Fife coastal walk

Fife Coastal Walk

These poems were inspired by stages of the Fife Coastal Walk, undertaken in 1997 and 1998. They were later published in issues of Fife Lines. 

1. Elie to St Monans

The approval of seals

Today we’ll be sea-things;
you’ll be a seal and I’ll be
a different seal. We’ll
swerve and flash
through the kelp stipes,
trailing silver bubble-trains
from our flipper-tips.

What’s the seal-doing word?
Cavort - that’s it - seals cavort
like no other creatures.
Do sloths cavort?
No, sloths brummage in the branches,
with their moths.
Dromedaries lollop,
while elephants proceed.

Only we seals cavort,
having the grace and wit
to enjoy seal-ness,
the sea’s beanfeasts,
and its scope for frolic.

Above, in silhouette against the blue,
a shag whisks the waves to soft peaks,
thrashing feathers back into line.

Shoreward we hear
the fizzing rattle of pebbles
in the wave’s backwash.

Being seals we live only now,
where the word is made fish.
The past is a tablet of overwritten dreams,
and we cheerfully ignore
the abyssal darkness
where a fear-filled future upwells.

Colin Will
9 March, 1997
St Monans

2. St Monans to Anstruther

Marigold

Bobbing beside the moored scampi-boat

an orange rubber glove floats finger-up;

a hand raised from the deep, in greeting or despair.

The sea moves it in a mermaid’s wave,

gently rising, gently falling, turning,

but always with the wrist hidden.

I’m almost sure it’s empty,

but the drowned have many tricks

to teach an old sea-dog.

Perhaps the strings that shift the fingers

stretch far down to bone claws

clutching at lost air.  Perhaps.

Colin Will 

25 March 1997

Anstruther

3. Anstruther to Crail

The stone harmonium

Once waves planed a cliff

from ancient dunes,

then joints were quarried, cracks caved

by the sea’s suspended grit,

grinding weaknesses between blocks,

stacks cleft to the open sky.

As the land rose,

freed from the weight of winter,

the stone ribs stood free,

one pierced with a perfect port-hole

for the wind’s whistle

to blow grains to grow new dunes.

The codes for lovers and haters

adorn the platy walls of this alfresco gallery -

Lascaux in language -

but where bull or bison diagrammed for ritual,

now shapes of hearts and body parts

promote a baser magic.

It won’t last.  Weather will erase,

and like the transient smoke we saw

from the derelict cottage chimney,

and then did not see,

the rocks too are temporary

in landscape’s timescales.

Colin Will

Caiplin Caves, near Crail

March 29, 1997

4. Crail to Fife Ness

The physics of fishing

An eider arrows over the waves.
In the depths below the bobbing floats
Heisenberg’s lobsters may, or may not,
lurk in each weighted pot.

The uncertainty is resolved
when Schrödinger gaffs
the suspended line, reels in,
and curses every stolen bait
and empty creel,
in the manner of all Fife fishermen,
then plouters home through the swell
to poison his cat.


Colin Will

Fife Ness21/09/98

All poems Copyright © Colin Will, 1997, 1998, 2018