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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

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winterlight

cold light on cold water
clear stream rushing over our bones

*

winterlight
lowglow
sheltersun

Nant Gelli Wern / Stream of the Alder Grove

Nant Gelli Wern, Cwm Garw, De Cymru / Stream of the Alder Grove, Garw Valley, South Wales
28th October 2013

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three line poems

                                                    a handful of words
                                              a palmful of poems
                                                         a bookful of leaves

 

Japanese maples leaves in poetry book

Bryngarw Country Park, South Wales
14th October 2013

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the field

There’s an idyllic green field that I’ve returned to now the summer is ending.

It sits draped over the hill behind our house like a soft saddle. From above it looks as if it’s floating, suspended over the tightly arrayed rows of the village, held beneath the bare bleached shoulders of the valley head.

The valley climbs steeply, with the village pitted deep in the cleft of its slow slim river, and the field hangs halfway up, smoothly swathed over a gentle hollow in the hillside, like a dear green meadow of the mind.

I once read a quote in a Kenneth White book about the mind of a deer being a green place and the image has stayed with me. I imagine a quiet clearing in a forest, filtered by leaves, a cool greenness gathering.

The field doesn’t have the close-hid intimacy of woodland, with its winding trails and swift wildness. The field is domesticated, grazed upon alternately by ewes and their half-grown lambs or a few highland cows and a dark brown horse. It’s open pasture, where you can lay out your thoughts and bathe them in the flooding sunlight and sit with them there; or lay your whole self out and rest, while the light illuminates the veridical carpet and the world, for a moment, stays.

Above Pontycymer, Garw Valley, South Wales / Cwm Garw, De Cymru
29th September 2013

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the summer

Assynt seen from the Minch

The summer was blue; blue and spreading, blue and rising, blue and stretching.

The summer slid out onto the sea, gliding through it, when the sea was silken; riding upon it, when the waves swelled cut and grey.

Summer streamed out and lands rose from the sides of it, low and lumpy, tall and hard. We sailed among their fingers, which reached out, raking the waters and holding them down like huge paws of an old stone beast, and we clambered out on their rocky knuckles, stumbling among the feathered grass and fallen walls.

Some lands greeted us with longer arms, which curved around and drew us in gently, with welcoming hills and pale beaches shining like soft promises through the thin drizzle; and when we rowed ashore, the sun flooded us and myriad wildflowers danced behind the sand in the multi-coloured machairs which are the true meadows of heaven.

One group of islands was made of walls – high columns, stacked with seabirds, which stood in a sheltering arc around us, and we spent the night there listening to their story, enchanted.

The summer was blue the day we left the spell of those islands and sailed back over the Minch to the northern mainland. The sun rose early and the wind blew us steadily east until, close to the coast, it dropped beneath the glassy water – and there we were with all the mountains of Assynt arrayed around us – solitaires, circling – rugged and red.

We watched and waited, in the blue bloomed sky, in the pure afternoon, floating on our own reflection, until eventually a small breeze arose and, nudging our sails, blew us quietly home.

It was slow, was fair, our passage through the summer: araf, teg.

Ara’ Deg.

Easy does it, she said.

The Minch, Scotland
14th August 2013