Some New Age

Another poem from Mementoliths (2005). We visited Sedona, on our trip to the national parks of SW USA. It's full of New Age stuff, which I don't believe in, but, hey, it's harmless, mostly, innit? We saw Bell Rock through the lens of an approaching thunderstorm, which released a deluge when we were running about to find somewhere to have lunch. I remember seeing a member of the Solanaceae family, with red fruits like tiny tomatoes on the ends of their stems. I remember the scenery. I have no memory of the lunch. So here's the poem and its geo-intro:

Bell Rock, Sedona

Bell Rock is a singular lump of red sandstone, outside of Sedona, Arizona. Seen from most angles, it appears to be in the shape of a perfect bell. Sedona seems to be the New Age Capital of the USA. There’s a village in Normandy – Villedieu-les-Poeles – where real bells are cast from bell-metal (what else?). The cores are built up from clay, chalk, goat hair and horse dung. I’ve often wondered how the combination was first discovered. Maybe it just struck someone as an obvious thing to try, or maybe it was just whatever happened to be lying about.

Creationers

Route 66 ate the miles in Arizona,

past roadside cinder cones, ashy flows,

wayleave patched in yellow gaillardias

stitched together by blue lupins,

snaking to a straightened Colorado River

in a neck of Nevada.

Bus overtaken

by helmetless bikers,

where blown hair

is as cheap as freedom gets

Sedona’s red Bell Rock blazed in a thunderous morning.

In the dust, little blue flowers, a kind of tomato, sprawled untidily

among the beavertail cactus.

At noon the rain hit, hammered us

into the burger joint. Menu-whipped, we wandered

in and out of shops, unbelieving, staggering

from crystals to tarot, to shaman drums,

all the spiritual fashion accessories

for this New Age. All the easy answers

to the hard questions no-one dares to ask.

Kokopeli’s an omnipresent joker,

a flim-flam, but the real wonder-worker,

Coyote, ’s never seen. Easier

to believe the trappings than the core,

prefer dancer to do-er, decorator

to architect.

Colin Will

31/01/04

Oil shale

There was a programme on the telly a couple of weeks ago about oil shale mining in West Lothian. It was good to see the old familiar landmarks - we lived in Bathgate and Mid Calder for over 30 years before moving to Dunbar. Seeing a young woman exploring the Oakbank Mine reminded me of all the times I explored the stoop and room workings in the mine on the opposite bank of the Linhouse Water. I got quite far into the workings, before coming up against water too deep to wade through. The workings are bricked off now, and that's probably a good thing; old mines are dangerous places, even for the experienced. There were three horizontal mine openings - adits - joined by a long gallery parallel to the stream, overlooking the cliff face. And the gallery was pierced by openings, so it was well lit. It wasn't a well-visited place - you had to know it was there, as it was concealed from the Calder Wood Country Park above, and nobody went to the Oakbank Bing on the opposite bank in those days.

I wrote this poem in 1998 about the Five Sisters bing, no far away at Westwood, near West Calder. It was published in Mementoliths (Calder Wood Press 2005), and it contains the geological story as well as the poem. A revised version of the pamphlet, Mementoliths 2, is available from Amazon in a Kindle edition.



Oil shale, Mid Calder

In the woods behind our old home in Mid Calder the Linhouse Water cut through an outcrop of oil shale, a black and fissile deposit of curly carbonaceous claystone, laid down in lagoons. In the 1850’s James ‘Paraffin’ Young discovered you could cook this stuff, yielding a good quality mineral oil for lamps and heating. So naturally, a mining industry started up. In the beginning, the rock was mined where it outcropped, as in the Linhouse Water. Open adits were driven in from the streamside, and the shale was removed by stoop and room working, leaving pillars of rock supporting the roof. It’s quite scary, but I’ve gone in about 500 metres into the workings without coming to the end. A sobering thought, that the big beech trees of Calder Wood Park were somewhere above my head.



Five Sisters

Dry shale’s a slippery medium;
platy flakes of calcined clay
slide over each other
as I launch and leap
down the bing’s steep slope.

Heels dig deep to stabilise
on each long jump,
lunging further
than an Olympian can.

A sense of balance
becomes more important
than a sense of proportion;
fun outweighs gravity
and son-flanked father laughs
as all three skelter to the base.

The long trudge up
to the tip’s top
is an Everest epic
of back-sliding and step-kicking,
and it’s a relief to reach
the five-way summit
for the next downhill slalom.

This stuff was hewn
in oil-shale’s heyday –
retorted and refined
it lit the lamps
and oiled the guns
to blaze at Kaiser Bill
in Scotland’s first oil boom.

The waste, the waste of it all,
a red ton per barrel, tipped and piled;
flat-topped clinker mesas sat and waited
for the road-making boom to come.

Mostly shifted now,
Contentibus bottoms the by-pass,
and Addiewell’s ‘Reserved for Nature’.
But Westwood’s left, the red skirts
of the Five Sisters preserved
as industrial heritage,
now the industry’s gone.

Bing-jumping’s finished too –
my knees wouldn’t take it –
and my boys are men
and moved away.
I wonder if they recall
these pink hills of childhood,
these mountains once mined,
this discarded debris
in a paraffin playground?


Copyright (c) Colin Will 2005, 2016

The 'How well do you know someone?' poem

I like to write poems about imagined relationships, I suppose I recognise now that it's from the storytelling side of my character. This one, as I recall, came from a writing challenge set in the Dunbar Writers group. It was written in 2004, and published in Sushi & Chips (Diehard 2006).


Foundations

In an untended day

she looks for dust in his bookcase,

finds a shelf of sci-fi long past its read-by.

Idly, an old Asimov reveals

a scrawly bookmark, a letter

in a hand she does not own.

She hesitates; doubts and rights

and wrongs conflict, and are not

resolved, but fingers stretch,

and sweaty curious hands

unfold and smooth

the wrinkled paper.

Some words are blurred

and waterworn, but darling,

desperate and love are clear.

Downstairs his dog barks

at her row of flying ducks

where he wanted nuns –

his brother has them -  worse -

gnomes who moon all night

in his concrete garden.

Derek might have a desperate darling

but not her John, whose vows

she thought a deep and unacknowledged

sacrament, a layer of himself

rigid as limestone, a core value.

But now she has a key

without a lock, without a door,

an unsuspected room

in a house she thought she knew.

She folds the letter, puts it back,

leaves the cobwebs hanging

and the window unwashed.

Copyright  © Colin Will, 2006, 2016

The acting poem

This one's about acting in On Golden Pond, the first time I did it. I was actually in two productions, separated by several years, and in different drama groups, but playing the same part - Charlie the Maine mailman. I suppose I'm thinking a lot about my acting days lately, because I'm writing a series of short stories based on my career in amdram, from 1982 to 2002, as actor, director, lighting designer and general backstage helper. I loved it. Being backstage in a theatre is one of the most magical experience I know, and I never got over the thrill of it. 

This was first published in my second book - Seven Senses - published by Diehard and now available from Amazon, slightly modified, in a Kindle edition (ASIN B005FG1IU0).

The mailman cometh

(After Ernest Thompson’s On Golden Pond)

I’m listening to Copland’s Appalachian Spring

for the hundredth time or more.

It’s a fine piece on its own

but for me it also tugs back curtains

on backstage nerves and certainty.

The opening, quiet and slow,

dignity in the backwoods,

and then a jaggy dance

before the bassoon’s pipe-and-slippered serenity.

At the side of the song,

on the corners of hearing,

there’s a stringed tension

under the oboe’s yearning

and that’s a part of why I am.

That was when, each night,

the curtain opened and the play began.

I watched from the wings, never bored, breathing,

as every night the old couple entered their Maine

and groused through their first scene,

until my goofied entrance.

Their daughter was my first boy-dream,

and my only hopeless adult adulation.

When she came back with her own routemap

I knew there could have been love -I felt it -

but the freeway world’s dissatisfactions

bypassed my hick laughter;

my forest-nurtured wishing.

You could never be everyone’s everything -

the son your father wanted -

the home-wife for me -

the fiery, assenting lover for yourself.

And yet, as we played our roles,

you torn, and hating, but only self-hurting;

me the audience’s comic relief,

we really lived our paper lives

and the words became flesh,

knowing less than love,

needing more than music.

Copyright © Colin Will, 1996, 2000, 2016

More geology

Another excerpt from Mementoliths, first printed in 2005, this one from the Kindle edition, Mementoloiths2, available from Amazon. Again, there's a description of the rock, followed by a poem which I associated with it. The association here is with the ancient nature of the rock, and with James Hutton, the man who first realised the enormity of geological time - 'no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.'

Granulite, Scourie

This rock is granular in texture (hence the name), grey in colour, made from mixed black and white grains. This is the oldest rock in Scotland – 2.9 Ga old, and that’s a major part of the age of the planet. One man who appreciated the enormous scale of geological time was James Hutton, author of The Theory of the Earth (1795). He wrote of finding in the cyclical processes of the Earth “no vestige of a beginning and no prospect of an end”. It’s very tempting to suggest that some of Robert Burns’ lines in ‘My luv is like a red, red rose’ owe a debt to Hutton, and to his friend Sir James Hall, of Dunglass – Burns certainly met them both in Edinburgh. Earlier, Hutton had farmed at Slighhouses in the Berwickshire hinterland, where he wrote an enormous unpublished manuscript on agriculture, preserved in the National Library of Scotland.

The Elements of Agriculture

It’s cool here on Monynut Edge,

strafed by the wind,

grubbing for enlightenment

among the scabby half-chewed neeps

and scunnered sheep.

Another page done - two candles-worth -

yet more scrawled remembrances

and admonitions

on the improvement of pasture,

the winterage of beasts

and the beneficiation of soils.

This book will treasure me

in times to come, enough

to forego farming

and fund my hammering

in the hame hills, and furth,

through the echoing halls

of uncountable time,

and the rocks of eternity.

Copyright  @ Colin Will 2005, 2016

The Valentine

Over the years I've written several Valentine poems for Jane, but not for some time. Now, with our 50th anniversary coming up in April (which we'll be celebrating privately, just the two of us, as in the beginning) I felt the urge to write a new one.



For Jane, 2016

It’s coming up to our 50^th,
but of course our love began
before that. I’d be lying
if I said I can’t remember us
back then. I definitely can,
it’s just that memories get buried
with the weight of life on top.

Sometimes it needs a jog,
a jolt, an image, for me to begin
to unravel the years, the experiences,
especially in the early times.
But one thing I do recall
with absolute clarity.
At the start of us, a friend asked,
‘How long will it last?’ 
I said, ‘The rest of my life.’ 
That was, and still is, true.


Copyright © Colin Will 2016

Stones again

Another poem from Mementoliths (2005). This time I'm including the full description of the rock, as I think it's quite poetic, even with all the geological terms. It's the kind of stone you'd pick up on a beach, walking with a loved one, talking about this and that. The paleness of it, it's chunky crystals, a lucky stone, a talking point, the kind of stone you'd either keep or drop, but you would never throw it into the anonymity of the sea.


Pegmatite, South Harris

A pale rock, composed of large angular crystals of near-pink plagioclase feldspar in a matrix of interlocked quartz - sugar-grained, and translucent, milky, like candle-drips – with black patches of shiny biotite in foliated groups, the minerals aligned as if bedded, frozen in the moment of crystallising. It was formed deep in the crust, when a mass of granitic composition cooled very very slowly, at a temperature close to its melting point, so the crystals had time to grow really large. I picked this piece up on the shore at Horgabost, Harris, just along the road from Luskentyre – one of Norman MacCaig’s favourite places (and no wonder). Harris is all roundness, everything smoothed by the weather of aeons. These islands are as much water as solid ground, and where the lochs hold islands, each has a water-hollow in its heart, with a wet rock in the middle – an infinite regression of water and stone.




Tryst

We sit together on a bank of yielding pebbles
looking out on a sea an even blue.

We discuss our latest local difficulties,
the stuttering points where our boats have grounded,

the reefs of indecision and the myriad channels
of possibility, the stumps of old wrecks

from our separate histories, the courses we might set
in convoy or as independent voyagers.

At some stage an unvoiced agreement is reached.
Sinews are stretched as we stand, stones shift

and scooped prints near the wave’s edge mark our ways
on the wet beach, and the incremental progress of tides


Colin Will
Copyright (c) 2003, 2005

More geology

Back in 2005 I published Mementoliths, a wee pamphlet where each poem was introduced by a short piece of writing on a geological or mineral topic related to the poem. 

This one was inspired by a trip with a friend to a quarry near Middleton, Midlothian. She thought it was a quarry she'd visited as a child with her late father. She described it to me, and I thought it sounded wonderful, but I couldn't place it. So we went to Middleton, and it wasn't like that at all. It was...



The Wrong Quarry

Blue flakes litter the grey sky bowl.

We pick our careful way

between squelch and slide,

totter and bog-soak.

A steady breeze removes

the heat of walking

from spoil-heap to cart-track.

We reach the carved cliff

and peck among sharpened talus,

seeking the pearly glyphs

of prehistory among industrial shards.

A mud burrow in the sandy stone

reveals a creature's traces

like the curling whiff of smoking cordite

from a dropped gun

beside an absent victim.

It's all about the tectonics of memory

shuffling continental fragments;

how a wedge of childhood

docks against the hard foreland

of an adult's dreams. Yet though

pink spikes of orchids drift

through the purple tufts of thistles

the way they always did,

the rocks have moved away,

buried or eroded. Time subducts

experience, when no-one checks

in the missing years. What's left

is mystery, uncertainty, the lost clues

to map our Polar Wandering Curve

and reunite a personal Gondwana.


Copyright  © Colin Will 2005