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