There is no way to explainthe light that rises into a roomfrom the early morning bloom of snow;through closed lids, the slow dawningof white. The body is quick to knowthe pace of the day has changed, the spacewiped clean to make way for the first bird, first song.There is no way to explainhow, even when […]
You are nothing more than yourself,not a message sent to change the world,not here to save mankind or even me. You are,like a snail or mollusc, only there;like a leaf among thousands on a tree,like the sea or the smallest of its creatures,just there. And yet, and yet I watch your faceand see a star […]
Heading north is a leap of the heart.
On the map on the phone, the blue dot
is a pulse that crosses the border.
Do not send me a postcardof the city that once lived here,its water-courses and its domes.No photograph can show that thiswas once home, and that homeis long gone.Do not send me a miniaturedrawn with a camel’s-hair brushto hang on my wall, or tell meyou were in the Anarkali Bazaar,or say the gulmohar trees were aflameand […]
Cathy’s mother saysshe is her sweet heart.My mother says I am a piece of her liver.Cathy has an ice blue cardigan.My mother holds Cathy stillin front of her, and studies the stitcheswith her eyes screwed up. Shemeasures me with the span of her handand marches me over the bridgeto Argyle Street for wool and needles.Sitting […]
At Loch Lomond they were king and queen to me,laying out their bounty on the braeafter the queasy ride from Glasgow, wechildren making sick-stops on the way.Tumbled out, we sprawled at the water’s mouthwhere light ate shade and made us ravenous.With a flourish, Her Majesty untied the clothto set the parathas free. She did, she […]
You’ll be wondering why you bothered: beatingup from Senegal, just to hit a teuchit storm -late March blizzards and raw winds – before the tiltacross the A9, to arrive, merehours apart, at the self-same riversideScots pine, and possess again the sticks and fishbonesof last year’s nest: still here, pretty muchlike the rest of us – […]
Remember how we rowed toward the cottageon the sickle-shaped bay,that one night after the publoosed us through its swinging doorsand we pushed across the shingletill water lipped the sidesas though the loch mouthed ‘boat’?I forget who rowed. Our jokes hushed.The oars’ splash, creak, and the spillof the loch reached long into the night.Out in the […]
On the civic amenity landfill site,the coup, the dump beyond the cemeteryand the 30-mile-an-hour sign, her stiffold ladies’ bags, open mouthed, spewpostcards sent from small Scots townsin 1960: Peebles, Largs, the rock-gardensof Carnoustie, tinted in the dirt.Mr and Mrs Scotland, here is the hand you were dealt:fair but cool, showery but nevertheless,Jean asks kindly; the […]
A driech day, and nothing to dobar watch starlings fluchterover soup bonesleft on a plate on the grass.All forenoon broth-barley, marrowfat peasswelled in a kitchen jug,and I soaked stamps, cornerstorn from polite white envelopesin a saucer till they peeled clear,neither soggy nor stuck: ‘See,watch and not tear them, wait at peace.’ There’d aye be women […]
The swing was picked up for the boys,for the here-and-here-to-stayand only she knew why it wasI dug so solemnlyI spread the feet two yards apartand hammered down the pegsfilled up the holes and stamped the dirtaround its skinny legsI hung the rope up in the airand fixed the yellow seatthen stood back that I might […]
For RussI’ll tell you, if you really want to know:remember that day you lost two years agoat the rockpool where you sat and played the jewellerwith all those stones you’d stolen from the shore?Most of them went dark and nothing more,but sometimes one would blink the secret colourit had locked up somewhere in its stony […]
