Monday, 1 February 2016

Callanish



We breathe a diffuse sea in which
                place is distance
                and time is memory. The smoky clouds,
the egalitarian mist,
                swallow the sun,
                inhale it whole,
                and dissolve it in a common lung,
                dispensing a full and even
                persistence of light,
                a gentle and bright
                lingering luminosity of the soul,
and in my pocket I slip secret seconds
                pilfered from under the nose
                of a sleeping spendthrift,
                his urgency undone,
                his mechanism rusted stiff
in the still and briny air. Untethered hours
                stray and disperse.
                over the moor, across the hill.
                The time-herd hides
                behind his beard,
                toying and tinkering
                with the fickle fiction of clocks,
                smiling as their hands exert
                a mutual repulsion,
                abhorring alignment,
disinclined to mend the broken noon,
or collude in the making of any appointment.

Improbable abandoned cars protrude,
                marooned on moors -
                casualties of collisions
                with long vanished hazards,
                mist-melted reefs,
                the oblique obstacles
imagined by men
                who inhabit the blurry
                time-lapse history
                that spills and flows
                over these flat lands and shoals
                dissolving in the mist:
each ruin is a moment's refuge found    
                by a storm-struck shepherd's
                collie-keen sense for shelter;
                random palaces;
                relics of madness;
                corrosion-consumed ferrous carrion
                reverting to its ore.
The long defunct radio responds to a thought touch,
                picks up
                a silent prayer
                from a dead saint's cell
                transmitted across the centuries
                through the dim soul-glow
                to the confines of this other isolation
and beneath the sway
                of the wide and slackening sea
                that surrounds and grips and glides
                and dips and slides against the rocks
                mediating the general simultaneity
                of a world waiting to be noticed
wrecks carry cargoes
                to their doom without detour
                or delay in unknowable ports.

Immersed in the pale milky twilight
                of these Hebrides
in the interstice between
                the rough rock tusks
                and ribs of gneiss
                with veins ingrained
                beneath a crotal rust,
within
                the living stone engine,
                the death-vessel,
where
                tall stone cloud-stilts surround
                a burst open burial mound,
I see
                the effortless and unconscious beauty
                of a lonely swollen full pale Moon
                who has come to earth and lies
                among her fellow stones
                to give birth to the sky
and a slow swirling silent strip-the-willow
                down the crag-lined avenue of ages
                celebrates the confluence
                of stone and memory.
The potter is long dead.
                His orphaned shards
                have long since split and spilled
                the ashes that they held
and foreign fingers
                sift the ancient soil
                to fumble forgotten crowns
                and rummage for cobbles
                dropped and robbed
                and lodged in sheepfold dykes
                more firmly than any tome
                jammed in a bookcase
                in some university library
                that catalogues conjectures
                as futile as fathoms sounded
                in the depthless mist
which yields at last its luminosity to night.

Retrace your steps
                across the dew of stars
                night spreads beneath your feet.
                Hold the past firmly in plain sight:
                life is but a silly pilgrimage
                walked backwards to the light
to this place, now,
                where time in form of child catches us
                turns us within the orbit of his game

                and dances with us upon the moon.

No comments:

Post a Comment