Andrew Greig

Certainly I've been here before

where the moon breaks up like a carrier wave
among rockpools and spume,

but tonight the static
does not irritate,

adding dark commas,
a semi-colon's pause;

the moon's ashen
apostrophe of itself:

loss as punctuation, fracture
as rhythmic device

shuffling the constant wind
which rattles the lanyards of your bones,

tempting even
the furled sails of your heart

to rise, be snapping taut,
drum-hard, driving the craft on

to deeps where the moon
is received unbroken, ecstatic.
...

Most every morning
it's out the back door to step,
mug in one hand, curiosity in the other,
down to the first of nine
off-round uneven Caithness slabs
roughly the size and shape of mammoth's footprints
that stomp across uneven, soggy grass
dividing house from shed,

And it's true I feel myself following in the bulk
of something vast, patient, fissured —
the deep past, say, or the world yet undeclared —
on this short transition from one dwelling to another.

What's down there today? A fresh splatter
from passing gull, faint stains of last week's nosebleed,
the snail lurched sideways in its crunched house,
and something between an image and a phrase that earlier
fell on my bowed head in the shower:
plenty to be going on with!

These stones are split
from the bed of Lake Orcady
that swelled and shrank over these plains,
fresh water, salt, dried up, fresh again, salt,
this happened many times and the stony shades
of shell-fish and minnows now lurk among
the delicate flout of fronds and weeds, squashed
with utter delicacy and irresistible power
by the swaying weight of stars passing overhead
(tiny crunch of that snail in the dark last night),
as the few memories from the vanished
lake of a life are left distorted, flattened,
set in stone as we pause on the way
to the place of reckoning —

So small a place to contain
the vast gone pachyderm, the fossils and the lake,
the trail of stones that led you here
to pause with one hand on the door.
Take a last look at the world you are in,
small fry with time pressing on your neck
even as you bent under the shower's benediction;
look back at the stepping stones, this staggering line
between one dwelling and the next,
then step into the gloom, the different light.
...

But what can we say of what happens when we close our eyes? What is the true scale of that space? How large its perimeter, how small its centre? How measureless a world the failing and the blind must inhabit! I reel, astounded.
François Aussemain
Close your eyes.
What's left is practically
the shape and size of the head
of a pin.

Gleaming, round, smooth, it resembles nothing
so much as a highly-charged dance floor
for atoms done up to the nines
where you chassis ecstatically (as you seldom did in life)
with your beloved in your arms.
You turn with your mother in your arms.
You are spinning with your father in your arms.
Every love you've ever known, however brief or shaming,
long-gone grandparents, teachers, friends, even the odd family dog
is clasped in your arms as you take a turn round the floor
to quickstep, waltz, the Shimmy and the Hippy Hippy Shake,
while the indefatigable band plays over
the rhythm of your pulse.

All this turns
on something the size of the head of a pin
and it is stuck
alongside a myriad of others
in the dark pincushion of interstellar space

which is kept in a corner of the sewing box
of something so vast and forgetful
it seldom remembers to sew

like your Mother who sits all morning
looking out the window at the passing show,
a few buttons short
on the cardigan she has had so long
she has no idea where it came from,
or when she last looked inside
that sewing box in the corner.

She remembers this much: in the War,
people died, and they all loved to dance
and lived when they could, from the heart.
...

The best thing a dream can do for you
is not prophecy nor
free entertainment from your inner lunatic,

not even the message
your mind is holed below the waterline
and will sink fast unless
you can find that length of rope
you somehow let slip overboard last year

(though it's good to know the secret sharer of your life
remains on watch throughout the night,
a calm and I think magnificently bearded second-mate
— your first mate, beardless, sleeps beside you —
who will always truthfully report
the gravity of the buoyancy situation).

No, the best thing a dream
can do is remind you
it's not true

and the distressed lady
carrying her mutilated liver in a handbag
will not die,
not because you've saved her or failed her
as you rummaged frantically through her entrails,
but because she does not exist.

It's worth being reminded your mind
does this kind of thing most often
when you're wide awake,
especially the distressed ladies,

and to truly wake up is to know the reason
you cannot grasp that rope underwater
is there is no rope, no water,
only grasping —

Oh to surface beside an entire lover
and feel your fingers slowly unhook
one by painful one!
...

A speck of dust no weightier than a thought
must have touched dead water.
I did not see what started it, but watch the ring
expand as though the pool is shaping O!
while I stand with the same exclamation
widening through me —

Could the Porter Brook, this autumn park,
the fallen and the falling leaves,
this calm pool and the weir beyond, the onrush
to Stinky Bob steaming on his bench in the sun,
all the snags and graces with which things go downhill,
be best regarded not as material
but one long, complex thought of Autumn
on this sector of the planet in its circuit round the sun,
a beat in that catchy theme
The Way Things Are?

And, more usefully, as I watch that circle spread
and these words begin enlarging on a momentary calm,
might we consider what arises in our minds
as nothing other than water, sky, trees, seasons,
and we who see ourselves as moving through the world
are better seen as receptacles, hosts
of the being that moves through us,
the pool in which its dust is registered and spread?
...

Sometimes an axe was placed in the crops with the cutting edge to the skies.
Wikipedia
Praise our routines —
the dog walked at dawn, coffee to the left
at the place of work, soaking oatmeal overnight,
short doze in the afternoon, the Sunday
morning call to fading parent, breakfast
with radio, the lowering book at night, last embrace
then sleepy turning away,
morning greeting mumbled into the neck.

Praise them for they are most of our life,
the hard and the easy part,
the bit where we slog, the bit
where we are coasting, and knows which
but you in honest moments?

Praise too those times
we go off our rails,
the veggie splurging brown sauce on a bacon roll
and biting, astonished, into a life
she didn't know was also hers;
the man rising from bed after midnight,
to drive to the coast where he sits
in the car listening to a foreign radio station
make perfect sense of the multiple moons
colliding in the surf;
a summer dawn spent pacing outside Intensive Care,
still in slippers, drinking Bovril and telling strangers
about the life that is becoming
something you once knew.

Praise the moments we haven't a clue,
they may be the only answer
to a question we never knew we'd asked.
Yet I'm picturing days like stolid logs
lined up in the rain;
with full swing of the heart's axe,
aim to make kindling of those few
times we truly know what we are doing,
when we go with the grain
of our own life, and know it
as wood knows the cutting edge
and the true of the haft
only as it splits wide open.
...

My only talent lay in these.
My father rubbed his hands together,
stared as though their whorls held codes
of thirty years obstetric surgery.
It's a manual craft - the rest's just memory
and application. The hard art
lies in knowing when to stop.

He curled his fingers like a safe-cracker
recalling a demanding lock;
I glimpse a thousand silent break-ins:
the scalpel's shining jemmy pops
a window in the body, then - quick! -
working in the dark remove or
re-arrange, clean up, quit,
seal the entrance. Oh strange burglar
who leaves things better than he found them!
On good days it seemed my fingertips
could see through skin, and once inside
had little lamps attached, that lit
exactly how and where to go.
He felt most kin to plumbers, sparks and joiners,
men whose hands would speak for them.

I wander through the college, meet
portraits of those names he'd list,
Simpson, Lister, Wade and Bell,
the icons of his craft, recalled
as though he'd known them personally.
Impossible, of course. Fingers don't see.
Yet it gave me confidence, so I could proceed.

I stare at the College coat of arms,
that eye wide-open in the palm,
hear his long-dead voice, see again
those skilful hands that now are ash;
working these words I feel him by me,
lighting up the branching pathways.
Impossible, of course, and yet it gives
me confidence. We need
to believe we are not working blind;
with his eye open in my mind
I open the notebook and proceed.
...

For Catherine and Jamie

It is big sky and its changes,
the sea all round and the waters within.
It is the way sea and sky
work off each other constantly,
like people meeting in Alfred Street,
each face coming away with a hint
of the other's face pressed in it.
It is the way a week-long gale
ends and folk emerge to hear
a single bird cry way high up.

It is the way you lean to me
and the way I lean to you, as if
we are each other's prevailing;
how we connect along our shores,
the way we are tidal islands
joined for hours then inaccessible,
I'll go for that, and smile when I
pick sand off myself in the shower.
The way I am an inland loch to you
when a clatter of white whoops and rises...

It is the way Scotland looks to the South,
the way we enter friends' houses
to leave what we came with, or flick
the kettle's switch and wait.
This is where I want to live,
close to where the heart gives out,
ruined, perfected, an empty arch against the sky
where birds fly through instead of prayers
while in Hoy Sound the ferry's engines thrum
this life this life this life.
...

As your lover on waking recounts her dreams,
unruly, striking, unfathomable as herself,
your attention wanders
to her moving lips, throat, those slim shoulders
draped in a shawl of light, and what's being christened here
is not what is said but who is saying it,
the overwhelming fact
she lives and breathes beside you another day.

Other folks' golf shots being even less interesting
than their dreams, I'll be brief:
as she spoke I thought of a putt yesterday at the 4th,
as many feet from the pin as I am years from my birth,
several more than I am from my death -
one stiff clip, it birled across the green,
curved up the rise, swung down the dip
like a miniature planet heading home,

and the strangest thing is not what's going to happen
but your dazed, incredulous knowing it will,
long before the ball reaches the cup then drops,
that it's turned out right after all,
like waking one morning to find yourself
unerringly in love with your wife.
...

At the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh

My only talent lay in these.
My father rubbed his hands together,
stared as though their whorls held codes
of thirty years obstetric surgery -
It's a manual craft; the rest's just memory
and application. The hard art
lay in knowing when to stop.
He curled his fingers like a safe-cracker
recalling a demanding lock;
I glimpse a thousand silent break-ins:
the scalpel's shining jemmy pops
a window in the body, then - quick! -
working in the dark remove or
re-arrange, clean up, quit,
seal the way in. Oh strange burglar
who leaves things better than he found them!
On good days it seemed my fingertips
could see through skin, and once inside
had little lamps attached, that lit
exactly how and where to go.
He felt kin to painters, plumbers, joiners,
men whose hands were eloquent.
I wander through the college, stare
at portraits of those names he'd list,
Simpson, Lister, Wade and Bell,
the legends of his craft, recalled
as though he'd known them personally.
Impossible, of course. Fingers don't see.
Yet it gave me confidence, so I could proceed.
I stare at the College coat of arms,
that eye wide-open in the palm,
hear his long-dead voice, and see
those skilful hands that now are ash;
working these words I feel him by me,
lighting up the branching pathways.
Impossible, of course, and yet it gives
me confidence. Surely we need
to believe we are not working blind;
with his eye open in my mind
I open the notebook and proceed.
...

It's back again, the how of rain
pleating off leaky roans, binding
strands that curve down stanks, curl
by high-walled wynds and dreels,
past sweetie shops with one faint bulb,
bell faltering as the pinnied widow
shuffles through from her back room -
What can I do for you the day?
She hands me now
no Galaxy or Bounty Bar
but a kindly, weary face, smear
of lipstick for her public, the groove
tartan slippers wore in linoleum
from sitting-room to counter, over thirty years:
the lost fact of her existence.

Currents ravel past the draper's
where Mr Duncan and his unspeaking sister
sort shirts by collar size, set out
Mason's cuff links and next season's vests;
on stiff white cards their flowing pens
price elastic, Brylcreem, dark tartan braces.

Floods tangle, splice, uncoil
down Rodger Street, past bank and tearoom,
the dodgy garage where they sold airguns to anyone,
the steamed-up window of the ‘Royal'
where fires warms the bums of men who like
to drink standing, bunnets jammed down tight.
At Shore Street the rain-river
leaps the pavement, scours a channel
through pongy weed behind the sea wall
where damp frocks shiver under umbrellas
by the market cross, waiting for their lucky day
or at least the bus to Leven -
which won't come for ages, because it's Sunday.

In the hours between Stingray and the evening meal,
when the strings of family, place and history
working us, are all too bleeding visible,
as gutters burst the adolescent wonders
whether to have a quick one or read French poetry.
Smouldering with solitude, the prince of boredom
stands at the window, watching rain,
wondering when life ends, or will finally begin.

Fall, flow ache.
By those cramped streets, the kenned wynds,
loans, closes, byways, dreels,
the dying shops, fishermen's damp houses
with empty sail lofts, broken pantiles,
wash-houses not ready for witty conversion;
by the constricting, cherished dreichness of our town
whose high tide had ebbed before ours began;
by the draper with its yellow blinds pulled down,
the angle of a bent streetlamp,
the budgie cage in old Jeanie's window;
by the secret path behind the allotment,
the steep slalom of Burial Brae,
the short-cuts, the dank kirks and graveyards -
by these details we did not know we loved,
we grew up provincial, in the heart of the world.

You are standing at the bedroom window
watching rain, homework abandoned on the desk.
The parents are somewhere unimportant,
wee brother plays keepie-uppie in the gloom -
time to belt the shorty raincoat, go
in search of nothing but the life to come.
...

Privilege or necessity of age
this twice or thrice nightly quitting
warm pit for a slash in the dark?

Not that automatic
nocturnal quest to the loo and back
I woke to hear my father make,
heavy tread past my room humming
childlike under his breath
Oh Jeezy-beezy loves me
the Bible tells me so
and wondered that he went so often ...

Years tell not in the mind but in the bladder.
It's a reminder
who's in charge here
as one unzips the tent and stumbles
turf thrust wet between toes,

to sway stop stand
upright in the night
releasing
streams of oneself back to earth.

I find myself
upright in late middle-age
a mast stuck into the ground
bracing the billowing
spinnaker of night
as the dark hull of this island
sails forth with constellated sails …

Cockleshell image, I know!
Couped by the first critical wave
but wonderful to float within
for the duration of a pish.

Damp soles dried on palms,
back in my pit,
first offices of the night performed,
I smiled at the dark and sank.
...