then hesitates
the Paying Guest lying in the lettings
remembers the old joke about the drummer
and now the Paying Guest is laughing on the inside.
TIME AWAY WITH THE ERROR
I need to call it something, if I’m to curse it.
I am known by many names, it intones in its fake voice
as I bail out the drum of the rental flat’s unfamiliar
AEG 365 washer/dryer, whose manufacturer is not responsible
for its misuse, for any use contradicting its natural purpose,
but how can one use improperly an appliance
whose purposes are contradictory?
Never has the manufacturer been more remote.
I am the have-been-made-in and the-potential-for. I am
the wayward wind. This speaks to the heart of the problem.
One of free will, adds the AEG 365, with
sublime neutrality. I hear the northern waters walk toward me.
Not in my ear, in my wishful thinking.
I hear a message composed across the Atlantic, made possible
by way of the fact that this hour accommodates all hours,
the way of the fact not as straightforward as it seems;
and maybe the message can’t find me in my patience,
where the subcrackle of May Island interrupts all signals
from its station in the firth’s hard chair, in January’s basement light,
big head bent over its transmission, face
scribbled out. When a bond is broken, energy is released, disperses
and is lost, offers the electric fire, whose switch
I’m unable to find. No operator’s manual for the long night either,
no troubleshooting tips for those of us
who truth can’t stop from going
where truth isn’t. But that’s what I love about you, says The Error,
how you really get into it. As if it’s the last stupid thing you’ll ever do.
TWO CHAPTERS ON ANCIENT STONES
1.
Such is the nervous power of life. Symbols,
allegorical forms, language
signifying less and less
though very slowly.
Water freezes in the pore fabric of the sandstone.
There are various physical openings-up.
Also powdering, topical growth,
chemical aggression from the carbon of the country
and an all-over blurring of features
in galleries of the fields.
A wedge knocked from the upper face
of the Aberlemno roadside stone released its serpent
back into groundcover of the late 6th century.
2.
Standing stones at Callanish
stare over the head of time, minds
somewhere else.
Arranged in cruciform, an inner circle
from which expanse flows.
In their presence, we are like grasses
at the two-leaf stage, whose eyes
are only beginning to focus,
faces wet, light rain pattering our jackets,
and where we saw raw land off the A858 is revealed
a framework for acknowledgement.
Precise and generous technology. Alignments stream right
through us.
Southeast, the Great Bernera Hills,
the “Old Woman of the Moors.”
We don’t want to go back to the car.
Speeding ahead in the vehicles of our bodies,
in our clouds of dust,
everywhere we go is in relation to them now.
As if a happiness felt there might shelter, and survive,
even though all that gave rise to it has passed away.
ANCIENT REMEDIES WITH CONTEMPORARY APPLICATIONS CURRENTLY IN DEVELOPMENT
In the company of
heath pea
(or bitter vetch),
suppressor of hunger
and of thirst, or of the need
to attend to hunger
and thirst —
though not of the need
for more bitter vetch
to remain off the lead
of hunger and thirst —
one may go off-road in the clarity
of depletion, the licorice
of depletion, its anise.
And free of the body
on wings of
the inflorescence,
by its standard
and its keel, fairly
glabrous, on freedom’s
transethanol,
300 times more potent
than sugar — its bursts
of lateral physical energy
in which to settle the rootstock
among dark tubers,
no pain there —
one might remember
when joy appeared
like a horse
crossing a river.
Joy might appear differently
should it do so again,
bitter vetch
(or heath pea)
prepares it a place
with the broom
of metabolism —
should one be worthy,
having sold the laptop,
purified accounts,
in an emptied room sleeping
on the floor
of the spirit —
fog burned off the senses
and the seconds
on fire.
56.1833° N, 2.5667° W
May Island, born under the firth’s unstable bed,
an eruption deep within the ritual subconscious.
Sill of an underworld planed by glaciers
crawling east-northeast. Ragged incursions,
occlusions, perspectival falsehoods
wreck boats. Heavily birded, sealed, befouled
and anointed. Its resting heart rate is very low.
“The Isle of May,” imposed upon it
by foreigners from the English Ordnance Survey,
represents it on contemporary maps and charts
though not in the hearts of people with any sense.
Virtue has deserted its brackish wells.
Sanctuary, a grave peril, sunk to its neck.
Small freshwater loch like a light left on.
The Isle of May lies just outside the western boundary
of danger area D607/55
how long have I been sleeping, Paul?
not that anything’s changed
the army of black rock marches from the sea
black rock at a military angle and the seabirds, the spies
poor weed at the cave mouth, I thought winter would have killed it
very little sunlight for its use
roots in not much
wound around fingerbones of former occupants maybe
I find their junk lying around
my affection so reckless it tries to animate
cold objects with its friendship
laugh if you will
music at the fold of appearance and disappearance
may be what I’m hearing
played in the octave between two kinds of darkness
the excess of, and absence of, light
from which do you transpire?
creeping through the scurvy grass, going by smell
Paul, I literally see through you
but you don’t frighten me anymore, for I have looked into myself
the May is there
idling at the curb in a cloud of exhaust
radio on
its doors all dented
Its paved road, which has all the appearance
of a processional way, must have led
from somewhere, to somewhere
you may think you want to disperse the intermediaries
between your mind and the true mystery
but be
lieve me
you don’t
the solitude
there are no two ways about it
you can live here but don’t expect it to entertain you
like a can on a fence it will set you up
test on you its experimental drugs
dress you in its homemade clothes
hunger breaking you in two to make you last
things maintain their professional secrecy
and I look down the length of the great indifference as though it were a train
I want to see the end of
it does not end
the silence in this way like noise
as dust and ash are noise
nutrients of meaning and communication used up
one’s self is not a well from which to draw endlessly
if you leave the tap open while brushing your teeth
so says the wisdom of the Proverbs
one day you will want that water back
when you find the place you’re in
no longer supports life
Having once dwelt at Caiplie, “place of horses,”
known locally as the Coves
yet, with the fuzzy logic of its mobile infirmary
the haar lays a cool cloth upon my brow
May sent into the hall, where it walks up and down
rolling in its mouth the name my parents gave me
visual losses propagate in supersaturated air
what I can’t see, I can’t see myself in
I don’t mind it
some losses bring peace
though others remain audible to the mind’s ear
roaring around their tracks on distant raceways
in this radiant simultaneous tense
buoyant mingling of the elements
the nearby newly astonishes
blooms practically sing to the eye
I’m sorry, I can’t get over it
groundleaves, grassblades, individuals in groups
communicating through variations in their common forms
I would like to receive the world as equally
tear down the curtains and bring to light the dust
mistaken for emanations of the spirit
In a purposeful adoption of an ancient burial site,
deliberate burning of the ground,
a shroud came to be charred,
and thus preserved
Paul, where have you gone?
only I, it seems, am exactly as I appear
a living argument against this sort of life
but I’m afraid I’m not good
for anything else now
feasting on simple sugars of my indecision
eroding, like the cave
it can’t stop thinking
regret for error, forward facing
is fear
both burn
with ambition
and will not abandon me
where are you Paul, the May has struggled to its feet
it’s turned its face toward me
it’s about to speak
YOU CAN’T GO BACK
The glass factory doesn’t control the batch material fed
though its dog door, that it processes according to its design
just as our own apparatus admits raw phenomena, constituents
rough and refined, for consistency some of the broken old stuff, and water
because everything is. Along a sequence of chutes, conveyors, scales,
it proceeds with decibels of the world’s nerves jangling.
On Medicine Hat’s industrial verge, Dominion Glass released at intervals
balloons of black smoke with fire inside, like ideas
off the top of its head, that like ideas were more impressive
after dark. Never did it not answer the question posed by its existence.
Those nitrogen and sulphur oxides erupting like personality
into the environment heralded the birth of something useful.
Indecision had no business there. Unlike uncertainty, and the so-called
acts of God haunting even the glass factory’s most utilitarian
products; unlike second thought’s intuitive logic,
which has undoubtedly saved the ass of more than one glass factory
as was the case for United Glass of Edinburgh when Archie Young
crawled through its bowel with a rope around his waist.
When I learned, as a child, the Medicine Hat factory operated
around the clock, lest molten glass harden in its veins, in a heart
whose capacity for heat was limited only by its physical structure —
I feared for it. Hesitation could mean the vital machinery
would be made worthless. As the nuns said of us, good for nothing.
Rough men cried in ’67 when United Glass received its closure notice
despite the apparent health of its enterprise, no one could understand it.
Rumours of a clerical mistake that spared a factory in England
at United’s expense trickled down from management, but error
had long since crystallized in the system, and it was too late.
STINGING NETTLE APPRECIATION
Would that you had only seen what was not catnip, was not mint!
Sui generis, you crashed its congregation, and now will attend
to your inattention, will heed this understory plant
who knows where its strength lies —
in histamine, serotonin, acetylcholine delivered
by the single cells of its stinging hairs. The absence of doubt in its mind
is felt by you as the burning numbness of an encounter with naturalism
that advice makes worse.
Soaked or cooked, it soothes the pain it causes. You could just do the work.
A nutritional as well as metaphorical powerhouse,
it kept the northern hermits alive another day
to flog themselves with it.
Above and belowground parts differ in pharmacological properties.
Verify your ailment before you approach. Should the previously indicated
be contraindicated, all the world’s vitamins A and C,
all the protein and iron in the world won’t help you.
Where nettle grows, says local custom, so grows the healing dock
whose leaves, broadfaced and not very bright, may initially provide
a cooling sensation, though there’s less to affirm its status as a remedy
than there is the merits of a little self-deception.
Urtica dioica, sting of two houses. To learn this lessens no one’s pain.
The agonies are products, the ancients say. Not voids, or defects.
Once they exist, they will always exist.
Comforts can only lie alongside them.
THE HERMITS
Warmth activates the sugars
and sugars rally
in the gorse, in the flowers
it sees with, the scent
that is its voice,
the non-toxic fragrant wood
good for cutlery, and for burning
though it flares out quickly
unlike smouldering peat. Are they converting
sugars of their loneliness
to conviction? Burning
their sugars on the wicks
of their frailty
one can nearly read by them
as Fillan read by the light
of his broken arm,
one of the horrible miracles
of the times —
St. Fillan, the Human Flashlight,
patron of the mentally ill —
an unenviable between-worlds
position.
Whereas marsh orchids
fully in this one
change their clothes
out in the open, hard candy
in their mouths, the sugars
plump, rou
nd, smooth,
unlike seawater’s jagged molecules
which when drunk like anger
will tear through you.
Like bitterness, desiccate you.
To survive, suffering burns
the strength of the afflicted. If,
left in Fillan’s cave,
bonds of the stricken
were loosened by morning
his spirit had intervened to convert
the molecules of their madness
and still later did smugglers stash there
some of those little things
that make life worth living.
The highly edible
sweet gorse flowers
produce a coconut-flavoured wine
if one enjoys the luxury of time
and a tea prescribed in cases
of uncertainty,
for those who appear
to have lost all hope.
CLARITY
In the centre of the path
near the ruined bothy.
Styrofoam maybe,
a sweater, fishing gear.
As I approached, I saw
it was a gannet, how odd.
How long, then,
before I realized it was dead?
When did my sixth receiver
register the hydrostatic pressure
of fluid newly at rest
between subject and object?
Bill beneath its wing,
the head’s saffron
seemed a signal
that should fade, in death.
What killed it
had not been vain
in its signature, allowing
for the vulnerable feet
to be tucked, as is the instinct,
under the quilt of its body.
Cormorants presided
the way they do over the sea’s
many funerals. Rock spoke
through its forms
the eulogy: the smaller
is not the lesser stone.
The day’s warm air had cold
ribboned through it
like a hotel atrium
built around a stream
or the childhood swimming hole
fed by an artesian current
I visualized as darker
than the surrounding water
and more coherent, its integrity
having not yet degraded.
Much of what I feared then