will not leave me. All burned in body,
in contemplation, as the lonely burn,
a musical state. The brethren assemble
for a meal, or, from the last free place in America
watch the Navy at war games bombing
the Chocolate Mountains,
but Snakeman prefers to exercise his hobbies —
salvaging undetonated shells, pointing
guns at people, antagonizing snowbirds
and short-term RVers communally parked
near the East Jesus Sculpture Garden
and preaching the ethics of solitude.
By vocation or necessity the future transforms
in the heat of the impartial desert.
Tourists and scholars of human interest
from villages along the Nile, or funnelled
through Niland, which the census
grudgingly designates “a place,” seek insight
but wish someone would do something about the trash.
Leonard Knight’s Salvation Mountain beckons
in three-storey robes of multicoloured latex.
He clocked in with a half-bag of cement and some paint
and kept at it for 26 years. But just as Anthony
decamped to his Inner Mountain
so Leonard did to the Eldorado care home,
and even the tattooed hermit of the Isle of Skye
took up a flat in Broadford. A cell
can teach you everything. All it asks is
you give it your mind. Snakeman wars against
the body that would destroy his spirit.
Someday, he says, I will be all flame.
“WHEN SOLITUDE WAS A PROBLEM, I HAD NO SOLITUDE”
Experience teaches, but its lessons
may be useless. I could have done without a few
whose only byproduct is grief;
which, as waste, in its final form,
isn’t good for anything.
A helicopter beating all night above the firth,
a druid shouting astrology outside
the off-licence, will eventually
put the Ambien in ambience.
Our culture is best described as heroic.
Courageous in self-promotion, noble
in the circulation of others’ disgrace,
its preoccupation with death in a context of immortal glory
truly epic, and the task becomes to keep
the particulars in motion
lest they settle into categories whose opera
is bad infinity.
Isolation. The odd auditory hallucination.
The meagre profile of a widow’s cabbagerow
corresponds to needs must,
but also to its architect’s state of mind
at the time. Why do I not move on? Why
hang around here while grass
grows up my chimney?
Every choice is a refusal. For Christ’s sake.
I am guarding the walls. Like punctuation
it could make all the difference.
TENTSMUIR FOREST
The sign denoting a negative quantity indicates,
also, subtraction. The symbol for equivalence
means also alike. The deadliest mushroom is
among the most delicious. Distinct
in their intensities of purpose. Her children found her
on the kitchen floor, plate on the table,
pan on the stove. A life foraging in these woods,
she should have known. But to pour out
is not to spill. To spill is not to lay oneself down.
A MISCALCULATION
Like a king from a promontory
the kestrel presides from an updraft, an array
of barely perceptible movements sustaining
balance and attention, and the woodmouse,
the shrew, the secondary characters,
know whose watch they’re under. There are no
bystanders among them. The razorbill’s piety
winters at sea, secular and medium-sized,
black above, white below; while
frontloaded with military tech
gannets send tones of the aquatic scale
straight to the emotional signature clusters,
though we human proprietors of emotion
are to them as circumstantial
as the shadow I cast over a vole’s workday,
my presence too general for relevance.
It was November. I made these notes,
then in absentminded self-disgust
set out on the path from Crail
and by sunset, at 4, could neither return
nor make Kingsbarns before dark.
Though no one knew where I was, real danger
lay elsewhere. No cows even. Just sleepless
fields staring skyward and the firth prowling
the forest of itself, what’s hidden as well as
what hides it. To turn back would have made sense
but I chose otherwise, a lamp post
at what I assumed was the golf course
a fixed point I couldn’t seem to advance on
like a misinterpretation pursued because now
it is your life. Proportion vanished. A creature
scratching at a stone dyke was big as the North
Atlantic, and my body, not as old as when visible
became, not one with mind, but indistinguishable —
consciousness feeling with the blunt toe of its boot
as its footprints fill with groundwater.
THE SPIES
Where two convene, a third is always present.
This makes the world seem small
and satisfies our need
to be observed and understood.
Polishing a cup behind the bar. In the background
weighing grain. Hovering over us
a few paces behind, or racing ahead, innocently
buzzing like a toy, like the boy
who bags your pheasants then
reports you to the king.
The scenery interprets us
and we are also the hyper-vigilant scenery
sanguine in our right to own the frontiers
in our photographs, drop
some payload, linger at neighbours’ windows
with trauma sensors all lit up,
to rat each other out
with the assistance of an airborne scrap
of the 21st-century unconscious
beside which the old machines of delivery appear
inefficient, comical, overlarge, like a Quaalude,
quaint as any former bond between
the watcher and the watched.
Laws of causality and continuity reside in
the vertical din. For over such forms as my heart
is wont to range, did my eyes then range . . .
MERCENARIES KNOW THERE’S ALWAYS ROOM FOR SPECIALISTS IN THE MARKET
“Security contractor” is the term preferred
by a growing industry of private actors who,
at the sharp end of operations,
aren’t kidding ourselves about the economy.
Money is a country I can take with me.
I walk through the battlefield
as through my home town, self-actuated,
valued for my talents. In this territory
also known as Fuck You. Your home town
is now my home town.
These abstract northern wastes
are even more so when you’re in them
fighting alongside those you’ve fought against.
The Picts, fortunately, are unmistakable
in their fondness for nudity and tattoos,
in their grim, barbaric language
whose struggle to remain alive is bold
and clearly futile. Homer, in Smyrna, blackwater
of the Meles flowing through him,
knew some individuals are born in combat
and others ruined, frantic with belief in meaning
as a thing outside them
they can’t find. All saved, nonetheless,
from poverty, dishonour, boredom, irrelevance.
A durable disorder is in our best interest
to sustain, and loyalty to a paycheque purer
than to a man, or god, and more flexible.
Non-linear. Mission-based.
If the plan does not fit the game you see,
call a few audibles, and change it.
THE MERIDIAN
Fishers, who mapped Kilrenny steeple
as a marker to direct them at sea, call it St. Irnie
to this day. I can’t bring you back.
My imagination’s not enough. Or maybe
it was lost with you offshore among the rigs,
between domestic and foreign sectors, its beacon
unattended. A loved thing shared and doubled
is in solitude never whole again.
The harbour’s full of sightsee daycruisers,
private recreational vessels, a few trawlers left
to cross swords for Talisman Energy’s odd jobs
on their bellies in the mud. When the sea,
even knowing what it knows, dares flood back in here
with whom will I watch flat fish rummaging
in the sediment, the Canadian sport fisherman
in new gear, baiting his hook with a fillet?
WHOSE DEATHS WERE RECORDED OFFICIALLY AS CASUALTIES OF “THE BATTLE OF MAY ISLAND”
1918, last of January, not late, but dark for hours
Sliding under the Forth Bridge toward the North Sea
Cruisers, battleships, destroyers, and the K-boats
Big, steam-driven pigs
Wallowing in the troughs and undulations
Under radio silence, and no lights
Pursuant to worthless intel
To opinions more plausible in formation than they might otherwise appear
En masse, you can’t see past them
Is he still a boy
Sailing under the flag of error
And, as it happens, low cloud cover
On a collision course with the unforeseen minesweepers
On board K-11, or K-17, turning hard to port
If not exactly on a dime
Or K-14, whose rudder jams full right, K-22 who slams into it
Then is run over by the oncoming HMS Inflexible
Who hears his name called, as if in twilight sleep
A second flotilla, led by HMS Fearless
Unaware the ships of the first have turned around
Increases speed to 21 knots
They meet head-on east of May Island, which barely looks up from its desk
Intuition breaks in two and heads for the bottom
Along with the wreck of the K-17
Whose crew is in the water
Feeling the warmth of the self against cold abstraction
No group of people has more in common
More fear in their blood than oxygen at this point
Unstable land, unswimmable water, air needing light
As it was in the chaos at the beginning of creation
Behind Fearless, and to avoid HMS Australia
K-6 rams K-4, which sinks with all hands
Remaining capital ships and destroyers of the 5th Battle Squadron
Bear down on the scene
On the men in the water
Whose eyesight has never been clearer, how cruel
I saw not it, but the place where it dwells
Chains of the wake around their ankles
Propellers tearing through them
Seven stars of the plough obscured by weather
Badly discordant atoms in the one place night seems to be pouring out of
Whose grandfather was a shepherd
How can he sleep in such cold
Face up or face down
In sheets of fuel
The unbreathable aftermath
104 killed, a conservative estimate
No enemy engaged but error
In the historical present, a modest commemorative monument
With its back to the sea
SONG
Ships arrived to harvest souls // I saw stones become a church //
I saw the church filled with gold // and the pit with souls who harvest gold //
I saw more fields cut from the forest // I no longer saw the forest dwellers //
As an egg to a bird, tree to a stone // I saw trees turn into ships, and sail away //
II
NO 59981 05825; 56.24324° N, 2.64731° W
Make your preparations. Supplement a lack
of expertise with curiosity undeterred
by the vandalized interior, histoplasmotic
pigeon shit, trash of its pilgrims who’ve written
on its forehead and eyelids their symbols
of blessing and protection: Pictish z-rod
(indeterminate), crosses Latin and Greek,
Mairi + Ian, Saor Alba. Iron and magnesium,
the contemplative oxides. Axis of
the main cave, NW-SE. You will see,
among spirits of the exhumed, the holdfasts,
will know the place by its local name
and your readiness repaid. Another landmark
fixed in the mind of the navigator.
He remembers a friend
from his travels
dispersed atoms sullenly reconciled, I woke
to a human noise conceived outside me, for once
and a bundle over to which I hauled my body’s carbons
a griskin
hard bread
for thirty years an otter brought fish to Paul the Hermit
yes, well
as did Kentigern
another story there, his poor mother
what a place
unwilling to let me expire in their quarter
or in the hope it buys favour
people leave food
I wish they wouldn’t I wish they would
some remember me from when I was a person
their backs to me now, a child’s small frame
or yards of female fabric describing wind direction
Jesus is love, but bank the coals or die
hands wrapped in rags, heaping stones for a cache against
wild pigs and others, light to moderate snow
horizontally north-south
I recognize this rough farm cloth, its provenance
a wife from the hill of daughters
whose husband walked a path as if to shame it
although you did not sit, did not loosen your coatcollar
before first talking to her
I must not soften my blisters with water, she said
and her neighbourhood with druids up to here
The earth may provide for them
but by Christ’s fingernails not what grows from or grazes
upon my own. Dogwalkers, granary robbers,
mannequins, litterers,
Brother, their poetry is truly awful.
her warm kitchen, honey and dry leaf smell of cut barley
spade leaning in a corner representing mortality
Eejits drunk and sunburned by the dyke,
one a stretched rope, one a shrivelled root, another
an angry little spider. You laugh,
but when schoolboys pelt them with rocks, God help me, I understand.
To look at them is to have one leap into your hand.
our talk, the good and lowly vegetables she prepared
memory
I would rather starve now than suffer it
Like Cormac Ua Liatháin, he sought
his desert in the ocean
if one asks for a sign
must on
e accept what’s given?
the hazards of catching authority’s eye have been well borne out
May Island on the palm of the horizon, take it away
a proper island, unlike Lindisfarne
gifted to beloved Aidan, who is likeable
and good
but one might long even for Iona in sight of this outrage
this wellhead
thorn in the sea
I wanted an answer, not a choice, it’s too late in life
a task, if not completed, might at least be finished with
now a cipher has fallen from an ancient book
logos, anti-logos, an intellectual violence
crouched on the offing like a word crossed out
blood
when one doesn’t expect blood
see how it draws around itself
the hospital curtain
Hostilities were inevitable among the four peoples
clustered around the Forth-Clyde line
kingdoms like these don’t collapse all at once
even in my white martyrdom the wars find me
as far-off fires use the wind, as seeds will
or burrs that travel in the fur
what can I do
a creature isn’t thought from its shell, my knife extracts it
to nourish me wasn’t in its life plan no kidding
I’ve settled bottom-first into the mud of this thinking
pulled the mud of it to my chin, but even a toad
leaps through its tent flaps in spring like a one-man band
what can I do, blink first in this standoff with the May
in its cop sunglasses trying to break me
I don’t trust it
and who would seek with me a community of refuge there
even among my fellow half-people
denuded of vegetation, all remainder
estranged by wandering from our body mass
if no one follows shall I lie alone
at my own graveside, on a mattress of the dead
with no cover over me
Now blood on his lip
for some reason
Servanus, desiring a place less pleasant, came here
and flourished in an argument
that the authentic sacrifice is a pure mind, clean spirit
conscience without guile