Kathleen Jamie

We are flowers of the common
sward, that much we understand.
Of everything else
we're innocent. No Creator
laid down such terms
for our pleasant lives,
- it's just our nature,
were we not so,
we wouldn't be daisies, closing
our lashes at the first
suggestion of Venus. By then,
we're near exhausted. Evening
means sleep, and surely it's better
to renew ourselves than die
of all that openness?
But die we will, innocent
or no, of how night
spills above our garden,
twins glittering there
for each of us; die
never knowing what we miss.
...

When I appear to you
by dark, descended
not from heaven, but the lowest
branch of the walnut tree
bearing no annunciation,
suspended like a slub
in the air's weave -
and you shriek, you shriek
so prettily, I'm reminded
of the birds - don't birds also
cultivate elaborate beauty, devour
what catches their eye?
Hence my night shift,
my sulphur and black striped
jacket - poison - a lie
to cloak me while, exposed,
I squeeze from my own gut
the one material.
Who tore the night?
Who caused this rupture?
You, staring in horror
- had you never considered
how the world sustains?
- the ants by day
clearing, clearing,
the spiders mending endlessly.
...

Remember how we rowed toward the cottage
on the sickle-shaped bay,
that one night after the pub
loosed us through its swinging doors
and we pushed across the shingle
till water lipped the sides
as though the loch mouthed ‘boat'?

I forget who rowed. Our jokes hushed.
The oars' splash, creak, and the spill
of the loch reached long into the night.
Out in the race I was scared:
the cold shawl of breeze,
and hunched hills; what the water held
of deadheads, ticking nuclear hulls.

Who rowed, and who kept their peace?
Who hauled salt-air and stars
deep into their lungs, were not reassured;
and who first noticed the loch's
phosphorescence, so, like a twittering nest
washed from the rushes, an astonished
small boat of saints, we watched water shine
on our fingers and oars,
the magic dart of our bow wave?

It was surely foolhardy, such a broad loch, a tide,
but we live — and even have children
to women and men we had yet to meet
that night we set out, calling our own
the sky and salt-water, wounded hills
dark-starred by blaeberries, the glimmering anklets
we wore in the shallows
as we shipped oars and jumped,
to draw the boat safe, high at the cottage shore.
...

I stand neither in the wilderness
nor fairyland

but in the fold
of a green hill

the tilt from one parish
into another.

To look at me
through a smirr of rain

is to taste the iron
in your own blood

because I hoard
the common currency

of longing: each wish
each secret assignation.

My limbs lift, scabbed
with greenish coins

I draw into my slow wood
fleur-de-lys, the enthroned Brittania.

Behind me, the land
reaches towards the Atlantic.

And though I'm poisoned
choking on the small change

of human hope,
daily beaten into me

look: I am still alive—
in fact, in bud.
...

This is the multitude, the beasts
you wanted to show me, drawing me
upstream, all morning up through wind-
scoured heather to the hillcrest.
Below us, in the next glen, is the grave
calm brotherhood, descended
out of winter, out of hunger, kneeling
like the signatories of a covenant;
their weighty, antique-polished antlers
rising above the vegetation
like masts in a harbor, or city spires.
We lie close together, and though the wind
whips away our man-and-woman smell, every
stag-face seems to look toward us, toward,
but not to us: we're held, and hold them,
in civil regard. I suspect you'd
hoped to impress me, to lift to my sight
our shared country, lead me deeper
into what you know, but loath
to cause fear you're already moving
quietly away, sure I'll go with you,
as I would now, almost anywhere.
...

It was winter, near freezing,
I'd walked through a forest of firs
when I saw issue out of the waterfall
a solitary bird.

It lit on a damp rock,
and, as water swept stupidly on,
wrung from its own throat
supple, undammable song.

It isn't mine to give.
I can't coax this bird to my hand
that knows the depth of the river
yet sings of it on land.
...

Well, friend, we're here again — 
sauntering the last half-mile to the land's frayed end
to find what's laid on for us, strewn across the turf — 
gull feathers, bleached shells,
a whole bull seal, bone-dry,
knackered from the rut
(we knock on his leathern head, but no one's home).

Change, change — that's what the terns scream
down at their seaward rocks;
fleet clouds and salt kiss — 
everything else is provisional,
us and all our works.
I guess that's why we like it here:
listen — a brief lull,
a rock pipit's seed-small notes.
...

Last night, when the moon
slipped into my attic room
as an oblong of light,
I sensed she'd come to commiserate.

It was August. She traveled
with a small valise
of darkness, and the first few stars
returning to the northern sky,

and my room, it seemed,
had missed her. She pretended
an interest in the bookcase
while other objects

stirred, as in a rock pool,
with unexpected life:
strings of beads in their green bowl gleamed,
the paper-crowded desk;

the books, too, appeared inclined
to open and confess.
Being sure the moon
harbored some intention,

I waited; watched for an age
her cool gaze shift
first toward a flower sketch
pinned on the far wall

then glide down to recline
along the pinewood floor,
before I'd had enough. Moon,
I said, We're both scarred now.

Are they quite beyond you,
the simple words of love? Say them.
You are not my mother;
with my mother, I waited unto death.
...

an extract

she wants to strip the willow
she desires the keys
to the National Library
she is beckoning
the lasses

Yes, we'd like to
clap the camels,
to smell the spice,
admire her hairy legs and
bonny wicked smile, we want to take
PhDs in Persian, be vice
to her president: we want
to help her
ask some Difficult Questions

she's shouting for our wisest man
to test her mettle:

Scour Scotland for a Solomon!

Sure enough: from the back of the crowd
someone growls:
whae do you think y'ur?

and a thousand laughing girls and she
draw our hot breath
and shout

THE QUEEN OF SHEBA!
...

In which river did the fish swim
that mistook for a fly a hook on a line
so drew its last, that a silver blade
could pare from its flesh its still fresh
weed-green skin, to be cured
then eased around this little case,
which contains the doctor's
shoal of fleams, and the keen one
he's pressing now to your inner arm,
so a mere flick opens a vein
...

Full March moon and gale-force easters, the pair of them
sucking and shoving the river
back into its closet in the hills - or trying to. Naturally

the dykes failed, the town's last fishing boat
raved at the pier-head, then went down; diesel-
corrupted water cascaded into front-yards, coal-holes, garages,

and there's naethin ye can dae,
said the old boys, the sages, which may be true, but river -
what have you left us? Evidence of an inner life, secrets
of your estuarine soul hawked halfway

up Shore Street, up East and Mid Shore - and arrayed
in swags all through the swing-park: plastic trash and broken reeds,
driftwood, bust TVs . . .
and a salmon,
dead, flung beneath the see-saw, the crows are onto at once.
...

When I found I'd lost you -
not beside me, nor ahead,
nor right nor left not
your green jacket moving

between the trees anywhere,
I waited a long while
before wandering on: no wren
jinked in the undergrowth,

not a twig snapped.
It was hardly the Wildwood,
just some auld fairmer's
shelter belt, but red haws

reached out to me,
and between fallen leaves
pretty white flowers bloomed
late into their year. I tried

calling out, or think
I did, but your name
shrivelled on my tongue,
so instead I strolled on

through the wood's good
offices, and duly fell
to wondering if I hadn't
simply made it all up: you,

I mean, everything,
my entire life....either way,
nothing now could touch me
bar my hosts, who appeared

as diffuse golden light,
as tiny spiders
examining my hair....
what gratitude I felt then -

I might be gone for ages,
maybe seven years!
- and such sudden joie de vivre
that when a ditch gaped

right there instantly in front of me
I jumped it, blithe as a girl -
ach, I jumped clear over it,
without even pausing to think.
...

I walk at the land's edge,
turning in my mind
a private predicament.
Today the sea is indigo.
Thirty years an adult -
same mind, same
ridiculous quandaries -
but every time the sea
appears differently: today
a tumultuous dream,
flinging its waves ashore -

Nothing resolved,
I tread back over the moor
- but every time the moor
appears differently: this evening,
tufts of bog-cotton
unbutton themselves in the wind
- and then comes the road
so wearily familiar
the old shining road
that leads everywhere
...

First come the jellyfish:
mauve-fringed, luminous bowls
like lost internal organs,
pulsing and slow.

Then in the green gloom
swaying sideways and back
like half-forgotten ancestors
- columns of bladderwrack.

It's as though we're stalled in a taxi
in an ill-lit, odd
little town, at closing time,
when everyone's maudlin

and really, ought just to go
home, you sorry inclining
pillars of wrack, you lone,
vaguely uterine jellyfish

- whom I almost envy:
spun out, when our engines churn,
on some sudden new trajectory,
fuddled, but unperturbed.
...

Higher than the craw-stepped
gables of our institutes - chess-clubs,
fanciers, reels & Strathspeys -
the old kingdom of lum, with crowns agley.

All birds will be citizens: banners
of starlings; Jacobin crows - also:
Sonny Jim Aitken, Special P.C.
whose red face closed in polis cars

utters terrible, ridiculous
at his brogher and sister citizens
but we're no feart, not of anyone
with a tartan nameplate screwed to his door.

Citizen also: the tall fellow I watched
lash his yurt to the leafy earth,
who lifted his chin
to my greeting, roared AYE!

as in YES! FOREVER! MYSELF!
The very woods where my friend Isabel
once saw a fairy, blue as a gas flame
dancing on trees. All this

close to the motorway
where a citizen has dangled.
maybe with a friend clutching
his/her ankles to spray

PAY NO POLL TAX on a flyover
near to Abernethy, in whose tea rooms
old Scots kings and bishops in mitres
supped wi a lang spoon. Citizens:

our spires and doocoots
institutes and tinkies' benders,
old Scots kings and dancing fairies
give strength to my house

on whose roof we can balance,
carefully stand and see
clear to the far off mountains,
cities, rigs and gardens,

Europe, Africa, the Forth and Tay bridges,
even dare let go, lift our hands
and wave to the waving citizens
of all those other countries.
...

For years I wandered hill and moor
Half looking for the road
Winding into fairyland
Where that blacksmith kept a forge

Who'd heat red hot the dragging links
That bound me to the past,
Then, with one almighty hammer-blow
Unfetter me at last.

Older now, I know nor fee
Nor anvil breaks those chains
And the wild ways we think we walk
Just bring us here again.
...

Here lies our land: every airt
Beneath swift clouds, glad glints of sun,
Belonging to none but itself.

We are mere transients, who sing
Its westlin' winds and fernie braes,
Northern lights and siller tides,

Small folk playing our part.
‘Come all ye', the country says,
You win me, who take me most to heart.
...

And when at last the road
gives out, I'll walk -
harsh grass, sea-maws,
lichen-crusted bedrock -

and hole up the cold
summer in some battered
caravan, quartering
the brittle waves

till my eyes evaporate
and I'm willing again
to deal myself in:
having watched them

breach, breathe, and dive
far out in the glare,
like stitches sewn in a rent
almost beyond repair.
...

How late the daylight edges
toward the northern night
as though journeying
in a blue boat, gilded in mussel shell

with, slung from its mast, a lantern
like our old idea of the soul
...

There's this life and no hereafter -
I'm sure of that
but still I dither, waiting
for my laggard soul
to leap at the world's touch.

How many May dawns
have I slept right through,
the trees courageous with blossom?
Let me number them . . .

I shall be weighed in the balance
and found wanting.
I shall reckon for less
than an apple pip.
...