Category: water

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there is fine green rain

There is fine green rain* falling in the woods, though at times not so much falling as hovering, resting lightly on the air. It rests, too, on leaves and petals, collecting in the concertinaed goblets of Lady’s Mantle, hanging poised on the lips of the rich yellow blooms of Broom. The open faces of the Dog Roses are studded with perfect transparent globes while the frilly Lungwort on the birches just glistens.

I listen for the sounds of falling—for the soft pattering of rain, the gentle hiss of drizzle—but there’s not even the sound of dripping. All the moisture is suspended, like dew evaporating into mist in the early morning sunlight, although in this case the sun is long risen and well concealed behind cloud.

I walk carefully among the wet bushes and branches as the fine green rain dampens my skin and beads on my curling hair, trying not to disturb the myriad droplets trembling like moments of time on the breathing surface of each living form.

globules of water poised on yellow petals of a bloom of broom

* A line in ‘Forecast’ by Andrew Ogilvie, Shout: Collected Poems from Corbenic Poets, Tippermuir Books

Broom, Culag Wood, Lochinver, Assynt, Scotland
20th June 2026

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downfall

I haven’t wanted the rain to come and wash away our lovely white blanket of snow, but it has its own beauty. The air is still and the raindrops pelt straight down in closely packed parallel lines which are unusually vertical. I stand at my caravan’s wide window and watch them, bouncing off the rounded sandstone copes on the wall or vanishing into the snow in front of me. Something about their straightness and linearity is very appealing, a change from the distracted, dancing drift of the snowflakes or the hard, angular momentum of the hail.

The sound is pleasing too, a precise patterning on the aluminium roof, gentler than the loud battering of the hail, more satisfying than the absent settling of the snow. The rain comes down directly, with thoroughness and vigour, and perhaps it’s that I’ve missed during these six days of snowy abandonment, when roads have been impassable, work delayed, and the world slowed and silenced.

The snow has been beautiful, soothing and serene, but it’s time now to move. It’s time now to wash our eyes and ears and step out.

Lochinver, Assynt, Scotland
8th January 2026

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liquidity

Another day, another city. Edinburgh, the Water of Leith. The bonny brown ribbon running through the city with its familiar metallic smell, the sun gleaming orange in the water. I recall my childhood at the foot of the Pentlands, where the river begins, playing in the parks and on the old railway line that ran alongside it, then, when I worked at the university, exploring the river paths that passed by my small flat in Stockbridge.

As I stroll into Saunders Street, I come upon a former university colleague, now, I discover, a recently retired professor. We discuss some of the people I used to know; she recounts the varied courses they’ve taken. Times and places, times and people. Water carrying it all along. A tear sits on her check, the cool weather she tells me. I feel liquid inside, the river of memory momentarily stopped, welling up, reminding me of its constancy, its resilience, its renewing presence.

Stockbridge, Edinburgh, Scotland
14th November 2024

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autumn

shaking aspen
shivering ripples
we quiver on the cusp

Unnamed lochan at Ardroe, Assynt, Scotland
4th September 2024

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heat

It’s like the sultry summer days when I lived in Montreal, heat so thick your skin’s running with sweat,and all your thirsts want slaking. You’re heavy with desire and you want to do something about it but the sun’s pressing in relentlessly and your will is liquefying and really all you can do is wait: wait for the humidity to build, wait for the humidity to break, and then….

First there’s the thunder – the clap, the flash, the weighted brightness – and then comes the rain. You’re standing out in it, lying out in it, feeling it patter all over your body like a thousand darting tongues; touching, tasting, quenching the heat of you, until you sigh and subside and gratefully dissolve.

Those were the days, and this is one now, although in this case the thunder is a low rumble rather than a violent crash, and the sky isn’t dense purple but medium-grey, and the rain isn’t filling the hot street with warmed flooding water: this is a Scottish summer, more temperate in all its aspects. Yet still the heat comes in, still the rain insists.

Lochinver, Assynt, Scotland
13th June 2023