the waves,
guillemots whirred toward
their cliff-ledge nests,
but they carried nothing;
few young, this year –
Aye, the birds
–
not so many now
…
and the men stood, considering.
Then it was the ewes:
each in turn, a man’s thumb
crossways in her mouth
was tilted upside down
like a small sofa, and clipped
till she stepped out trig
and her fleece
cast over the side:
Fit only to be burned!
–
No market nowadays
–
All the hot Saturday
the men kept to their work
– a modest living –
pausing every so often
to roll cigarettes, or tilt
plastic bottles of cola
to their parched mouths,
as their denims and tee-shirts
turned slowly rigid
with sweat and wool-grease
and the tide began to lift
fronds of dark weed
as though seeking
something mislaid,
and from the cliffs,
through the constant bleating
came the wild birds’
faint, strangulated cries.
When, late in the day
they were done, the sheep,
began to pick their way
up to their familiar pastures –
first the old ewes,
who understood
– if anything – that they,
who take but a small share,
are
a living, whom
now and then
a fate visits, like a storm.
But though the sky
was still blue with
teased out clouds,
and the sea brimmed and
lapped at the shore rocks gently,
and they could have rested,
the men wanted away
before the wind rose,
before – they laughed –
the taverns close!
And I run out of tob-aacco!
Before – though they didn’t
actually say this – the Sabbath,
so they loaded their boat
– a RIB with a hefty outboard –
and hauled the dogs in.
At first they chugged out
slow and old-fashioned,
like a scene in a documentary,
but suddenly with an arched,
overblown plume
of salt spray
they roared off at top speed,
throwing us a grand wave.
This is the moment the roses
cascade over backstreet walls,
throng the public parks –
their cream or scrunched pinks
unfolding now to demonstrate
unacknowledged thought.
The world is ours too!
they brave,
careless of tomorrow
and wholly without leadership
for who’d mount a soap-box
on the rose-behalf?
‘
I haggle for my little
portion of happiness
,’
says each flower, equal, in the scented mass.
Look – it’s the
Lively
,
hauled out above the tideline
up on a trailer with two
flat tyres. What –
14 foot? Clinker-built
and chained by the stern
to a pile of granite blocks,
but with the bow
still pointed westward
down the long voe,
down toward the ocean,
where the business is.
Inland from the shore
a road runs, for the crofts
scattered on the hill
where washing flaps,
and the school bus calls
and once a week or so
the mobile library;
but see how this
duck-egg green keel’s
all salt-weathered,
how the stem, taller
– like a film star –
than you’d imagine,
is raked to hold steady
if a swell picks up
and everyone gets scared …
No, it can’t be easy,
when the only spray to touch
your boards all summer
is flowers of scentless mayweed;
when little wavelets leap
less than a stone’s throw
with your good name
written all over them –
but hey,
Lively
,
it’s a time-of-life thing,
it’s a waiting game –
patience, patience.
Bird on the cliff-top,
the angle of your back
a master-stroke:
why should kittiwakes
plunge at your head
with white shrills?
You’re only just falling
from your parents’ care,
they’ve dared slope off
together, to quarter
the island’s only glen
leaving you sunlit, burnished,
glaring out to sea
like one bewildered.
Some day soon you’ll
topple to the winds
and be gone, a gangrel,
obliged to wander
island to mountain,
taking your chances –
till you moult at last
to an adult’s mantle
and settle some scant
estate of your own. Already
the gulls shriek
Eagle!
Eagle!
—they know
more than you
what you’ll become.
Bluebell at the wayside
nodding your assent
to summer, and summer’s end;
nodding, on your slender stem
your undemurring
yes
to the small role life
offers you – a few weeks
seasoning the hill-foot grasses
with shakes of blue …
You accept, and acquiesce
thereby, to any wind,
though the winds tease:
‘Flower,’ they ask –
‘d’you want to be noticed?’
Yes, yes, noticed!
‘Or rather left alone?’
Yes
,
left perfectly alone!
‘Flower,’
they whisper, ‘d’you love
the breeze that wantons
the whole earth round
breathing its sweet proposals,
but does not love you?’
– then laugh when your blue
head nods:
I do. I do.
Low in the south sky shines
the stern white lamp
of planet Jupiter. A man
on the radio said