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.
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