April 23rd 2008


Sailean nan Cuileag


the pelt of sea its tongues
smooring & quenching &

plucking what will be left
at tide’s going air

of what’s uttered oystercatcher’s
pitch & pipe smew & craik of

curlew pulse of what’s given
what’s yielded what’s opened

3rd April 2008

this is not an explanation or critique of the poem last posted, but another poem, titled

COMMENTARY

we construct landscape
as identity
there is no water imagine
imagine there is no sea loch
Resipole has its foundation
in syncline
cormorant curves in
that nothing which is something
already easing away
the mountain’s walking off
into that hour before
dawn that is the same every
where everywhere

17th March 2008


Camas Torsa

glacier talks
under ocean moon

above Resipole rises & shrinks
tide swills & hangs

Spindrift’s gutting across
sun’s line of gulls

its engine throb hub
of the scoured world

March 3rd 2008

wearing a summer hat.
walked out into powdery snow.

Shimpei Kusano: Certain Days

Leap Year’s day came & went. The smallest hind of Gobsheallach hill has not been seen for five days; in her place is a small stag, timid & keeping close to the two larger hinds as they move across the bay, exposed, & as they browse on the sparse green among rusting bracken. Has the small hind been shot, or is there some transformation happening here in this corner of a materialistic land where a white stag can be explained by leucism?

I’m content here, heaping language onto landscape, through winter’s mouldering, now watching spring’s shoots; but I’m leaving Ardnamurchan, on a day of blizzards alternating with the blue-blindness of cloud free skies. The dramas of the mountains, companionable Beinn Resipol & Beinn Hianta in Morvern & the doings of the waters: Loch Shiel, Loch Sunart, & Abhainn an Iubhair & the burns & puddles no longer ask my daily attention. Spring is a good time to leave; though here, in this journal I will still be writing, though more slowly, of the walking of last summer, last spring, grounded in memory & experience. The Atlantic wind will blow my nose cold from another quarter. Like any trumpeting swan I’m migrating; like any wild goose, I’ll land again on this bog, unworked since the sixties, near Airigh Bheagaig.

Back in September I wrote of the notion of a weblog (though I call this a journal) being a we blog. Of late, comments have been arriving & have been most welcome. They will be more welcome in weeks to come, as I post new entries, poem-drafts even; back-channel (as I write this, I see the south channel between the mainland & Eilean Shona) or here, publicly. The mountains’ll keep on walking & I in my green knit hat rushing to tongue the snow.

27th February 2008

The moon’s sliding the sea into its tidal heaping back into the bay again.
How tender the hill is where the woodlands are thin; a child with solitary promise. Spring is here, whatever the weather, & it has been wild & wet, but mild with it. The colonies of birch with their hair-like traceries of twigs have small ochre leafbuds & are putting out their first catkins. Spring’s not reluctant, but I’m happy still to be in the bareness of the woods, finding great pleasure in the journey; enjoying the forms of the trees & their limbs, boughs, branches & twigs rising towards the increased light of advancing days. Unless it’s possible to appreciate the underlying structure of winter’s austerity, then surely it would be hard to welcome the leaf, blossom & fruit of summer. I’m reminded here of just how much like purple figs alder buds are, just at the point of ripening; it’s a matter of scale. The hazels have extended their lime green catkins; every branchlet terminates with a small club shaped bud. The contorted willows (weather does this, it’s not a true contorted form) have tiny rufous buds. Each fragile brittle length of woodbine ends with six newly opened leaves, while amid the tangle, in the sheltered hollows where burns roll to the sea, the first handsbreadth blades of flag iris thrust their sword leaves through rust brown rot from clearly visible rhizomes. The furze has been flowering a month & more, its almond scented yellow a discussion of dormancy with the iris, which will not show colour for a full two months yet. There’s a rippling cloud in every transient puddle; the newly minted translucency of holly leaves glows against the dark green waxyness of the old sharp foliage. The little faint buds of the dogrose call the pink-white flowers that’ll rise from stems. Aspens, still now, have heavy pointed chocolate coloured buds, which will soon start their wind whispering as leaves. Out at sea a curlew’s ringing its song. & the oaks - all ages leaning into the hill, woven with ivies, sheltering holly & birch saplings, their every branch-end knobbled & swelling , last year’s lobed & brown papery leaves still clinging, the mossy oaks are distending their strong pointed buff & sandy buds. Everything’s bubbling & fizzing its irresistible course through trunk & stem, through sap, bud & blood. On the rocks, lichens continue their concentric growth like soft moist meandering trails of night time snails.

There’s a convocation of crows in a half mile circle around me, from rock to outermost tree top; they bow & sing rasping beautiful songs & no-one to hear; no-one to see their spanning but the seven hinds of Airigh Bheagaig, eyebright & long soft leather ears pricked, & a solitary sceptical buzzard hunched in her own glamour.

I’m back at the Byre just as the sulphur coloured evening rain begins its downpour, lashing bud & me & the incoming sea alike.

25th February 2008

On the ruddy golden coat of the warrantable deer the bright sunlight shone, so that the colour seemed unsteady, or as if it was visibly emanating and flowing forth in undulations.

Richard Jefferies; Red Deer

Having only yesterday performed the comedy classic of falling off a ladder, I’m hirpling about among the trees & in no position to go chasing over the heather & moss after the white red deer stag that’s been sighted in the west highlands. If white red deer stag sounds like an oxymoron, not to mention contradictory, that’s what the animal himself is. Of course, he has no idea (I guess) that he is in any way exceptional.

What makes him special is that he is leucistic. Leucism is a reduction of all types of skin pigmentation, resulting in a white skin or coat, unlike albinism, which is a reduction of melanin only. Leucistic animals have normally pigmented eyes. Leucism is also seen in the irregular patches on other animals - the hides of some cattle, where localized hypopigmentation gives the pied effect in differing patterns of Friesian herds, for example.

For me, that’s enough, but white stags have always exerted a kind of reverse shadow on the imagination. There’s lots of talk about the special nature of such a stag. Those who see him are sure (it’s said) to have a profound change imminent in their lives. A white stag also seems to have been conflated into a unicorn in past ages. Now we’re perhaps a trifle more materialistic; though Latter Day Shamans, Druids, & Wicca folk were outraged by the shooting & decapitation of a white stag last autumn on Exmoor, presumably as a trophy for sale. These folk, & to be fair, many others, including local farmers, not normally given to vapours of a mystical kind, spoke of the sacred nature of the animal. What they all feel on the shooting & beheading of red red deer stags is unknown.

Here, I hope it might give another kick start to the great deer debate & take it further than the usual hunting versus photo-opportunity for tourism impasse. The red deer in Scotland, indigenous to these parts, is too often seen as an opportunity; a resource. Whether for venison or the thrill of stalking with a camera, it raises so many questions, from landownership to local food sourcing, from woodland regeneration to wolf reintroduction, that I’m actually pleased not to be in any fit condition to bother the white one by walking in his area (I know his whereabouts): he doesn’t need me ogling him as a curiosity. His peers, the other stags, have no doubts that he’s one of them & another rival come rutting time. No more, no less.

I’m not much for walking anyway. Walking for me in the past usually had a purpose, like helping gather sheep, or walking to the hay meadow. Sitting still, contemplating the way the sun moves, or the tide comes & goes & to see what the woods, waters & fields bring my way has never been a problem though.

This year, I’ve been re-examining that attitude; spending time walking the woodlands in what Richard Holloway calls “exuberant purposelessness”. I have no purpose, other than to observe the poetry of clouds & winds; to cheer the dance of gnats & moths, to listen intently to the musical compositions of wrens & herring gulls. There’s no point to caressing the moss as I go, to saluting the ancient oaks; no point to commiserating with the birch on the loss of its limb. But I do it all anyway. It’s for no reason I study for half an hour the spider spinning a filament across my path, then walking round it. I have nothing in mind when I see the rising & wheeling of herons over Garbh Eilean & count them to be, today, nineteen in number. The woodlands are full, if not of purpose, then of clarity & movement. Each creature here has enough intent for me as well. Exuberance rises from the knowledge that I am not needed.The woodlands are as liberating of egotism as of ideas & objectives.

I have no need to follow unicorns.

18th February 2008

3 events at Gobsheallach today

This morning, a column of cloud rises from Bein Resipol, from just below the summit into the upper sky. Volcanoes look like this.

At noon, a grey crow flies down to the large sheet of unleavened bread, stale & curling, that I’ve put out front of the byre for her. With claw & beak, she neatly quarters it & flaps away with the whole bread in her beak.

An eagle eats up the miles westward with an easy but fast flight. She is silhouetted for a moment against a pale moon, three days away from full.