05 10 07

At the jetty & along, by the little wooden boathouse, there’s no blue & white china fragments on the shore. The crackling blue shining of the mussel shells deceives, though. & the insides of dog whelks on the rocks, broken possibly by crows, are quietly luminescent, faint mauve & nicotine-yellow spiralling chambers. Fish jump clear of the water here, almost beneath the Miocene other-world gaze of the black cormorants on their rock, twenty four in this colony, unmoving; watching wind against the tide. The small creel boats at moorings swing & fall & rise. The parchment grey-black leaves of aspens rattle onto the shore. Acorns drop & roll into the sea. It’s how the brindled hound & I measure each day’s incursion into another season.

04 10 07

I should have written: zealots, followers of the Word given, sent down; not fundamental-ists, since there is nothing of essence about them.

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Away for a few days in Galloway & the Ariundle apples on the cherry boards of my desk have moved from deepsea to lit suns, with a rouged blush. The leafchart of bloods & wines, amber & umber, golds & saffron is again surrendering to the pull of earth & its gravity, its gravitas & its fun. The odd flashpoint colour of a sycamore branch, its leaves no longer producing chlorophyll green as the days shorten, moving beyond equinox towards solstice. Autumn always climbs sycamores a limb at a time, while the rowan’s tinted, tinged everywhere. A mirror to the rowan’s berries is in the scarlet dogrose hips, beamed forth & back, a recognition, a signal: the way light seduces.

In October sun Glen Tarbert wears a thick new pelt the colour of a fox. The sky’s not quite the blue of a kingfisher, but this is already a halcyon day. A passing dozy buzzing fly lands on my eyebrow & I wink. I remove the fly & wink again at the conspiracy of the day.

In his poem Why I am not a Painter, Frank O’Hara, not thinking of autumn, writes
There should be / so much more, not of orange, of / words, of how terrible orange is / and life.

Terrible perhaps, in the sense of trembling, of intensity. Certainly, the hound beside me feels it & trembles in the face of it moving around us with an intensity that drives all the woodlands, all its creatures.

Tonight, somewhere over towards Creag Dhubh & the little lochans in the hills, Laga & Lochan Sligneach, the stags are bellowing. The Milky Way is all that lights our path. & the winking lights & long drone of the black plane in the dark where no airline flies.

We return, the hound & myself, to a phone message from a friend on his way to Syria, one place of his former imprisonment & torture. He’s asking for my prayers. Palestinian, Muslim, stateless, lately an imam in his own play, hating imams, he says, all imams. In my fashion, I silently respond: a bat, probably a Pipistrelle, just the one, flittering & swooping, looping over & over hard by the old rowan with its knuckled roots gripping rock outcrop.