how often stones

While this blog usually contains published poems with or without commentaries, in this case I'm posting a previously unpublished piece. I don't know if it's a poem or not. At the end of the project The Road North, by Alec Finlay and Ken Cockburn, I went to an exhibition about it in the Scottish Poetry Library. It included a wee slide viewer with a slide show. I found it utterly captivating. The second time the slides came round, I found myself writing very quickly a series of imaginary captions suggested by the photographs. The outcome is the sort of thing that probably wouldn't lend itself to conventional publication in print, so I won't even try, but some of the fragments I think are worth hanging on to. I must emphasise that these are not haiku. As Norman MacCaig might have said, 'No, Colin, these are wee poems.' I worked with Alec and Ken on a couple of sections of the project, and my piece on Beinn Dorain forms part of it. I was there at the beginning and at the end of it. So, with thanks to Alec and Ken, here it is.

how often stones

on the shore

sea-washed pebbles and

a thin blue line knotted through the kelp

rusted iron railings

sight of lawns, trees and

padlocked gates – keep shut

behind the shore

a cliff, stacked strata,

near vertical, with a wayward bend

moving matching pebbles

to make pictures

hand stone hand stone two eyes

close to Gavin Maxwell’s

secret places

otter bronze sea look

miniature bottle

full of golden liquid

whisky on the shore

a crown

carved, abandoned

the king’s worn stone

a place to store nets

shelter from the rain

a wee howff i the neuk o crags

blue surprises

in the short grass

spring squill, I will, I will

pink blossoms

blown in the cliff’s wind

thrift overhangs a wish

rusty iron

forms a sculpture

Iron Cross, Third Class, the Trinity

abandoned house

on the headland

two gables, an emptiness between

green wisps,

grey-green crusts

lichen thatching a wall

feather stone stone feather

copse in winter wheat

broken eggs on granite

eggy boulders in a field

turbines, turning

the ramsons are labelled

radar golfballs, a really big mashie niblick

blue stone wet stone whetstone

cups and rings

Beinn Dorain, Scotland’s Fuji

school, crossing

Isobel in 3

a doorless doorway

a fire, place

she, ling

Barney’s feet below everything

fox, gloves, hot palms

gravelly array, log arc

rasps in the nettlebed

kegs akimbo in the woods

oak, leaves

a loch cut in two by a long straight branch

initials in a tree trunk

again, but different

peat layered, Pete Laird

hat in a boat

moss pillows

quartz crossed pebble

faint track through blueberries

can’t see Slioch

browning bracken

faint writing

I’ve been here

or somewhere like it

jelly fungus, Bulgaria inquinans

oak pennies

through a window

a compass, pointedly

ripple tracks

drowning trees

mossy trunk

wishing tree

violas, yarrow

old machinery

feet in the loch

boots on the shore

a meadow, unmown

rasps at the roadside

aspen, birch, bark, willow, aspen

an alder wish

birch grove

bridge ruin

basalt boulders

old one-eye

Meg sprinkles

door sneck

a goose-line

shelly mermaid

sun cracks, once

Skye, sea, sky

hairy Highlander, in the bushes

cliff and dyke, two magma pulses

messages on thistles

wrack, that slurping sound

lichen moon circle

shore post

dock in the bay

whisky, stoned

crotal, usnea

three cups, no rings

rim of a cup is a ring

tea-time, Maree

jaggy mountains

ash wish

limpet-eyed

running for the boat

an empty crab

crustose, foliose

burnet moth, ragwort

Jura malt

sands of Morar

empty picnic table

standing, stones

foxglove, dropsy

eight gold bottles

one for the falls

apple blossom

ramsons, walk sign

circular walk round cup

it’s OK not to talk

fucking toads

falls of Dochart

flask and book

hand water

stump

wee stone ring

iron bridge track

all the way

home

Copyright © Colin Will

24/11/2011

Mountain poem

The Cioch is a massive rock pinnacle which juts out from a slab of rough gabbro on the face of the Sron na Ciche in the Cuillin of Skye. Jane and I climbed it in 1963, but it wasn't until 1997 that I wrote the following poem. It's the first poem in my second collection - Seven Senses - published by Diehard in 2000, and it has been out of print for some years. I've written many mountain poems over the years, but these days I mostly restrict myself to hill walking, rather than rock climbing. The exposure walking up the slab is quite terrifying, as is the final push to the top of the pinnacle.

A’ Chioch

You are free, if you are brave, to stand up
on this steep rough rock.
Hands are not needed
except for reassurance.
This slab is so sound
you could run up, unroped,
facing in, looking up.

But back, behind,
there’s air below;
a thousand feet
until you’d hit
the crags and boulders -
and you’re no cartoon coyote.

The wee lochan’s a blue eye, open,
on the bog’s distant map,
and all the peaty tracks you struggled up
are little brown scratches.

You turn again to what’s afoot,
release locked fingers, look up,
and take the next few steps,
and the rope that stops you falling
is the one that pulls you on
into danger, into further fear.

At the deepest level,
where it hurts to tell,
every climb’s a first
and last
ascent.


Copyright  © Colin Will 2000