Between the stern, dark-towering,
cloud-powered doom-engines
that are the mountains of Wester Ross
in bad weather
(whatever gods reside there
are sore displeased)
and the glittering distant Isle of the Elect
(where no optimism survives
the rebuke of a thousand pulpits,
and hope is not suffered lightly,
while pessimism is confirmed
by the eternal recurrence of disaster,
and the concatenation of catastrophes),
upon the Minch I find
my disgruntled, turbulent maritime muse,
stalking the deck among the refugees
from the nausea tormenting passengers
in the car ferry lounge below.
Swift wave-smith winds hammer
and twist a grey sea of stiff annealing lead
with ten thousand blows upon its bruised surface,
beaten like a sheet of tortured metal.
Wind-mute men crouch and curl up and hide,
lung-curdled and bereft of breath,
all air gust-snatched by the grasping gale,
and wait to retreat ashore to homes
where they are condemned to share tea,
stewed since morning,
with their wives,
to dilute each other's unique insanity
in miserable milky sweet matrimony,
in houses slackly lashed together
by half-finished roads
to form haphazard townships
upon the sodden turf
that is both ground to men
and roof
to some vast subterranean ocean
that heaves and hurls
our little world on its back,
a sea kept in the dark,
still ignorant of the firmament's division
by a now absent deity long ago,
who, it is rumoured,
once had good intentions towards this land,
so the old men say,
despite this soggy Hebridean
rodeo of the waves.
An imperfect balance is struck
in this listing lop-sided world.
The wisdom of all women
is outweighed by one man's folly,
and everyone is a widow of stupidity.
I tell myself this heave and sway,
and not the sea, causes my nausea,
and race my stomach to the heads.
I sink my breakfast in the porcelain bowl.
Eden was a glass in which God saw his image.
I look into this mirror but see Him not,
just a face I wouldn't tire of punching.
My God devised for me a cage of blood,
with arteries and sinews for its bars,
appetites for shackles, nerves
like long coils of electrified barbed wire
around the perimeter of sense.
With mossy tombstone teeth I eat
the fair renown of all my ancestors,
corrupting it with addiction and disgrace,
and grudgingly to my children I bequeath
the cherished myths by which we used to live,
debunked, worth nothing anymore,
and wish them luck.
Gulls loiter on the wing like wet vultures,
the wind assisting their nonchalant levitation.
The ship's nose scents a hint of coast
in the mist its prow penetrates with conquistador malice,
splitting the blood-black sea with land-lust haste:
not land, but a place
where the water's fluidity is attenuated,
begins to be more firmly bound by roots
and blocked by rocks,
starts to suffer some sort of impediment.
There is no coast, there is only a place where,
gradually, by imperceptible increments,
one becomes aware that the water
has stopped moving in waves
and has started seeping
through your shoe leather
and soaking your socks instead,
this desert of water a crucible of monotheism
as much as the arid nomad-sprinkled sands of Araby,
for a god we presume to honour with word and deed,
but it is not possible to be the one who honours him most,
only the one who dishonours him least,
in this place.
The pointlessness
of the sudden outburst of a car alarm
in the confines of the mezzanine deck of a car ferry
competes with a mad but persistent piper on the prow.
He attempts the elaborate ornamentation
he hopes will transform his chanter from wood to silver,
and bring a long lost eagerly sought straw
within his imbecile clutches at last,
but cold fingers, neglect of practice,
lack of basic knowledge, and a hangover,
leave him with an inert stick of wood in his hands.
No spells are cast by this wand,
and his grace notes are strewn to the wind,
lost, to be chased by it among the ripples
that fleetingly adorn the slopes
of the larger waves.
This is my element, this tempest, mine, and I am in it!
There is no achievement worth celebrating
that is not futile and unappreciated by men.
Everything else vain.
Everything else is politics,
the grace and favour of the damned,
and provokes a greater nausea in me
than a walk on deck can dispel,
and the storm will take it all.
It was an error of the ancients
that the water's surface was a membrane,
an interface,
between our world and the other,
and that kings could be made
by ritual murder and rebirth
in its depths.
There is no clear boundary
between there and here:
any membrane that could form,
and any veil that could be drawn,
is dissolved in the mist;
and in its rage the storm punishes the sea
for the deception it perpetuates
by its disingenuous offer of a surface.
Sin is the only mirror left by God
in which to find our truest selves.
We stand before it paralysed by the beauty
and the horror of our imperfections,
remaining a mystery to ourselves
in all other respects,
discovering beauty in the luxury of sin,
unmitigated by any mere necessity,
overwhelming and destroying us
in our own inexcusable reflection.
But the sea will twist and bend it
and threatens to save us from ourselves
with a dark and irreversible baptism
in its depths.
It is in our scorn for that salvation
that we are human.
Landfall is found at last in steerage bay,
where an eagle once brought its cargo of grief.
From there I ply a quivering path across the Lewis
of the dals and vals and vats and bosts
our viking forebears left us.
Dimly through a deception of mist
I see Muirneag's low deflated dome,
near yet remote,
like an understated, quietly spoken punchline,
the flattened Fuji of north Lewis,
the collapsed Kailash of Barvas.
This crossing is not from one place to another.
My route does not take me
from the silent trenches of Passchaendale
twisting like arteries of mud along the Western Front
to the abandoned peat banks by the ruins of Dun Borve
which the fallen of that war used to cut,
before they exchanged their peat iron
for a trenching spade,
and exposed their marrow to artillery
instead of putting the pith of their labour on the fire;
this path is not between the bullet's scream
of which Murdo Macfarlane of Melbost sang
and the goose and oyster-catcher
that make their nest within earshot of his home;
I do not make a journey from the red poppies of Flanders
to the white bog cotton of the Barvas Moor,
and though I sound the shallows with my words
they cannot reach the mystery of heartache
that lies within the depths over which I pass.
I recall, as a youth I lay at night on the deck of a yacht,
moored in some port of Ithaca, beneath an Ionian sky,
waiting for a homecoming long since celebrated in song,
listening to a halyard beat against tthe mast in the breeze,
reflecting on my compounded misfortunes,
my lonliness that left me with no companion but the world,
that childhood friend I was warned against by adults
concerned only with my safety, not my happiness,
the true second self one finds only in the wilderness,
torn from me by those whose best intention
blinded them to mine. I ached
to find someone to share my misery, someone
to corroborate the mysteries of solitude I had penetrated,
someone to show the emeralds I had plucked
from the walls of forbidden caverns whose breath
had blighted the lives of less sincere intruders,
in whose recesses nightmares whelped monsters
for me to train.
And as the halyard tapped its parody of Morse
with every passing gust I formed a plan.
I deny myself the element I breathe, my love,
because it drowns you. The air you need
is what our journey here is meant to reach.
I was in Thrace with Orpheus at the dawn of time.
I saw him, in feline form, reconnoitre his prey,
and pause. I saw him push back his claws,
and tease a tendon gently from his wrist,
and pull it tight upon a bough of oak,
bowed low, an oak upon one knee,
lyre-like, waiting on him. I saw him, as a man,
strum it with his more tender talon
and his caress inflicted a deeper wound
than time alone could heal, were there enough,
a wound that cut through time from then to now,
slit open centuries. Peeling it apart, peering inside,
I found the mouth-wound that he made
open wide with a song unique to every ear
and every hearing, and this was mine.
Everything is happening everywhere all at once,
but the world constrains my encounter with it:
the time it takes to cross this space,
to slip across this narrow sleeve of sea,
is a limited experience
of an infinite instantaneous and eternal place
and life and death are now just points of view
from which to embrace or ignore
my own insignificance within it,
and the wind finally blows the weather through
and suddenly I become aware of sunlight,
and the sky-bright shining quill sweep of Loch Seaforth
leaves the full stop of the Clisham as the end of my tale,
over which inky cloud shadows splash and spill and slide,
and raises the ramparts of North Harris, patrolled by eagles,
to protect the little miracle of Scarista and her gentler muse
from my clumsy efforts at praise. I would be content
to sing of Bosta and of Valtos and Dalmore
but for the need to visit Rodel and commune
with the shade of Mairi Nighean Alasdair
and confess the inadequacy of my song.
Every connection missed or made,
every moment of relief or despair,
every path meets in this present,
from Ithaca to Ballantrushal.
We are all connected by the past,
a consequence of all its grief and joy,
every battle won or lost,
every ship that made port
or sank in sight of shore
even while the kettle sang upon the hearth in Borve
and women waited, not knowing the cruelty
with which the sea would bring their waiting to an end,
and even the innumerable and nameless who perish unmourned
which is all of us, eventually.
Every toast that I can raise, every hymn of praise,
must be to both victory and defeat,
for nothing is in vain,
and I sing this song upon a lyre of flotsam,
I apply my harp key to the knots twisting the grain of driftwood
washed up on the beach at Europie and Tolsta
and blinded by being able to see,
I close my eyes and summon memory,
and capture the sun's slow detonation
that illuminates all our days
that rest between the darknesses
we stitch together with the light of all our voyages.
Bays of the west imbibe the sun
and overflow with beauty, where green and blue
are found at ease in friendly disputation
about the precise, appropriate Gaelic term
for each of the hues one borrows from the other
and claims as its own,
and light itself is a children's tug of war
between unruly colours too subtle for perception.
The bays lay pages of paradise open for us
where the eternal present of play among the waves
confounds all the notions of past and future
that I brought with me,
and all my baggage is devastated by its irrelevance
to the simple companionship our children discover
with the sea and sky and sun upon the beach.
The winds are hoarse with joy now,
and like Cortez upon a peak at Darien,
I discover not only that I was wrong
about everything I thought I knew,
but that the sum of all my errors
is itself as trivial and vanishing,
as the dwindling pyres of sunset
that illuminate the land of eternal youth
beyond the horizon.
