CONTENTS
Preface
“In this foggy, dispute-ridden landscape”
I
The North
Sauchope Links Caravan Park
Crail Autumn
A Plenitude
NO 59981 05825; 56.24324° N, 2.64731° W
Having abandoned his mission . . .
Efforts are made to dissuade him . . .
Evidence of his own cult in Pictland . . .
“Ethernan” likely derived from the Latin . . .
The Desert Fathers
“When Solitude Was a Problem, I Had No Solitude”
Tentsmuir Forest
A Miscalculation
The Spies
Mercenaries Know There’s Always Room for Specialists in the Market
The Meridian
Whose Deaths Were Recorded Officially as Casualties of “The Battle of May Island”
Song
II
NO 59981 05825; 56.24324° N, 2.64731° W
He remembers a friend . . .
Like Cormac Ua Liatháin, he sought . . .
Hostilities were inevitable among the four peoples . . .
Now blood on his lip . . .
Tomorrow, for sure, he will make a start . . .
A vision . . .
He reexamines his practice . . .
A visitation . . .
He enquires of the silence . . .
An Enthusiast
From The Invertebrate Fauna of The Firth of Forth, Part 2, 1881
The Shags, Whose Conservation Status Is “of Least Concern”
“Goodbye to Cockenzie Power Station, a Cathedral to Coal”
A Trawlerman
She Is Buried on the West Braes
White Strangers
Origin Story
Kentigern and the Robin
To the Extent a Tradition Can Be Said to Be Developed; It Is More Accurate to Say It Can Be Clothed in Different Forms
An Unexpected Encounter With He Who Has Been Left Alone To His Perils
A Retreat
Song
III
Song
A Lesson
The Intercessors
Crail Spring
The Sharing Economy
Time Away with the Error
Two Chapters on Ancient Stones
Ancient Remedies with Contemporary Applications Currently in Development
56.1833° N, 2.5667° W
The Isle of May lies just outside the western boundary . . .
Its paved road, which has all the appearance . . .
Having once dwelt at Caiplie, “place of horses” . . .
In a purposeful adoption of an ancient burial site . . .
You Can’t Go Back
Stinging Nettle Appreciation
The Hermits
Clarity
Notes
Acknowledgements
For Michael, Linda, Beth, and Stan
PREFACE
ACKNOWLEDGED AS A site of pilgrimage from antiquity, the Caiplie Caves, on the coast of Scotland’s East Neuk of Fife, are most consistently associated with the hermit Ethernan. The village and church of Kilrenny, which means “church of Ethernan,” are not far away, overlooking the sea. But despite the distribution of Ethernan’s name on carved stones and in dedications, where he appears in the accounts he is often sketched only briefly, in passing. Upon returning from study in Ireland, he may have become the first bishop of Rathin in Buchan. Sometimes conflated with Adrian of May, murdered with his fellow monks during a Viking raid on May Island in 875, Ethernan is also supposed to have been the “Itarnan” who “died amongst the Picts” in 669, as entered in the Annals of Ulster. Though some sources imagine him travelling the Great Glen from Iona to Fife in the 640s, or the popular route from Iona east towards Lindisfarne, his link with Iona cannot be confirmed. A number suggest he was an Irish missionary to Scotland who withdrew to the Caves in the mid-7th century in order to decide whether to commit to a hermit’s solitude or establish a priory on May Island. This choice, between life as a “contemplative” or as an “active,” was not an unusual one to take up among his cohort.
Inconsistencies are not surprising. What is surprising is Ethernan’s poverty of supernatural accomplishments. Fantastic tales of early medieval saints, hermits and martyrs in Britain — their feats of strength, endurance, and clairvoyance, their animal associates, meteorological interventions, and divinely assisted acts of revenge — are enthusiastic and plentiful. Ethernan, meanwhile, is said to have survived for a very long time on bread and water.
Ethernan’s story still wanders outside the archive, resists a final resting place in the ever-expanding facility of the past. And neither are the Caves the past. As John Berger writes, “The past is not for living in,” and the Caves — known locally as the Coves — are very much lived in. Unlike Fillan’s Cave in Pittenweem, no interpretive or preservational infrastructure attends them; there is no key to be acquired at a nearby café. Nor is there even a commemorative plaque, such as the one marking Constantine’s Cave north on the Coastal Path below the Balcomie Links golf club. People still build fires in the caves at Caiplie, drink, and camp there. Alongside crosses carved over centuries, they record their own symbols and advice, political statements, declarations of uncertainty and love.
It is reason and wisdom which take away cares, not places affording wide views over the sea.
— Horace, Epistles I, vi, 25–26
in this foggy, dispute-ridden landscape
thus begins my apprenticeship to cowardice
no leeks sprang where I walked
no stags bore beams for my house
neither am I that type of acute person who leads others into battle
or inspires love
all creatures are in exile, says Augustine, but my defeats feel more literal
and fault-based
will my fulfilment be the fulfilment of an error?
an error at the foundation of my life, an error burning in its stove
and this fear to which, as to a bureaucracy
I am repeatedly referred
it is a weak place to meet oneself
grassed roof, dirt for a bed
I don’t need to tell you what I thought
I
THE NORTH
Where should we find consolation,
dwelling in the north? Amid the stunted
desperate plant life clinging
to its edges, thriving on atmospheric
vengeance or neglect? Of two moods,
fragile and invasive, it gazes out to sea
as its character bends inland.
And why defend our poignant attempts
at agriculture, the gall
of our entrepreneurs? The defining
mid-winter pageants performed
in a somnolent rage? The leisure class
commends the virtues of hard work
above all else, and we labour under
frost-cramped statutes, the black
letters of legislation, in hog-reek
and land-driven slag, middle-aged
from birth and, given our devotion
to slandering this place, illogically
xenophobic. We could as soon move
south as rise above it. Are sympathies
inseparable from what one does
to stay alive? What is a self
but that which fights the cold?
SAUCHOPE LINKS CARAVAN PARK
Gulls up at dawn with swords and shields,
if dawn only in low season, in the week
we can afford. My love, who negotiated with a Silk Cut
in his wheel hand the unfamiliar roundabout
t
o the A915 at Kirkcaldy, sweeps droppings
from the paved deck like an owner, with his whole heart.
He grew old not thinking about himself.
So it follows our vacation home is not ours, but let
by the company on certain conditions, for certain uses
pertaining to a quiet enjoyment of sea views
beyond the lower lots, signed-for with the understanding
our initiative shall likewise be applied
at the company’s discretion.
The dogs we don’t have must be leashed, our wireless
fee charged daily. Here is the rent reminding
tenants they don’t own, interest confirming
for the borrower to whom the principal belongs.
Here is the insurance to tell us we’re not
safe, and here is the loophole which allows it
to not pay. The week he’s scraped together is now his.
My old man, who raises his spirit like a lamp,
collects Stella cans tossed from the raceway
down the hill overwritten with gorse and cow parsley;
and who, discovering the bulb beside the door
burnt out, will, cursing happily, replace it with the spare
I laughed at him for stowing in the glove box.
CRAIL AUTUMN
In a stone village on a stone coast
I tried to convince the storage heaters
to take our relationship to the next level,
spend some of what they’d put away
on me, the rented flat, its walls
three feet thick, stone, and 200 years
older than Canada. What I was
doing there was not to be confused
with doing something. But neither was it
nothing, exactly, and felt necessary,
though hardly a necessity, and so settled
the soot of the subjective over
everything. Objects of my attention
broke, like the day, into simple shapes,
which are the most difficult
to explain. In daylight I’d walk, unless
it rained, then hit the Co-op at 4,
before the working people. Suppers were
less simple than negligent, and under
the duvet I’d ruined with ink, the evening’s
plan turned to Ativan. Panel shows.
A PLENITUDE
Appearing as though they originate in spiritual rather
than material seed, as proof
we don’t know how to properly celebrate
or mourn — bindweed and ox-eye daisy, cranesbill, harebell,
hare’s-foot clover, whose ideology is fragrant
and sticky, the underside of reflection blooming
across centuries. Arguments for and against belief
volunteering in equal profusion.
My many regrets have become the great passion of my life.
One may also grow fond of what there isn’t
much of. Grass of Parnassus —
and when you finally find it, it’s just okay.
But look for lies and you will see them everywhere
like the melancholy thistle, erect spineless herb
of the sunflower family. That the eradication of desire
promotes peace and lengthens life
is time-honoured counsel. Still, you can’t simply wait until
you feel like it. The beauty of the campions,
bladder and sea, the tough little sea rocket,
is their effort in spite of, I want to say, everything
though they know nothing of what we mean
when we say everything; it is a sentiment referring only
to itself. Purple toadflax, common mouse ear,
orchids, trefoils, buttercup, self-heal,
the Adoxa moschatellina it’s too late in the year for,
I can hardly stand to look at them.
And all identified after the fact
but for the banks of wild roses, the poppies you loved
parked like an ambulance by the barley field.
NO 59981 05825; 56.24324° N, 2.64731° W
Landward, the cave mouth conspicuously dark.
Halfway between Anstruther and Crail,
singular in the vicinity. Prominent
calcareous sandstone outcrop on a raised beach
level, short lengths of passage
and as spectacularly weathered as the coexistence
of good and evil, the earth pigments.
Anchor in five metres, taking care to avoid
the numerous creel markers. At half-tide
a dinghy may be hauled out where the reef buffers
flat rocks, though they are sharp
and landing delicate, if land you must.
Wind may complicate return to the boat. Any visit
is a lesson in how quickly conditions change.
Having abandoned his mission,
Ethernan finds the Fife coast
crowded with solitaries
terrible to see, worse to be anywhere near, these vagrants
in search of a hermitage
men and women, mostly men
in rags overworn with larger rags
no one on whom to practice themselves
poisoned by their personalities, speaking pain
without opening the mouth
like vegetable life, but less reliable, huddled in the light
of the blind upstairs, and those are not the lingering odours of Paradise
yet they do seem free from a townie fear
of unfit, unkind, unmarked places, the undistracted measure
my fellow peregrini in self-exile, the form
of ascetic renunciation most available to Irishmen
Efforts are made to dissuade him
from his retreat
dress codes, character disorders
abecedarian hymns of praise
laws
he who does not cut his hair in the Roman manner, must
she who leaves hers uncovered, must not
no consort with pagans, no believing in vampires
can a person be trusted whose principles forbid despair?
I spot the cleric from a distance by his wide sleeves
his minor build’s angle of progress
he looks like someone who sleeps for pleasure
that iron bell a tiresome associate, a bit much
and I will soon be in earshot of his sentences
which exude an ugliness arising in nature
as a mix of banality and abundance
Evidence of his own cult in Pictland exists
in the distribution of carved stones
bearing his name
I can’t be sure now there ever was humility in it
burning the self as though it were a city
believing the past might be destroyed
and remade
we Companions of God appeared, even to ourselves
to experience our visions as actual contests
confronting dragons as did the Child Jesus
conversing with the irritable waters of the Albus Fons
improving on Servanus’ arguments with the devil while striding broad tracts of land
in satisfaction and in duty to the people
to whom we offered evidence of those who lived and died
contrary to nature’s precedents
those blessed by the artifacts claimed special talents
certainly, they seemed to get a lot more done
but the veneration of relics became a trade in relics eventually suggesting
our dear saints possessed, in addition to divine attributes
more than the usual number of working parts
to whom belonged all the blood-soaked cloth?
the surfeit of St. Pancras?
corpses piled up until the whole world was a tomb
death lost its autonomy, strange to say, it sickened
the boundary between place and no-place
no longer firm
it reduced our ability to think metaphorically
we believed the things we said because we said them
and as my colleagues grew incapable
of speaking off-brand, in the middle voice
the temper of my own voice drained away
“Ethernan” likely derived
from the Latin “aeternus,”
or “eternal”
until, finally, all was noise
rage and shame of creatures domesticated by brutality
uncanny beings mechanized under the influence
of austerity’s single truth
and the amphetamine of perpetual conflict
in a region of caves with a hermit in each like worms in cabbages
a vacancy
deep, vibrant compartments, chimney announced by a draft
that spat on the back of my neck
silence its content, its disposition, and generative
as language is generative
no one word reigns
I was shy, as we are before the original and self-evident
it immediately duplicated itself inside me, more than can be used in a lifetime
my first fire ingling in the recesses, I saw the scars
from its many tenants
THE DESERT FATHERS
With or without a bindle of crystal meth
they made their anchorage in Egypt’s
Wadi El Natrun, or the dismantled
Marine Corps training base of Slab City, California,
hard skills in transition, taking losses
and burning, if not with a sensible fire,
in the pride of specialized knowledge.
Snakeman relocates the red diamond rattlesnake
and northern Mojave rattlesnake
from residents’ trailers to his own to live
alongside him with the scorpions and guard dogs;
it’s tough to have riches and not love them.
St. Anthony sold his land, gave the money to
the poor, yet in his Outer Mountain sanctuary cried
I desire peace, but these bad thoughts