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lily

In the heart of winter, white lilies are exploding quietly in my rough-walled room. Anthers thick with pollen hang heavily around an erect glistening stigma, like lusty vulvas, scattering their russet dust everywhere. The sexes are reversed in this case, the stigma being the female part rising from the bulb of the womb. The petals and sepals peel back like inside-out labia, thrusting their sex shamelessly into the world.

Even just looking at them, I feel myself spreading open; and the scent, rich and heady and sensuous.

Oh, lily of the winter morning, lily of the winter warming.

heart of a lily

Pontycymer, Cwm Garw, South Wales
2nd February 2014

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winter blossom

tree blossom

White crocuses poking through grass – the first flowers! A few steps later, pale blossoms leaning skywards on a tree. It’s raw out today though and doesn’t feel like spring: the winter is blossoming.

I’ve had white lilies in my room intermittently these last few months too. Despite their summer scent, they feel like winter flowers, opening secretly in the season’s dimness, and softening our hard stone edges in the absence of soft blooms of snow.

White flowers in the heart of winter. The crocuses look sort of virginal, like the snowdrops will when they bloom on the river banks beneath the trees. But lilies are obscene.

Walking by the Kelvin, Glasgow, Scotland
28th January 2014

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touchstone

Red is a touchstone, a transporter to all times and places.

This red door in a back lane in Pontycymer reminds me of a red door which I used to pass in a back alley in Montreal. These red leaves in the park remind me of the red leaves I used to sift through in Montreal gardens after the death of a dear friend.

Red is threshold and gateway, entrance and passage. The red door I used to pass in the hidden lanes of Montreal had ‘possibility’ graffiti-sprayed on it in blue paint. Red is for participation, for being there. Red is the belly beating, the heart moving through.

red-painted gate

Cwm Garw, South Wales
22nd January 2014

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a rain of light

A rain of light – a fine white veil sweeping along the sea horizon like a swishing curtain against a backdrop of slate grey. There must be a gap in the sky to the south but it’s gone now and the illuminated downpour becomes absorbed into the wall of cloud behind it. The tide is far out and the beach is flat and gleaming and, as I walk along the lacy hem of the water, I remember another rain of light.

That one was land-based but equally short-lived. It didn’t pass past but showered over, tiny particles of water scattering around me like myriad stop-motion gems.

I was pottering about in the corner of an overgrown stone-wall enclosure beside a ruined cottage on a green hillside up behind Fairy Glen, behind Uig, on Skye. I was standing in the slim shelter of a silver birch and the light beneficently showered down in the late evening summer sunshine. It was a sudden refreshment, gone as quickly as it arrived. But it was utterly beautiful. For those few moments, light was domain and dominion, and relief.

Coney Beach, Porthcawl, South Wales
18th January 2014

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let it begin

Season of old friends and new fires.

The sun was level with me at 11am when I rose, on the first floor on the high hill of Fergus Drive. Now, in the span of short hours, it’s fading, and the little fairy lights and Christmas globes that are strung along the mantelpiece glow softly. I couldn’t find the switch to turn them off in the daylight so they’ve been on steadily, but now as the room gathers darkness they emerge.

The streetlamp right outside the middle pane of the bay window begins to shine that gentle pre-orange red, and each of the droplets of condensation on the window glow. It’s only quarter past three but we are gathering in. My old dear friend will ring soon and we will meet, with his new love, and talk and eat and draw near.

Glasgow is always like this: an old city in a new night, with the rain picking up and the wind stiffening and the streetlights growing to their full orange strength.

Let it begin!

West End, Glasgow, Scotland
1st January 2014

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evidence

We never see the sun itself but evidence of it – slanted casts across the brackened red hillsides, bright incandescences behind mists of white cloud, small patches of blue on the western horizon, or a gold-green stripe across the back of the low hills of the north coast, ahead.

When we get there the sun comes out; a rainbow doubles and disappears. The smashing waves are greener in their curl than I’ve ever seen, the beach smoother; the rocks holding it down are the heaviest black. This is the northern limit of our country. Everything begins.

Durness, Sutherland, Scotland
26th November 2013

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storm light

It’s amazing light. Storm light. Smoking yellow with a grey underglow, and moving moving moving. The seagulls are loving it – hanging whitely in the thick air above the masts and the jetty, wheeling down by the waves’ feet beyond the breakwater. The waves in the bay are whipping into whitecaps, and out past the entrance of the loch the horizon is foaming white and crashing higher than the islands that guard it. White! White! The sea’s frothing at the mouth and the sky’s whipping up a frenzy! Gates of rain are sweeping across the water, side to side, long grey curtains lashing.

The massive white fishing boat that trawled in here late last night now gleams in a stately manner out round the breakwater, and a small local rustbucket drifts in. What a night it was in the wild west wind! Hail thrashing against the portholes as the fronts moved in like horizontal waves, and all the boats creaking and straining at their chains and ropes. The harbour men were down in the afternoon, trussing us up fast to the cleats, and all night the masts clanked and the lines yanked and rattled, and the old heavy oak boat in front of us slapped the water and groaned. But this morning we are all still here in our floating dock cradles.

The wind has become more northerly though, and I could barely face against it just now, rounding the corner from the harbour, trying to reach the Lochinver Mission for a cup of tea after my run out to the headland. Walls of rain were smashing in across the bay and the wind was blasting the rain on the ground in sudden sheets towards me – it moved in wet flashes under my feet – like walking on lightning.

The Mission is in some shelter from the sea, however, and sitting inside with soaking thighs, a shining red face, and a cup of tea before me, I notice the trees outside are barely moving and – for a moment – a soft rainbow appears, glows, and vanishes.

But in my seaward ear I hear the wind still howling.

Lochinver, Assynt, Scotland
18th November 2013

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leaving

crimson Japanese maple leaves

Life changes after death. It becomes less about what you do than what you notice; and after you died it was the tiniest things which sustained me.

It was a sudden fall – within days of your death there were leaves on the ground – and out walking I’d find myself rescued by a bright glimpse of colour. I found consolation in all the hues but solace specifically in red, as if it matched something in me, as you did. I became obsessed by the search for the perfect crimson, spending wet mornings on my knees, wrist-deep in the fallen foliage, desperately prospecting for a silent, scarlet resolution.

I don’t know if it was the intensity of red that soothed me or its tenderness but it seemed to me then that everything came back to this primary, primal colour. It’s the colour of beginnings – our bloody animal births and the red tips and tinges of vegetation at the beginning of spring, and it’s the colour of glad ends – the rich wooded flame of autumn, the dusty suffusion of sunset. Seasonal and diurnal alteration. It’s the colour of change, the colour of vivacity, the colour of you.

Red became you. A ‘red-headed angel’, someone once called you, and you were: red-headed, red-hearted, red-blooded, red-tongued – and red-threaded, as I now am, dressing myself up in vermilion plumage to write to you. Even now – months after your death – the colour comforts and condenses me. Perhaps the writing does too. After all, we both found solace in words – in delving down, in pulling up, in drawing the truth to the surface and inscribing it there – the live line, the pulsing current. We wrote to keep going, to give ourselves something to hold onto until you broke, a red line of continuity, a red thread of faith.

Bryngarw Country Park, Glamorgan, South Wales / Montréal, Québec, Canada
15th November 2013 / Autumn 2004