Authors: Kathleen Jamie
it’s uncommonly close;
sequestered in the telescope lens
it’s like a compere, spotlit,
driving its borrowed light
out to all sides equally.
While set in a row in the dark
beyond its blaze,
like seed-pearls,
or coy new talents
awaiting their call onstage –
are what must be, surely,
the Galilean moons.
In another room,
my children lie asleep, turning
as Earth turns, growing
into their own lives, leaving me
a short time to watch, eye
to the eye-piece,
how a truth unfolds –
how the moonlets glide
out of their chance alignment,
each again to describe
around its shared host
its own unalterable course.
Tell me, Galileo, is this
what we’re working for?
The knowing that in just
one Jovian year
the children will be gone
uncommonly far, their bodies
aglow, grown, talented –
mere bright voice-motes
calling from the opposite
side of the world.
What else would we want
our long-sighted instruments
to assure us of? I’d like
to watch for hours, see
what you old astronomers
apprehended for the first time,
bowing to the inevitable …
but it’s late. Already
the next day
plucks at my elbow
like a wakeful infant,
next-door’s dog barks,
and a cloud arrives,
appearing out of nothing.
Mind thon bridge? The wynds
that spawned us? Those hemmed in,
ramshackle tenements
taller, it seemed, every year …
Caller herrin’! Ony rags! On the mountain
stands a lady
…
What a racket! Coal smoke,
midden-reek … filthy,
needless to mention, our two
old hives, heaped high
either side of the river,
crammed with the living, with the dead-beat
and joined by that sandstone ligature …
Did you ever notice
how walking out over the water
made us more human:
men became gracious,
women unfolded
their arms from their breasts –
and where else could children,
beggars, any one of us,
pause and look up at the sky!
And that river! Forever
bearing its breeze to the sea,
like a rustic bride, scented
now with blossom,
now with pine sap,
– But what was the sea to us, then?
What was a mountain?
Yes; us. Me and you.
That
bridge,
long ago demolished
where we first met.
Gie me, ye Po’ers, jist ane simmer mair
an ane maumie autumn,
that ma hairt, ripe wi sweet sang,
’s no sae swier for tae dee. A sowl
denied in life its heevinly richt
wil waunner Orcus disjaiskit;
but gin ah could mak whit’s halie
an maist dear tae me – ane perfect poem
I’ll welcome the cauld, the quate mirk!
For though I maun lee’ ma lyre
an gang doon wantin sang, Ah’d hae lived,
aince
, lik the gods; and aince is eneuch.
Last night, when the moon
slipped into my attic-room
as an oblong of light,
I sensed she’d come to commiserate.
It was August. She travelled
with a small valise
of darkness, and the first few stars
returning to the northern sky,
and my room, it seemed,
had missed her. She pretended
an interest in the bookcase
while other objects
stirred, as in a rockpool,
with unexpected life:
strings of beads in their green bowl gleamed,
the paper-crowded desk;
the books, too, appeared inclined
to open and confess.
Being sure the moon
harboured some intention,
I waited; watched for an age
her cool gaze shift
first toward a flower sketch
pinned on the far wall
then glide to recline
along the pinewood floor
before I’d had enough.
Moon
,
I said,
we’re both scarred now.
Are they quite beyond you
,
the simple words of love? Say them.
You are not my mother
;
with my mother, I waited unto death.
Here is the lighthouse,
redundant these days.
From the keepers’
neglected garden
– the sea, of course
a metallic seam
closing the horizon.
– And gulls too,
uttering the same
torn-throated cries
as when you first imagined
hours spent hunched
against the wind-
abraded wall might yield some
species of understanding.
All those hours, gazing
out to the ocean.
Years ago now.
When I found I’d lost you –
not beside me, nor ahead,
nor right nor left not
your green jacket moving
between the trees anywhere –
I waited a long while
before wandering on. No wren
jinked in the undergrowth,
not a twig snapped.
It was hardly the Wildwood –
just some auld fairmer’s
shelter belt – but red haws
reached out to me,
and between fallen leaves
pretty white flowers bloomed
late into their year. I tried
calling out, or think
I did, but your name
shrivelled on my tongue,
so instead I strolled on
through the wood’s good
offices, and duly fell
to wondering if I hadn’t
simply made it all up. You,
I mean, everything,
my entire life. Either way,
nothing now could touch me
bar my hosts, who appeared
as diffuse golden light,
as tiny spiders
examining my hair …
What gratitude I felt then –
I might be gone for ages
,
maybe seven years!
–
and such sudden joie de vivre
that when a ditch gaped
right there instantly in front of me
I jumped it, blithe as a girl –
ach, I jumped clear over it,
without even pausing to think.
Dusk, and the black rooks
rise from their stubble-fields,
returning to the pine-copse
they quit at dawn.
Kaah … kaah … kaah
… they proclaim
their shared release,
straggling in loose groups
above hedges and the river
as though the trees
were singing, to draw them in.
They go; the peasant earth
they’ve probed all day
beneath them now,
and of no matter.
There are only the trees
luring from their realms of sky
each mite of darkness
to counter the coming night;
and
kaah … kaah … kaah
…
the rooks reply.
She comes to me
as a jay’s shriek,
as ragged branches shading
deerways I find myself
lost among for days,
weeks, till the crisis
passes. When I weep
she strokes my hair
and calls me ‘babe’,
coaxing me to fall
once more for her
scarlet-berry promises –
This time
, she says,
I’ll keep you
,
so you’ll never have to face them all again.
If I could stand the pressures,
if I could make myself strong,
I’d dive far under the ocean,
away from these merfolk
– especially the mermen, moaning
and wringing out their beards.
I’d discover a cave
green and ventricular
and there, with tremendous patience,
I’d teach myself to listen:
what the whale-fish hear
answering through the vastnesses
I’d hear too. But oh my love,
tell me you’d swim by,
tell me you’d look out for me,
down there it’s impossible to breathe –
Nae lang yirdit
but here y’ur back –
turnt tae a blackie
feathert in bark –
Nou ye ken whit befaa’s
folk that wad clype
on whit tends tae us aa
ayont the dyke –
a burnt gleg ee,
twa wire feet,
a thrapple o wid
that cannae wheep
fi the heighest branch
o’ ony tree … Och
how could ye no’
hae gane quaitely?
Bien wi yella pears, fu
o wild roses, the braes
fa intil the loch;
ye mensefu’ swans,
drunk wi kisses
dook yir heids
i’ the douce, the hailie watter.
But whaur when winter’s wi us
will ah fin flo’ers?
Whaur the shadda
an sunlicht o the yird?
Dumbfounert, the wa’s staun.
The cauld blast
claitters the wethervanes.
The grey storm passes
a storm the sea wakes from
then soon forgets …
surf plumes at the rocks –
wave after wave, each
drawing its own long fetch
– and the hills across the firth –
golden, as the cloud lifts – yes
it’s here, everything
you wanted, everything
you insisted on –
Even the raven,
his old crocked voice
asks you what you’re waiting for
See when it all unravels – the entire project
reduced to threads of moss fleeing a nor’wester;
d’you ever imagine chasing just one strand, letting it lead you
to an unsung cleft in a rock, a place you could take to,
dig yourself in – but what are the chances of that?
Of the birds,
few remain all winter; half a dozen waders
mediate between sea and shore, that space confirmed
– don’t laugh – by your own work. Waves boom, off-white
spume-souls twirl out of geos, and look,
blown about the headland: scraps of nylon fishing net. Gannets
– did you know? – pluck such rubbish from the waves, then
hie awa’
to colonies so raucous and thief-ridden, each nest
winds up swagged to the next … Then they’re flown, and the
cliff’s left
wearing naught but a shoddy, bird-knitted vest.
And look at us! Out all day and damn all to show for it.
Bird-bones, rope-scraps, a cursory sketch – but a bit o’ bruck’s
all we need to get us started, all we’ll leave behind us when
we’re gone.
I am grateful to the editors of the following journals, in which some of these poems first appeared.
Edinburgh Review
, the
Guardian, Irish Pages
, the
London Review of Books, Orion
, the
New Yorker
Poetry London, Poetry Review, Woodlanders.
‘The Beach’ was broadcast on BBC Radio 3.
The quotation in ‘Roses’ is from Rosa Luxemburg.
With special thanks to James Dodds for his lino-cut, ‘Shetland Fourern’.
KATHLEEN JAMIE was born in the west of Scotland in 1962. She is the author of six previous poetry collections, including
Waterlight: Selected
Poems. The Overhaul
won the Costa Prize and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. Jamie’s nonfiction books include the highly regarded
Findings
and
Sightlines
, which won the John Burroughs Medal and the Orion Book Award. She is chair of creative writing at Stirling University, and lives with her family in Fife, Scotland.
The Overhaul
is set in Apollo MT.
Manufactured by Versa Press on acid-free,
30 percent postconsumer wastepaper.