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.