POETRY AND A SENSE
OF PLACE
John Burnside
Introduction
In this paper, I want to discuss the function
of the lyric in poetry of place. I will suggest that the lyric
poem is the point of intersection between place and a specific
moment or moments; that a lyric can, in effect, act as a detailed
map, not only of topological, (and meteorological), features,
but also of any possible response to those features. It may be
a very idiosyncratic and personal view, but I would maintain that
the purpose of the lyric is to stop time, by somehow conveying
the timelessness of the chosen place: paradoxically, this attempt
to break the flow of linear time is achieved by focusing very
specifically on the moment, (i.e. on transience, which is the
space in which linear time disappears).
I would also maintain that the lyric is concerned with
identity: the poem of place always contains an implied observer,
whose identity is inextricably linked to whatever is being observed;
indeed, taking into account the views of eighteenth century Scottish
philosophers, such as Hume and Reid, lyric poetry reveals that
the identity of the onlooker is indistinguishable from the things
perceived; the fact that we are bundles of sensations is not
a pessimistic or reductionist view, but a philosophy which allows
us to transcend time, to belong entirely to a place which can
be categorised as home , and that this home can be found
anywhere. The enterprise of the lyric is, in fact, to identify
home, and to locate both speaker and listener in a space of their
own, whether that space is a shared home, or not. In discussing
the lyric, I will make a distinction between place and space,
suggesting that lyric poetry of place concerns itself with
specific locales, not to create a sense of local colour, or for
any Romantic effect, but to set up a kind of metaphysical space,
which is essentially empty, a region of potential in which anything
can happen. Paradoxically, though the lyric can be seen as a map
which contains the responses of the observer, this is not the
map of a specific response, but of all possible responses. The
I of the lyric poem is neither poet, nor reader; its space
is only temporarily inhabitable. Personal experience is transmuted;
in the lyric, poetry is a form of alchemy, that is, the poem becomes
a region of near-infinite potential, which anyone can inhabit.
Or, to use Emily Dickinson s description of herself as a poet:
I dwell in Possibility -
A fairer House than Prose -
More numerous of Windows -
Superior - for Doors - 1
Identity
The psychologist, Nicholas Humphrey, has
said that Everything that is interesting in nature happens at
the boundaries. 2 It might also be claimed that everything that is interesting about
the human individual is what happens at the boundaries of his/her
perceptions and transactions. The question, What is identity?
is most profitably examined in this space between the individual
and the world: that is, as the question, Where does the self
end, and the other begin? It might be answered that the defining
line exists at the borderline of their transactions, that we define
one another, that without Thou , there is no I , or rather
that I is a short-lived singularity, destined for chaos. Experiments
in sensory deprivation have shown that, when external stimuli
are withdrawn from a subject, that subject effectively disintegrates,
losing all sense of self. Identity, in other words, can only be
sustained via transactions, whether with other human beings, or
with a living and changing environment. In other words, to speak
of the isolated individual in this context is quite meaningless.
On the other hand, the very fact of individuation depends upon
a separating out of one s self and the world that is not-self:
to exist, the person must maintain his/her bounds, both in order
to exist as a separate individual, and to have a space in which
transactions can occur.
The spaces between the self and the other where everything
takes place have long been a source of fascination for poets and
myth-makers. To take one example: the Celts, or at least those
Celts who once inhabited the British Isles, and informed much
of what still remains as an identifiably Scots/Irish/Welsh/Cornish
culture, recognised a space which they called, (in Irish), idir
eathara, that is, a boundary that is neither one place nor
another, but the space between the two, that space which Humphrey
has identified as the point where everything that is interesting
in Nature happens. This, in Celtic myth, is the magical space
where anything can occur. In one story, a fiddler enters this
space, and passes through it to the world of faery, where he stays
for a single night, playing his music to the Fairy King. When
he returns to his own world, twenty five years have passed: his
wife and his friends have died; no one in his village recognises
him. In other tales, this space is the locus of transformations:
humans become birds, or animals, the old are rejuvenated, the
human and the faery are indistinguishable. This gap is also the
space in which several versions of a place, or a person, can exist
simultaneously; depending on the choices made by the protagonist,
one or other of these possibilities emerges into the temporal
world. In other words, this magical space is where identity unfolds,
and is capable of transformation. It is the boundary between one
state and another, where magic is possible.
The legacy of this myth can be seen in much recent Scots
and Irish poetry in particular, where a boundary is commonly the
specific locus for lyric. This locus may be geographical or topological:
the border between one place and another, (in Northern Irish poetry,
for example, the boundary between the South and the North), or
it may be temporal. Key moments in the calendar are Lammas, Halloween,
(the old Celtic New Year), or New Year s Eve, or certain times
of day, such as noon or midnight, dawn or dusk. These are the
points at which one thing becomes another: the old year becomes
the new, summer becomes autumn, day becomes night. They are, in
our experience, the moments when the person is susceptible to
change, where being is raw, as it were, where identity is less
fixed, more open to possibility. Indeed, we might even say that
magic is nothing more than the recognition of potential. To illustrate
this state, I would like to quote my own poem, Halloween:
I have peeled the bark from the tree
to smell its ghost,
and walked the boundaries of ice and bone
where the parish returns to itself
in a flurry of snow;
I have learned to observe the winters:
the apples that fall for days
in abandoned yards,
the fernwork of ice and water
sealing me up with the dead
in misted rooms
as I come to define my place:
barn owls hunting in pairs along the hedge,
the smell of frost on the linen, the smell
of leaves
and the whiteness that breeds in the flaked
leaf mould, like the first elusive threads
of unmade souls.
The village is over there, in a pool of
bells,
and beyond that nothing,
or only the other versions of myself,
familiar and strange, and swaddled in
their time
as I am, standing out beneath the moon
or stooping to a clutch of twigs and straw
to breathe a little life into the fire. 3
Of course, one question raised by the
existence of this boundary is, Can there be such a thing as no-place
or a no-time? The question is reminiscent of the old pile of
rice paradox: if I place one grain of rice on a table, then another,
then another, I will eventually end up with a pile of rice grains.
But what is the point at which the pile comes into being? Do fifty
grains of rice make a pile? Do thirty? Do ten? There is no rule
which applies in this case: somehow a pile of rice grains comes
into existence, but the point at which it begins to exist cannot
be determined. In the same way, one thing becomes another, and
each thing defines every other thing, but the locus of the change,
or of the definition, cannot be traced. While time only appears
to flow, one moment into another, it is a cliché of poetry
that no single moment can be fixed and held in place, that we
cannot, in our actual experience, stop time in its tracks. The
only way in which this linear flow, through a series of indefinable
points, can be evaded, in fact, is by artifice: the lyric seems
to break time s flow, not by freezing it, as a snapshot does,
(or seems to do), but by celebrating transience, by acknowledging
that the moment is, in itself, outside the limits of our description
of existence, and is therefore the very matter of eternity. The
lyric says, in other words, that the flow of time is an illusion:
the reality is that things change, things unfold and decay, in
the standstill of eternity. To resort once again to cliché,
time does not move, it is we who move within time. Similarly,
just as linear time melts into eternity on examination, so place
- the defined, the fixed, the mapped - becomes space - the fluid,
the shifting, a region of unexpected potential - when it is considered
within the context of lyric.
Community
By living together in a place, and calling
it home, we give rise to community. This may come about by sharing
resources, by identifying ourselves by way of a common location,
but it may as easily arise from shared difficulty, for example
from the binding effect of weathering some event together.
In David Clewell s poem, Storm, for instance, we are given, not only
a superb image of the Wisconsin landscape and climate, but also
an insight into this binding effect, into how kinship and community
life are perpetuated by shared experiences, of danger and difficulty,
of joy, even of the small, slightly crazy moments of day to day
life:
We unfold napkins and bolt down dinner.
The radio s full of the storm
and we know the twitch of electricity
here out on the porch, waiting,
iced tea sweating in our summer hands.
Hosing down a lawn giving up to brown
a neighbor yells this ll be a real clapper,
he can tell, we should have seen the walleye
hitting hard all afternoon.
When we came to Wisconsin they told us
about the summer storms thundering
across the lakes and through backyards,
washing weeks of heat down the gutters.
We d been through rain before,
never realizing how polite.
In this open land, miles of no relief,
the Elks scatter home with their softballs.
Tonight in dark circles around our eyes
another storm gathers. A year of plans
folded into maps stashed on the dashboard.
This house packed up behind us
shifts its new weight in the dark.
Maybe we need the sky falling in once
more
to yell no turning back.
So let it rain,
drops giving way to sheets of water.
If the roads wash out we ll make it anyway.
If lightning strikes
we ll jump into each other s arms.
We know it won t be long now:
someone with a newspaper full of rain
running down the sidewalk, running home.
This time it will be for everyone s sake
when we hope it isn t far.
Tonight if a tree falls we ll still be
here
to hear it, to leave the porch
and dance in the branches
until we re soaked to the skin
and what s underneath comes up to stay
alive. 4
So it is that all poetry of place, while
it appears to concern itself with landscape, is as often about
identity and community. Identity is revealed by relationship,
by kinship even: the poem of place speaks of the relationship
of the individual to a specific place at a particular point in
time, and invites the reader to share this relationship. The lyric
invites its reader to identify, not with the poet, or with the
poet s experience, but with the space in which that experience
unfolds. The best lyric poetry creates a magical, or metaphysical
space which the reader can inhabit. For this reason, the poet
must resist the temptations of glamour, on the one hand, and nostalgia
on the other, because the space of the successful lyric must be,
in one sense at least, empty. The reader must replace the poet
as viewer of the landscape; the poet must remove him/herself from
the scene. In this sense, the contemporary lyric is essentially
classical in its enterprise: what the poet seeks to create is
a mythical space, from which the personal and the ideological
have been carefully removed. This mythical space, it may be noted,
belongs not only to the living, but also to the dead and the unborn.
In the lyric poem, place is, in a sense, nothing less than a matrix
upon which all time may be mapped: there can be no distinction,
here, between the living and the dead, both exist as part of the
continuum which the lyric celebrates and makes, for a moment,
visible.
Language
The sense of community, (that is, of belonging
to a place), is cemented by language. In my own country of birth,
(a country I left as a child, and to which I have only recently
returned), the importance of language in determining the sense
of self, and of community, has become a central political and
aesthetic consideration during this century. It is not a new phenomenon:
Norwegians, for example, passed through a similar phase, in their
progress towards full nationhood. A specific landscape and way
of life gives rise to a specific language or dialect: Scots have
found that English is insufficient to describe the land in which
they live and, given the fact that Gaelic was deliberately eradicated,
as a matter of policy, by the English, the people of Scotland
rely on Scots - which some would describe as a language in itself,
while others would define it as a dialect - to delineate their
world. The use of dialect is, of course, a political act at present,
in a country where the people s sense of belonging was deliberately
undermined by another, dominant culture, (England), a culture
which for centuries denied the validity of Scots speech, insisting
that the only language we could use to describe and define our
place in the world was English. The English rulers and landowners
decided that Scots - or, indeed, Gaelic - was inadequate to the
task, that it was vulgar and crude, lacking in the necessary finesse.
As recently as 1994, a Scotsman was fined for contempt of court,
after using the word Aye instead of Yes , when swearing an
oath in a Scottish court, (presided over, it must be said, by
an English judge). Scots became aware that, no matter how faithfully
we believed in a given world, the world we inhabited
was determined by the way we described it.
Thus, the common experience of Scots, till relatively recently,
was that a Scots language description of the world was necessarily
inferior to an English language description. A good illustration
of this sentiment can be found in William McIlvanney s novel,
Docherty. Here, the younger Docherty, Conn, is being disciplined
by a teacher for fighting in the school playground:
What s wrong with your face, Docherty?
Skint ma nose, sur.
How?
Ah fell an bumped ma heid in the sheuch,
sur.
I beg your pardon?
Ah fell an bumped ma heid in the sheuch,
sur.
I beg your pardon?
In the pause Conn understands the nature
of the choice, tremblingly, compulsively, makes it.
Ah fell an bumped ma heid in the sheuch,
sur.
The blow is instant. His ear seems to
enlarge, is muffled in numbness. But it s only the dread of tears
that hurts. Mr Pirrie distends on a lozenge of light which mustn
t be allowed to break. It doesn t. Conn hasn t cried.
That, Docherty, is impertinence. You
will translate, please, into the mother-tongue. 5
Conn duly recants, and is duly punished.
A bright child, who has enjoyed school till now, he begins to
understand his brothers contempt for the world of learning,
mediated as it is through the English language. Mr Pirrie s attitude
is that of many of his time, a man who has bettered himself, who
saw his own father as a pig walking upright , who can say things
like, No wonder Livingstone left Blantyre. Africa was an easier
proposition. Later Conn makes a list of words in Scots and their
equivalents in English. He soon fills a side of paper. Then:
He didn t start on the other side because
he now wanted to write things that he couldn t find any English
for. When something sad had happened and his mother was meaning
that there wasn t anything you could do about it, she would say,
ye maun dree yer weird. When she was busy she said she was
saund-papered tae a whuppet. Pit a raker oan the fire. Hand-cuffed
tae Mackindoe s ghost. A face tae follow a flittin . If
his father had to give him a row but wasn t really angry, he
said, Ah ll skelp yer bum wi a tea-leaf tae yer nose bluids.
Conn despaired of English. Suddenly, with the desperation
of a man trying to amputate his own infected arm, he savagely
scored out all the English equivalents. On his way out of school,
he folded his grubby piece of paper very carefully and put it
in his pocket. It was religiously preserved for weeks. By the
time he lost, he didn t need it.6
I ve spent some time on this passage
because it illustrates one of the quandaries of Scots - a people
who prize education and learning, a people known, for example,
for their technological skill. On the one hand, there is the desire
to better oneself , a desire driven by poverty and isolation;
on the other, a stubborn - even, as above, compulsive - will to
assert one s own cultural and linguistic identity. With more
recent literature in Scotland, I would argue that that desire
is at the fore of the enterprise, either in the direct use of
the Scots language, or in a concern with specific aspects of Scottish
landscape and culture. This can be seen in Duncan MacLean s marvellous
description of the game of curling in Blackden, or in the explorations of Scottish myth undertaken by many of the
poets, such as Kathleen Jamie, W.N. Herbert and Robert Crawford.
More importantly, the lesson of the Scots experience is that any
attempt to deny a specific culture and language is, in effect,
an assault against all culture, all language.
In my own case, loss of the Scots language coincided with
the loss of the landscape it described. Another way in which Scots
have traditionally bettered themselves is by way of migration:
my father, with only limited employment opportunities in Scotland,
moved south, into the camp, as it were, of the linguistic enemy,
to find better-paid employment in England. Many Scots moved further
afield: to Canada and the United States, to Australia and New
Zealand. A whole separate paper could be written on the effects
of this migration, (or on the combined effect of Scots and Irish
migration), on the literature and music of those countries. Oddly
enough, while they made every effort to integrate with the cultures
in which they found themselves, migrant Scots were freer to express
themselves culturally than those who remained in Scotland. Only
in the last seventy years, perhaps, beginning with Hugh MacDiarmid,
has there been a conscious, political movement to renew, or perhaps,
revive, Scots as the language of poetry. Alongside this movement,
there has been an increasing interest in creating poems of place
that describe the real Scotland, (and not the Romantic, Monarch
of the Glen , heather and tartan Scotland of Queen Victoria s
fancy). A marvellous example of such poetry is Robert Crawford
s Scotland:
Glebe of water, country of thighs and
watermelons
In seeded red slices, bitten by a firthline
edged
With colonies of skypointing gannets,
You run like fresh paint under August
rain.
It is you I return to, mouth of erotic
Carnoustie,
Edinburgh in helio. I pass like an insect
Among shoots of ferns, gloved with pollen,
intent
On listing your meadows, your pastoral
Ayrshires, your glens
Gridded with light. A whey of meeting
Showers itself through us, sluiced from
defensive umbrellas.
Running its way down raincoat linings,
it beads
Soft skin beneath. A downpour takes us
At the height of summer, and when it is
finished
Bell heather shines to the roots,
Belly-clouds cover the bings and slate
cliffs,
Intimate grasses blur with August rain.7
Landscape and the maps of childhood
Crawford s poem speaks of us , and
somehow suggests a communal experience of Scotland - an intimate
, erotic experience. This commonality should not, however,
be confused with the idea of social existence. Indeed, we might
oppose the communal to the social in this context: forgetting
the ways in which right-wing ideologists have used the concept
of community , (and, in fact, if the lyric has any political
function, it is to redeem language from the ideological uses to
which it is put), we might say that the communal is what we
experience as a group of like-minded individuals, whereas the
social is what we experience as an undifferentiated mass, for
example, as voters, or workers, or citizens. The communal is the
space where we belong; the social a negotiated arena of structured
transactions, modified by courtesy and a sense of propriety. Members
of a community can be seen as a network of extended kin; members
of a society, as a gathering of self-interested individuals.
As I have already suggested, the lyric works as a map,
one which is far more detailed in conveying a topology, and the
experience of that topology, than any other. Most importantly,
the lyric poem, where it deals with childhood, raises the most
interesting question of all concerning the world: that of the
person, of the identity of the individual, based upon a notion
of continuity. This question is at the heart of community: what
we know about ourselves is the key to what we know about others:
I am defined by my relationships with what surrounds me, which
may include landscape, or the means of production specific to
my locality, but is also the realm of others, of similarity and
difference, and what we accept as common knowledge . In this
context, the lyric poem sets up a space which anyone can inhabit
- or anyone, at least, with whom the writer imaginatively shares
at least some history or experience, (features, as we have seen,
which might be no more than a rain storm, or a change of seasons).
Thus, a poet like Seamus Heaney can speak, in the poem, In
the Beech,
of
My hidebound boundary tree. My tree of knowledge.
My thick-tapped, soft-fledged, airy listening post.8
At its best, the lyric poem works on this
mythical basis: imaginatively, every child is capable of reliving
the story of Odin, (or of Adam and Eve), by inhabiting, no matter
how tentatively, the tree of knowledge . The experience Heaney
describes here is a universal: the act of tuning in to the world,
of becoming more than ordinarily aware of place, such that a single
tree, somewhere in Derry, can become the centre of the world.
I said at the beginning of this paper that it was my intention
to present, informally, an idiosyncratic view of the lyric poem
of place. I have used more or less random examples from the work
of other poets, to illustrate my view that the work of the lyric
poem is to stop time, in order to root the reader in eternity,
to suggest, in other words, a sense of the continuum of being,
as opposed to the contingencies of everyday existence. The lyric
poem, for me, is the arena in which questions of identity and
time, individuality and communality, seeing and believing, may
be explored, but never resolved. The lyric poem allows me to locate
myself. Most recently, this has involved a return to the place
where I was born, and a re-exploration of the maps of childhood
which I have carried for so long. At the same time, I am forced
to explore the limits of identity: just as I am defined by my
relationships with others and with the land where I live, I am
also threatened by these things: love can reinforce my sense of
myself, or it can invade and undermine me; belonging to a community
can give me a solid foundation, or it can swallow me up. The act
of locating oneself, central to the enterprise of lyric poetry,
must be infinitely repeatable and modifiable, otherwise, the sense
I have of my place in the world becomes a static, meaningless
fact. These tensions inform my most recent
poem sequence, Epithalamium, which I attach as an appendix, and which arose directly from the considerations
of the place-poem outlined here. Perhaps, more than any exegesis,
the poem itself will convey my conviction that, while the poem
of place creates a metaphysical space in which the reader may
move and be, such a space must be hard-won, will demand constant
renewal, and may never be taken for granted.
***
Notes
1Emily Dickinson, c. 1862
2Nick Humphrey: A History of the Mind
3John Burnside: The myth of the twin, Jonathan
Cape, 1994
4David Clewell, Blessings in Disguise,
Penguin Books, 1991
5William McIlvanney, Docherty, Allen and
Unwin, 1975
6William McIlvanney, Docherty, Allen and
Unwin, 1975
7Robert Crawford, A Scottish Assembly,
Chatto and Windus, 1990
8Seamus Heaney, Station Island, Faber and
Faber, 1984
Appendix : Epithalamium
Da kam ich auf einen breiten Weg;
da kam ein Engelein und wollt mich abweisen.
Ach nein! Ich ließ mich nicht abweisen!
Des Knaben Wunderhorn
I Shekinah
I ve heard how the trawlermen
harvest
quivering, sexless fish
from the ache of the
sea;
how they stand on the
lighted decks and hold
the clouded bodies,
watching the absence
form in those buttoned eyes
and thinking of their
children, home in bed,
their songless wives,
made strange by years of dreaming.
I ve heard that seal-folk
drift in from the haar
through open doors,
the cold that strokes
your lips while I am gone,
probing your sleep and
stealing a little warmth
to mimic love
- so, driving back, it
s always a surprise
that coming home is only
to the given:
old gardens in Lochgelly,
thick with privet;
still-pools of oil and
silt at Pittenweem;
lights on the Isle of
May; the low woods
filling with salted rain
beyond Markinch.
It s always a surprise:
the stink of neeps;
the malt-spills of autumn
fields, where floodlit tractors
labour and churn;
the last few miles of
wind and scudding clouds,
or starlit silence, hung
around the house,
as vivid as the angel
who attends
all marriages.
Its shimmer on our bed
is subtle, but it keeps
us to itself,
learning the make-believe
of granted love,
and this is all we know,
an angel s gift:
that weddings are imagined,
love s contrived
while each of us has
one more tale to tell,
the way you feel the
turning of the tide
beneath the house, or
somewhere in the roof,
or how I sometimes linger
on the stairs,
listening for nothing,
unconvinced,
less husband than accomplice
to the dark,
beguiled by the pull
of the moon
and the leylines of herring.
II Heimweh
Remembering the story
of a man
who left the village
one bright afternoon,
wandering out in his
shirt sleeves and never returning,
I walk in this blur of
heat to the harbour wall,
and sit with my hands
in my pockets, gazing back
at painted houses, shopfronts,
narrow roofs,
people about their business,
neighbours, tourists,
the gaunt men loading
boats with lobster creels,
women in hats and coats,
despite the sun,
walking to church and
gossip.
It seems too small, too
thoroughly contained,
the quiet affliction
of home and its small adjustments,
dogs in the backstreets,
barking at every noise,
tidy gardens, crammed
with bedding plants.
I turn to the grey of
the sea and the further shore:
the thought of distance,
endless navigation,
and wonder where he went,
that quiet husband,
leaving his keys, his
money,
his snow-blind life.
It s strange how the ones who vanish
seem weightless and clean,
as if they have stepped away
to the near-angelic.
The clock strikes four.
On the sea wall, the boys from the village
are stripped to the waist
and plunging in random pairs
to the glass-smooth water;
they drop feet first,
or curl their small, hard bodies to a ball
and disappear for minutes
in the blue.
It s hard not to think
this moment is all they desire,
the best ones stay down
longest, till their friends
grow anxious, then they
re-emerge
like cormorants, some
yards from where they dived,
renewing their pact with
the air, then swimming back
to start again. It s
endlessly repeatable, their private game,
exclusive, pointless,
wholly improvised.
I watch them for a while,
then turn for home,
made tentative, half-waiting
for the day
I lock my door for good,
and leave behind
the smell of fish and
grain, your silent fear,
our difficult and unrelenting
love.
III After the storm
The wind has sealed our
house with a thin
layer of dust;
study the landing windows
and you ll find
tiny particles of leaf
and shell,
insect bodies, crystals
of salt and mica.
The radio s playing;
you ve put the kettle on
and, standing in your
winter coat and gloves,
you listen to that song
you ve always liked
the one about love.
Somewhere outside, in
the gradually stilling world
a bus has stalled, the
driver
turning the engine, over
and over again,
and someone s dog is
barking at the noise,
guarding its phantom
realm of bricks and weeds.
All over Fife, the roads
are blocked with fallen
trees and stranded cars,
the tide keeps washing
wreckage to the shore,
splints of timber, fishnets,
broken toys.
This wind has blown for
days across the fields,
so now the silence feels
unnatural,
as if the storm is what
we really need,
the sound of it, its
small, forensic pleasures,
ribbons of silt or birchseed
in the hall,
a feather on the bedroom
windowsill,
and what we might discover
of ourselves
and one another, as the
night begins.
So much that moves around
us in the dark
is ours: the smallest
shiver in the hedge
a knowledge we have waited
years to learn,
and something come inside,
in that one
moment, when you hold
the door ajar,
more than a gust of rain,
more than the wind,
more than the Halloween
ghosts we might imagine.
Those animals that figure
on the walls,
those creatures we imagine
on the stairs
are real, and we must
give them shapes and names,
feed them with blood
and salt, fix them a bed,
make shift, make good,
allow them this possession.
IV Borders
A mile inland, foxes
begin.
We see them working the
fields
like patient farmers,
hunting for rabbits and
voles
behind the dunes,
aware of us as strange,
peripheral,
almost unreal.
By
now we belong
to the sea,
to lights on the firth
and the sifting
of water and sand.
Our dreams are all of
fish we cannot name,
slivers of ice or metal
in the nets,
mackerel shedding their
scales and becoming
children, like the creatures
who appear
when we sprinkle a handful
of salt
on a dying fire,
figments of longing,
ghosts from the shriven
past.
A mile inland, the guard-dogs
and wintered cattle
know nothing of tides;
people go out at dawn,
to taste the earth
that clings to their
walls and their houses,
pinning them to transience
and loss,
gaps in the kirkyard,
the lifelong remoteness of stars.
Out here, it seems
the harbour never changes:
cormorants; gulls; the
same boats moored by the wall,
Gemini, Sapphire,
Reaper, Lucky Strike.
Nothing s impermanent
here, where nothing
is ever untouched by
the wind, or the salted rain;
though our dreams can
recur for weeks, they will still remain
unknowable, repeated
in the dark
as everything s repeated:
love; regret;
the lights across the
water, drawing in
like friendly animals
we might have known
from somewhere else,
some childhood we have lost
and turn to one another
to renew
with questions, dares,
evasions, hunted looks.
V Alchemy
We have to drive the
length of Fife to work,
moving from sunlight
to frost, from brightness to fog,
each fence post and wind-thrawn
tree
familiar as a road-sign
or a steeple.
This is the journey we
ll make
all winter,
snow on the roofs, the
street trees dusted with salt
like Nativity angels;
the land around us silent
as a trap;
roads washed with light,
pewits and crows in the fields,
the schoolhouse clock
suspended in mid-air,
white-faced, exact,
like something achieved,
then forgotten.
This is the winter we
ll learn
again and again,
like alchemy, not turning
lead to gold, but finding
ways to persist, to go
on for no good reason,
choosing our landmarks,
finding the best way home.
Meanwhile, the road is
clear: the gardens and hedges
glitter with dew;
yewberries melt and leave
their fleshly stains
on cinder paths and flagstones
in the park;
and here, in the lane,
behind the Catholic church,
a litter of small, gold
apples, newly-fallen,
wet with thawglass
after last night s frost
- crab-apples, worthless
and bright
in the morning sun,
like something that might
have been left behind
to signal a transmutation.
We ll spend a lifetime
finding useless gold,
and learning how to read
it as a sign:
the angel we ve imagined
in our path,
a stain on the daylight,
as close as I am to you,
closer by far, and far
more dangerous.
VI The house by the sea
The light is angelic and black,
the waves lap the harbour wall
like a form of laughter,
salt-laughter, drawn from the depths,
like the names of fishes.
At night, on the swaying deck, in
the singing wind,
the trawlerman will find himself
alone,
forgetting his thoughts, aware of
the moving dark,
and listening to something he can
hear,
he knows must be imagined.
When he turns
to call out to his neighbour, no
one s there;
but something he saw through the
rain, a face, a wing,
will haunt him for years,
the way it shone like home,
so far at sea.
Yet home belongs at sea: that tang
of salt,
that smell of flesh and rain
- what little we know
of houses, we have learned
from sirens: how to walk our new-made
lawns,
singing the names of flowers like
a spell
to make them true,
cornflower, lily, sea-holly, rhododendron,
roses for scent and colour, yew
for its fruits,
tubers and pistils, seed-pods and
sacs of nectar.
What little we know of houses, we
achieve
against the wind, the motion of
the tides,
the pebbles and pockmarked stones
we bring indoors
at random, for no good reason, and
perhaps
against our wills.
The day is angelic; black; but we
have fashioned
circles of grey against the coming
light,
and sit at home, pretending to be
safe,
aware of the siren calling in the
bay,
the voice that only enters through
the gaps
we leave in this invention of a
life,
but enters still, to part us from
ourselves
and one another: creatures from
the sea
who know how long before the tide
returns.
VII Signs
I want to plant the garden
with Forsythia;
not for its busy flowers,
the strident
yellows fading to clusters
of watered cream,
and not for the coarse-haired
leaves
that follow, like a clumsy
afterthought;
it s just that I d
have a sign
to augur spring,
to come in from the garden,
where I ve stood
hanging the wash, or
watching the sky for rain
and tell you:
the Forsythia s in bloom.
I want to plant the beds
with Chionodoxa,
Narcissus poeticus, Iris
reticulata,
lacecap hydrangeas, peonies,
Meconopsis,
so nothing will be missed:
the smallest change,
blossom-break, first-fruit,
leaf-fall,
coming snow.
I want to know when every
lily blooms,
to read our garden like
a favourite book
and find you, as you
step in from the heat,
clouded with pollen,
scented with grain and sap;
to know you as the locals
know
the names of fields and
long-abandoned wells,
gossip from way back,
the best place for sloes,
or apples.
I want to step out at
night, when you re asleep
and sit beside the pool,
watching the fish:
stars on the water, the
orange carp hanging in pairs
as if they meant to mirror
one another,
making a game of likeness,
matching
shadow with shadow; the
patterns of colour and scale
echoed in the water as
they glide,
so separate, so bright
within their world,
plugged into one tight
current of tension and sound,
and only a notion of
difference by which
to flicker apart, and
tell themselves
one from another.
VIII Beholding
As morning moves in from
the firth
I m sitting up awake,
a mug of tea
fogging the window, the
bones of my hands and face
shot with insomnia s
delicate, lukewarm needles.
You re still asleep.
Your hair is the colour of whey
and your hand on the
pillow is clenched, like a baby s fist
on a figment of heat,
or whatever you ve clutched in a dream,
and I suddenly want to
ask
your forgiveness, for
something deliberately
cruel in the way I see,
in the way
all seeing could become:
too hard, too clear,
refusing to find something
more than the cool of morning.
It s Halloween; if only
because the dead
will come all afternoon
to walk the streets
in faded hats and 1950s
coats,
or gather by the harbour
after dark
watching for lights beyond
the lights we know,
their eyes like the eyes
of seals, their faces
meltwater blue, as if
they had surfaced through ice,
I want to go outside
and gather
buckets of rain-washed
apples, scabs of leaf,
a handful of broken coal,
or a yellowed stump
of spindlewood, to feed
the kitchen fire,
then watch, as it dwindles
to ash
by late afternoon;
or wander all day in
the kirkyard, reading the names
on strangers graves:
their plots laid side by side
with those they loved
and hated, those they feared;
friends who betrayed
them; children who watched them die.
It s what they meant
by coming to this place
and choosing to remain,
though decades fastened their hands
to kindling and wire,
and the dampness that seeped through the walls
all winter long.
Now, suddenly, you re talking in your sleep,
your face on the pillow
like one of those paper masks
we used to make in school,
for Halloween,
talking to someone you
ve dreamed, while your white hands
fasten on something fragile
or easily lost,
a strand of hair, a ring,
a stranger s arm,
the promise you have
to remember, that brings us home.
