for Jane Routh and Dominic Cooper
EVENING
WILL
COME
THEY
WILL
SEW
THE BLUE SAIL
Ian Hamilton Finlay
(from his sculpture garden)
1
My watch has stopped,
And there's no clock.
Daylight, out there, becomes the hour -
Even as I try to re-set it
From half past two in the blackness
Until an hour later, all it can do
Is limp a beat forwards, then back, suspended;
As the sheep lie on the grass, chewing
Some with their eyes closed in meditation
And the sunlit morning becomes endless as it is
To the man who can let go to it...
I put my pen down from the dream
Of her blond hair braided with intestines
Seeing you go out, passing the arena of this window,
Diminutive in your grey windcheater -
And I am the shadow of your brightness.
Beyond you, and the sheep, among the rocks in the bay,
The laminaria glitters like a half-buried snake -
Brown, wreathed, writhing at the low tide's edge
And between us. Earth-alive. Charged with liquid light
As I go back to that strip-lit fringe gallery glow
Leaving you in the light I should be in too...
And for you, breasting the morning, glad
It was such a huge light
It made my spirit soar like the two buzzards
Tilting their wings to rise higher
Into that brilliance, that clarity of Hebridean blue.
Meadow pipits from rock to rock around you
Meadow sweet drifting to you
Meadow brown by the wall -
And then a black and gold dragonfly spelt the day
With its translucent wings shot rainbow in the light
And as you gazed at the islands
You saw the triple peaks of South Uist
Masquerading as clouds...sailing round them in memory
Knowing their seaward view, as you did
Knowing things from the inside as they are,
The way you do, with eyes for me, in your otherness
And then you saw the laminaria too.
And I must find feeling, I must find my way
Even through this temporary blur...
Heading out, as the sheep run scattering, left
Up through the bracken to the old croft wall on the rise
Where the next bay opens down onto the sand
With a rushing stream channel melting into the sea,
A promontory of cracked, pitted rock beyond...
Inland: a farm bungalow, a field with two brown horses
Stationary, open, innocent in the sun
And it's then as I climb down
To the sand's edge, and only then
Bending down, that I find this stone
- heart-shaped, pink veined, clouded, exposed
That will do to show you
And there is somewhere else to reach
That is nowhere but inward
Where neither time or eyesight arrives
Where I lie half-naked in the sun
And the light fills these calmed empty sockets
As the wind bathes my ears
And the grass' moist river heartbeat
Pulses gently up through my feet
What I mean is being
Where the eye of the needle
Is as it always was:
Being nothing and no one
And then all we essentially are
Comes, like the light,
To take that Somebody's place.
2
Those two buzzards you saw
As you point to them -
Circling high in the blue
Inviting our eyes
As well as our steps
To see together
The hovering, paused, wheeling
greater view
Now we walk to the bay's edge, bearing right
And over a knoll where the level grass reveals
An identical kind of cabin, but larger, in blue.
Bright red buoys border its sealed door -
The grass leads down to the shingle's edge
Where a stream winds its curves into the sea...
It's time to take a leap:
Into the energy of the day
That is here-now-awake
And that can take a risk
Stretching your skin -
As we do it in miniature
jumping this stream
- stepping up onto the beach
With its enlarged dry grey cobbles
And hints of other colours, rainwashed down to matt
And twisted in among driftwood, seaweed, detritus:
Bones, everywhere, bleached to a whitened crust
The air space within them exposed, cellular -
Joints and limbs with socket holes, perfectly formed,
One winged in white, one shaped like a fan,
And one with two eye-holes you suddenly
Cover your own with, like an owl mask, shamanka...
Two thigh bones I mistake for drum sticks,
Refined like instruments tipped to their length
As a snare's skin appears beneath them...
Bone woven with wood, where they blend to a oneness
So you could barely tell the difference
- a cow's huge tibia and a horse's foot -
Bending, crouching, turning them in our hands
Beachcombing this after-graveyard
Stumbling on this ram's skull, its drooping horns intact,
Gathered in the round of a rusting car wheel rim...
And just as we're thinking to leave
Out of the liquid sun in the water
Where it dazzles beside a smooth grey rock
- as you see it first, stopped in your tracks -
Comes an otter,
Horizontal over the pathway of death
Sleek as a rat, glistening soft grey
Whiskered as she sidles up onto the pebbles
In spite of our presence - holding her tail up
Thin and small, black against the light,
Moving up onto the grass above -
Then into the bracken towards her halt
High among the scree-like rocks, vertically agile
And you can hardly believe it!
As we stand gazing at the invisible trail
Of where her body has just been
Longing to see it all again
But now we've seen it
Life is this haunting, isn't it ?
As we pick among the remains, missing it,
Clinging on to what's tangible...
And it's all beauty here in her wake
Where the basalt rocks at the sea's edge
Are grey like her, and so smooth and sensual
Blended in their imprint on the sand -
And then dry and wet streaked as the water
Half covers them, slipping over them
In the gleam of their darkened sheen
'Like seals basking in the sun...'
The stones are alive, as the sea is
And as we are as we touch them...
Turning then where the tide water
Narrows in a passage between two cliffs
As we climb winding our way up the rockfall
To emerge again on another page
Where the view down over the sea to the islands opens
And on an outcrop of jagged rocks
A cloud of fifty seagulls begins to move
In their stirring, disturbed white-flickering -
Wheeling round, calling, skimming over the waves
Their wings dissolving in the light's blue
Glinting off the particled water
As we climb to the crest of the hill
Where the horizon is all islands
Muck, Canna, Rhum, Eigg, and Skye now - as you drew them
Sketched in air under the cloud...
And on this little patch of unknown ground;
Tormentil, heather, oak scrub, bog myrtle
Jewelled within the grass
Above where the cliff edge plunges down...
And if flesh is grass, then we can see
That flesh loves grass and bone loves bone
While we stand in them -
And that the windrush of what loves is neither
And now you stand there
Laughing in your gleaming white sweatshirt
You want to lift the islands in your palm
As you align it at a glance along the skyline
Then sitting to breathe
The green opening around us in all its shades
As we gaze over and beyond where we are
In all the ripples and fissures of the land
- wooded clefts, moorland and fields -
Like a subtle flower
Seen from this openness within
The greenness' heart otherwise blurred
Its outline lost - as the land is
Become merely a map, contracted,
Shadowed as the sun slides behind cloud...
But out here it stays shining
The way your eyes do in their wide-awake hazel
Not missing a thing
for the joy of it
while it is
Even as you sense the tide coming in
To join stream-end and river, as it is doing
Now we walk the short distance to its view:
The channel swollen, the crossing place covered,
The gap too wide now...
So as we descend, with you in front,
It's a growing down to each sideways step
- toes pressed to the front of our boots -
It's collecting the bones where we left them
And, barefoot, gingerly across the river's slippery cobbles
Holding the wheel rim like a wedding cake.
3
The wind boiling up in the dark
Billowing round the roof it once lifted clean off -
As we lie half asleep and awake
On our backs, like brother and sister
In this after-coniunctio of blackness...
Then in the morning, the quietness that takes it all in
Sitting this side of the window
In a square of room left empty for truth...
With the bay like a uterus filling and draining
Marked by a solitary recumbent ewe.
Outside, the green path beckoning, shining
To take to the brightness while it is here
In the land's huge respite and welcome
Spread like the palms of open hands...
What shines on us knows its way
The way a river does, invisibly
And we are all-seeing, seeing nothing,
On a path we can only follow
Where everything is made new again:
The gleaming fronds of bracken, the little burn
With its wild mint sparkling in the grass -
And as we pass this cairn, a single stone
Perched on its summit like a philisophic egg...
And all of it against the blue, the green
In the eye of the blue that is heaven
Where its light shines through the earth. One creation.
And a man and a woman, walking in it...
And in all this expanse, as we come to the mail box,
With its sapphire blue gleaming metallic paint -
Your letter, like a nest egg in its blessing,
Written by, carried by, received by hand -
And the heart-threads between us reaching anywhere.
The path becomes the road, the high road,
The old crofter's path to Ockle -
That a car can skim over now, leaving the past
To transfer its pain into our minds
Where all the knots go back like beads on a string
That we unravel in their openings
Where nature meets us inside
And the journey continues.
The road leads down to the bridge
With its paint-flaked railing we pause at:
And as we lean out over the clear tan water
A boulder downstream is shimmering with the reflection
Of the light from underneath it, where it juts out
Under a ledge with its crown of heather - now we watch it
Swirling, bubbling and rippling lit up, until it seems
That not even the rock is solid...
And as I glance down, your shadow is tiny
With the water like a river around you:
You are a child, a faery woman grown full-sized,
And younger as you were, in miniature -
Your hair shoulder length, your anorak distended into a dress,
And it's as if I'm seeing the woman you are inside
That you are returning to, to reclaim
That is the exact shadow of your light
Being herself light, only buried in time,
And rising like a reflection of the light
As it ripples on up the base of the overhang...
And you drop the meadowsweet you're holding
Like a divination, watching it drift
Into the silence of your gaze...
leaving, somehow
This one yellow flower in the light breeze
Radiating light at your feet
Then we turn to go under...
slipping down
From a low wall on the other side
Onto a flat rock in the middle of the stream
Where it reaches under the arch of the bridge,
As we listen to the water, with its undergurgle
Like the skin of a drum being tautened and slackened
Amplified as the sound fills our ears, and the water
Flows like cool breath through the cells of our skin
So we know we are as permeable, we are part of it
Breathing in its vast secret rhythm...
We stand to go on, crossing the bridge finally
Where the lane continues past the last of the houses
And their caravan and shed appendages... petering out
In a track that forks onto the moorland
Where the space opens out again.
We walk, resting in the land,
Past an old lambing shed with its roof blown away
And a narrow door rusting on its hinges...
Out onto the uneven grass and bracken
As slowly through the sunlight, intermittent in the breeze,
Comes a deathly smell...
rotting meat, you say
Must be a sheep, though you can't see anything
There's only a small gully where a stream course trickles
It seems to exude from in its hidden putrefaction
And there are no other sheep in sight -
Death, invisible in this light: like its sign
And the land unmarked, unsanctified -
There's only the gully path, or the tractor track
Branching to the right in this wilderness
Until we see the Little Mountain rising
With its peak like Cnicht, a perfect Matterhorn,
In miniature over the grass and purple heather
As you follow the eaten path to it, ahead as I write
Watching you make half its ascent -
Then following you in the rising wind round its side
Up the ankle-scraping rough of its stubble
To its hundred foot summit where the air bites
And we sit for the free moment of whatever wants to come
Turning inland, then round to the sea...
and it's down
You can't explain it, but it's that way -
Down into the gully out of the wind
Where the path is hidden, or non-existent
- where you feel there'll be something -
And as we reach the cove, there it is...
walls
With the triangle of its apse where the roof was:
A blackhouse before its windows were carved,
As you name it, its stone as if tarred -
You can tell by the rounding on its corners
And those walls built without a hint of cement
The stones laid, piled perfectly, end to end -
Animals at one end, crofters at the other
'They shovelled the shit out in the spring'
With all the breadth of the sea in front of them
Its calm and fruit, or lashing storm -
Treading down among the stones
Casting our minds into those years
Wondering if the place was cleared...
And as I sit and reach out to touch rock
I lift back my hand - it is bone
A rock-sized lump of greyed bone
Far larger than any cow or ox could be
As you stumble on a huge whitened plate
And we realize: whale
Then there are fragments everywhere
Some obvious, some featureless, sodden green
Some further down like tusks that are ribs
Last pieces of its great ship - to think of it
Beached here with only these empty walls to witness it
As the whole air palls, like a cloud come low...
And what we didn't know, like the river,
Was this rumble of invisible thunder
That became a volcano in slow motion -
A whale exploding like a zeppelin
As its skin burst sending flung pieces of flesh out
Some of them landing half a mile away...
Then the scramble for choice pieces -
Its vast body given like bread from this altar
To be stripped and polished, hoarded like icons,
Leaving the torn structure of its whole shape
Like an invisible outline
And leaving a divine stench that lasted for weeks.
We knew none of this. And what did we do ?
Simply what everyone else did.
We gathered what we could, reverently
And put it in a supermarket bag.
Only as we walked back, it was behind us in the twilight
Moulded like the sky, invisibly great -
And as great as anything we can expand in
To go beyond ourselves, into the mystery
As it spread to become the sky...
And as we crossed the river, wading again,
All it was lay stretched among the pine trees
In its white fleece, with its eyes closed, asleep.
4
Softened grey waking. Weatherwise eyes
Open to the sky beyond streets or buildings
That can read the air in cloud and wind
Moisture to moisture, brightness to brightness,
Breathing with what is...
And a heron again, in the bay -
In the grey-bright air, as it gathered its wings to land
Perched for a moment, then vanished like a ghost dancer,
Leaving its own forecast for us...
Weatherwise inside.
And drawing your attention to the rocks, to explore
With your camera-wise eyes: their rugged, jagged outgrowth
Between us and the waves...
and they
Embody the kind of contrast you like.
Black after the green
Against the grey-white of the sky
Above the covered laminaria, as we step among them
One at a time, to get a grip: before they lift
To their brief ridge as we wedge our feet to climb
Standing among their black fisssures, gazing down at them
Scored like runes or cracks in the bone to decipher -
Dusted over with clusters of barnacles in a sandy sheen
And in their deeper crevices, tiny rock pools
With their sleeping red nubs of anemone
That you touch as gently, as they stir
In their pulse of sensitivity, flinching
Like this current of attuning
With its invitation to be precise.
Right this way, wrong there
And the difference all in how it feels
At the nerve-ends of a language become real
Which has consequences.
Magic of naming, evoking, releasing
Become this deep thing we can participate in
That can save us from a fog of non-being
Where nothing meets us, nothing means.
You know... and in your art or mine
All we are really doing is reaching being
Where we can be alive inside out.
So call it life.
We climb away from the rocks up the bracken to the ridge
That leads down to the bay next door -
Where jagged granite smooths into basalt, at the sand's edge
As we turn from slipping down it, to see its
Flattened curves and water-filled crevice like buttocks
Covered in an acne of sun-bleached barnacles...
And then the sand itself with its spread coating of stones
Snagging strands of lime-green seaweed like hair
Toupees, wigs - combed out by the tide and the wind
And as the sand clears:
this is the sea's art
Suddenly, open air, unframed in this free exhibition
Where two stones are flanked like eyebrows: one ridged
The other falling down over a cheek like hair
And then a few steps further on
Where a stone head and a sand-etched stickleback spine
Reach the perfect outline of a broad-fanned tail
Sketched as if on a wall as Lascaux -
Fossilized, Pleistocene -
Made by the last tide
taken by the next
As the sand borders to the edge of a platform
Coated in the green stuff - and there, in a niche
Where it rises like the foundations of a Dead Sea ruin
Thousands and thousands of sea-swept tiny cowries
Heaped as you run them through your fingers
Where they could fill a giant hourglass - imagine
And as you step up onto the cracked pitted rock
A giant rusted key etched between two jagged pools
Is crossed by another line, in cruciform -
Like a corn circle or a Nazca glyph,
As we gaze down like gods
Then the surface cracks up completely like a chaos
Of coagulated cloud-pools - a nightmare to run across -
Raised into staircases that lead nowhere
In random concrete cavities aerated like bone
Cratered, lunar, like another sun's moon...
Only lower, as we turn, where it reforms
Does the outflux create a masterpiece
Where a dried grey rock is clouded by twin pools
Above and below, riven by a thin trickling channel
And the stain in the black is like sprayed gold
As you hold your breath, and bend in closer...
And finally as we come back, in the given time,
Flattened in the shingle, two smooth grey stones
As snug as scissors, and like a walking ideogram,
Make the exact radical for 'man'
At the root, one who is: and one who grows
Also by growing down.
for Dominic
Soft grey twilight, when time rolls backwards
And then and now are a single octave -
Your cropped hair and sensual mouth lingering
Novelist, poet, and repairer of clocks
With your visions of the first rains, peoples and creatures
And the 'Old Wood' - of the earth redeeming us,
Out here, out of reach of Babylon
Where golden eagles soar and peregrines plunge
As we drive out on the road past Kilmory
Slowing to its narrow curves, with the windows wound down,
When suddenly, in what was empty grassland,
Emptiness everywhere - the deer, a whole stag herd
Floating under their antlers as they stop, alert
And we stop to watch their sea of wildness
That belongs here, and to no keeper or larder,
Royal as they move, hinds too, and ethereal
Between silhouette and substance, in their light
Leaving us crude and undignified: as a car closens behind
And as we accelerate, a hind and her calf by the wire fence
Start to run, caught out on the wrong side -
As one jumps, clearing it, leaving the other
Still racing along, imprisoned before she suddenly turns
Bolting straight across the tarmac between us,
Bounding unharmed up the grassy incline
Leaving us as near as this, and as far
This side of windows and words -
In the zoo of what we mistake for humanness
In this sullen apology for a bar.
5
Wholeness - the world within us
Whether we open our eyes or close them
Or only when we do, in our inner movie house
Realizing or remembering all that is also in me -
Intellectual woman, piss-taking adolescent,
And this cool blond-haired operator having his affair
Seeing off his children with perfect explanations...
All that - and the screens we are for each other, too.
And in this space between us
To have the courage to say
Exactly where we are, and stay with it:
I love you by inches as I swallow her ghost
To say the most we can say, and not lie
To cross the demon of comfort -
With his temptations of ease and denial
Which stand between us, and our deeper selves,
Our depth and colour.
And to be able to leave them, shelve them,
To climb back out of our inner skins
To the day as it is...
We take out the residue as we talk, walking
And it goes out through our breath and our feet.
We head east beyond where we've been
Lured by ruined villages and the Singing Sands
As we leave Whalebone Bay behind
And the track unravels with its green between rough earth and gravel
Gateway to gateway, undulating;
Moorland either side of it -
When suddenly it opens,
and there in a bowl
Between the hills beyond it and the way here,
Is the lochan - opening out as if from our chests
In limpid amazement
In a circle within a circle where its silver-green rippling
Is bordered by a band of gleaming lilypads
Surrounded near the shore by thin-tipped reeds;
Its centre drifting to the left, the whole of it a spiral
As it wheels in the breath of wind whispering over it
Bringing us to stillness;
And behind us, as the sun slants over the grass,
The foundations of a croft in its crescent of stones
Barely visible, subsumed into heather, moss and lichen
And as we sit, the whole ground is honey-warm
As if hallowed with gladness... as you glimpse
The lazybeds across the water, their ridged outlines
Piled again with seaweed in the dream...
And while we sit in silence, with only the bees and the breeze
It is easy to imagine a life that was also happy
Rooted like this, or as simply in this moment
Where it breathes
As we ripple out in our seeing and listening
Towards the sheen of its silver candescence
Like a cloud of moonlit water in the daylight
Spreading and drifting, drawing us into
Its spell of gentleness, its whispered gesture
To be with what our hearts know, spoken like a mother
And its sound that is the wind among its reeds,
Keening as we blend to it... broken only
By the high shrill shriek of a pipit, climbing
As we come back, and up onto our feet.
The path leads on but quietened, gentled
Inviting us further now there is no distance
Between us and all we can see
It's a wild rocky road with no one and nothing
But bleached telegraph poles connecting what voices
Come into this quarter and leave
It's an empty land that no one has cleared or inhabited,
Virgin as it was (even for hardy sheep): and as pure
As this solitary piece of white quartz I bend to find
As we round another raw, rock-blasted corner
Only imagine the ridiculousness of building a road
From here across to 'the mainland': a two-lane, two-sided
Motorway with above-blue signs... the cars as if sailing
Round a bend through the air, and every cove
Full of gift shops selling binoculars - will we never give up
Until we've reduced every last piece of wilderness to tarmac ?
Twenty five years... let's make it forever
And find other ways of thinking about the future
While we still have one to dream about that isn't a nightmare
Returning us all to hunkering survivalists...
And the thought goes empty, the emptiness takes it
Leaving a quieter faith in obdurate rock
That has seen this kind of thing come and go
Seeing it as we may have to
In the invisible counterpart to its eye
Loftier than an eagle or an angel
But for now, it's still here for the walking
Like any pilgrim route could be seen to be -
Because it is green, because it still exists...
Like these silver birches we come to, by a stream
As the path corners over a culvert among stones
Where the water trickles in a tiny valley of its own,
And the trees are thick with layers of green-blue lichen
Covering their bark like coral, marking the purity of the air
As you finger it, honouring it
To think, or feel
How all that is so seemingly transient
Outlives us -
Phrase it how you will.
We turn as we have to - leaving it unfinished
And for lightness, too, quickening our step:
For me, one of the poles is irresistible
With its steel foot-rungs just begging to be climbed!
For you, it's the broken-planked footbridge
With its bared iron girders
Plunging into a gully below -
'Dare you', your life said to you. And you did.
All of it,
and all you will.
Going out to the West - at a bend in the lane
In what has been emptiness, with barely even sheep
There, in the middle of a field with its gate left open,
Hair combed by rain towards the ground -
Eyes covered in hair under his horns -
A shaggy highland bull, like the first here,
Wandering unconcerned: his field, his lane anyway
Where they wander as they will...
And in all this drabness, he's the laird.
We went out west and what did we see ?
A lighthouse become an automaton
Rising above a slate grey windy sea
With all the soul gone out of it:
Silent, the warning cannon
And the lighthouse keeper's shoes on the endless stairs
The red foghorn poised like a tannoy over the railing
Trumpeting, silent above the waves' foaming...
A map of the zone like bubbling green lead -
And the great grey whale expanse beyond
Hanging like rain in the air over Canna...
We saw nothing but desolation
That not even the sun could conceal
Until we came back: and there on the road
Larger than any monolith - a ringed highland giant
Horns as wide as handlebars, and tail like a bell rope -
Blocking the way entirely at his own pace
Sidling along with a female friend
He cossets with his nose as we slow almost to stalling...
And as darkness comes, the air comes alive
Silhouettes of stags on the hillside -
A cormorant-black heron winging like its messenger
And at the last bend, in the glow of the headlights
By the laneside, along the rough verge of the grass
Shaggy hair, wondering eyes, calves' wet noses -
The whole family of the herd, on the move.
6
A drop of clear gold, like crystal
Gold you can see with, and through
As your dream gives you the distillation:
All it is on a postcard somewhere home
And this is the message that is given:
Even in the most ordinary landscapes
You will find marvels
When you learn to see whole
With new eyes
And the herd has come down, as we wake
Filling the vista of the bay window...
One bull-black with her horns standing right outside -
The others brown, lounging in their tonnage on the grass
Chewing mouthfuls: and the calves with their foal legs,
Fully formed hooves and huge snub noses
Frolicking between them...
The heffalumps have come down!
And what comes to greet them is a child
Large-eyed in their trust, as the calves are,
Simply wanting to go out and play with them.
Then the rain comes
Blown by the wind -
Whispering its tattoo against the windows,
And beyond the bay, the islands have gone,
Shrouded completely in cloud-mist...
As they sit and suffer it, their coats streaked
The black one still standing rooted to the spot -
The calves uncertain what to do, one nesting in the bracken,
As it pours some more of its sixty annual inches...
Business as usual. The air begins to close.
But not before another gift is given
So fleetingly we could as easily have missed it
- strange how we both happened to be looking -
What's that ? As an outsized tawny-striped cat
With a scrap in its mouth pads across by the cairn
Vanishing into the cover of the bracken -
Wildcat. Savaging the tamed air...
Cleaning the slate of the rain we go out into.
Cowled in anoraks, clad in waterproofs
Its needles on our faces, the wind at our ears,
And the loud brushing of nylon inside our hoods
As we pace
We are green monks in the rain -
Our cloister vaguely gestured among bracken
With eyes only for the gleaming road
Under a sky come low, as we hold the silence,
And down the valley side where the sheep are grazing
A glow reaches across the grass, a light within the rain,
Blending slate sky, outbuilding roof and grass
Hanging above it, suspended
Hiddenness of light, of intention, of realization
As if to say you never know
What a thing is , if you presume it -
And deeper too
Where the light is inside out in everything
Beneath the naked eye: the earth exuding it
And our flesh too, and falling rose petals,
The rain like a mole quarrying to the roots...
Where everything is light in a deeper circulation
That is dying, too - beyond our conception
Of layered judgement
All we can see is the rain, that is also true
As we climb to a bend in the road
Where the view back opens the whole terrain
With its promontory and fingers of rock
Beyond the low, snaking drystone wall
And these three ruined cottages we explore
Beside the holiday let that's refurbished
With its alien BMW from another world outside
And suspicious, curious occupant greeting us
In what passes for shared language when silence
Speaks so much more completely
Or feeling, the way it takes us, helpless
The way sadness comes, walking back, like a blade
Piercing between my shoulders, as a heron hovers,
And out of the front of my chest -
Vanishing in the away-swerve of its wings
Where truth is the edge...
As you know, as you sit with us now
In this hearthlight filling the room
And mixed with your deep voice and the wind
It can sharpen its whetsone and sing
Where song is the healing of speech
Even the darkest of speech. Sing on
Turn wind, wave and heart-ache
Into your song
And it shall be your release
Leaving, the bay returning to itself,
Two sheep, one grazing, one sitting -
The tide drawing in, the little cairn of stones:
And the rusty wheel rim like a bowl of receiving
A hundred seagulls stationary on the far promontory
The islands veiled in this white sky-mist
Leaving silence scored like a white line, as the land
Wraps the generous hand of itself
Back into its secret being
And as we come to your cabin above the ocean
That you have earnt and built out of nothing
With its workshop full of delicate tickings and chimings
Where time returns, and you are staying;
Where the sky opens far out over the sea
And the earth rises under your feet
May your heart be whole between them,
And tomorrow bring you peace.
- August 1996/7
- Tatham Fells,
Lancashire, and Stroud
|
