Heron

for Sheena

I come back to you again,

ocean-ankled, a long line

from leg to neck, a right

angle, half-pick head

all gaze and calculation

from black crest

                                                Dylan-doffed cap

                                                mid the briny bells

                                                of sea shells

                        to yellow spear.

Somewhere, out of my sight

there’s an eye, and, Picasso’d over face,

another, each rigid in bone circlets;

each admiring the tide’s lapping advance,

a twice-daily fish delivery system.

You notice me, and jut precedes stretch,

a deliberate step to firmer ground,

squat-thrust bounce into air,

and slow wing-beats,

                                                an old man

                                    shaking invisible rain

                                    from two stiff umbrellas.

It wasn’t you, but by the mill

another coasted out from

the stream’s tree line -

                                    nest-breaker,

                                    egg-scrambler,

                                    chick-gobbler.

It’s all true, not subject

to haughty denial,       which you don’t,

or dismissive flap. True too

that your home stinks

that you dismember frogs

and leave their quartered guts

and egg-masses by the pond-side

slaughterhouse,

that you kill heronry trees

with your toxic shit.

But I’m no judge        no-one can be, black cap or not.

Your feathers are grey variants, subtle -

no flashing gaudy plumes -

shading off, a mistless misting out

as a cloud unblues the sea.

I’ve seen you make

the perfect catch

                                    the stab, shake,

wash and swallow technique,

masterful. But not today; today

the water is cold, and the shoals

of silver-finned tinies are not running.

Spaced out, a family dysfunctions

along the Cove rocks

                                    barnacled limestone ribs

four hundred yards apart. The youngster

                                    skittish kid

takes less time to pause and ponder

than his ponderous parents

                                    moving with the fast crowd,

                                    noisy,

                                    between shriek and croak,

                                    fish-frightener,

but speed won’t last. Soon enough

he’ll signal, slow.

You are still, the perfect waiter;

long after I become impatient

stand, stretch, your cold stare

continues.

You were here when I arrived

but I see you go.

Left behind, in soft sand,

four long toe-tracks, the rear one

                                    offset.

Colin Will

26/04/04

Published in Sushi & Chips, Diehard Press, 2006

Bog cotton

One of my poems in Scots. I don't write in Scots as often as I maybe should, but I'm pleased with this one. It was published in The Propriety of Weeding (Red Squirrel Press, 2012)

Bog cotton

Wrappit in ma downie canach sark

Ah feel nae win, nor fear nae cauld.

A kin o girss, ye say?

Ae silky tassle, snaw-bricht,

bends wi the warslin westers

an chitterin northlies

bit stauns abin the muir,

nae heich, nae sae heich

as hae them pu’ed oot.

Some fite flags is no

fur giein up, bit gauin oan.

Colin Will

08/02/2009

Petrichor

I was at Matt MacDonald's launch of his new book of poems, Petrichor, today. He asked the audience if anyone knew what the word meant, and I said yes, having been told the word when Eleanor Livingstone and I were representing Scotland at an international poetry festival in Lithuania. I wrote a poem inspired by the experience, and it was published in The floorshow at the Mad Yak Cafe in 2010.

Petrichor
for Eleanor

Harsh cries from the trees, troll and ogre visions,
idylls, nightmares, signless tracks, waterbirds, frogs
pumping grunge for a zippy dragonfly.

The wind drops; sky is painted colourless;
woods fill with sudden mosquitoes
a nearby smoker’s fumes don’t dispel.

Sound of coalescing drops on plastic roof,
monoblocs darken. There must be a name
for the smell of first rain on warm stone.

Soil absorbs the early drops,
liquid films particles, begins to flow
through interstitial space.

Plant roots extend tentative hairs,
probe initial water, test its extent,
uncommitted, pending proof of shower’s half-life.

Everybody says it’s needed, s’been too long dry,
but there’s a sense of something ending:
not summer, but sunny certainties.



Colin Will
Alausyne, Lithuania, 14:06:08
Published in The floorshow at the Mad Yak Café, Red Squirrel Press, 2010

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

The flowers of Scotland

I wrote this in 1997, and presented it to the Botanical Society of Scotland. It was later published as a poem card.

The Flowers of Scotland; a personal field-trip
by Colin Will

To the upward limits of the land
there is green, there is growth.

In the depths of the blackest lochs
skeins of cells float on thermal contours.

In between, layers of life profess
the goodness of sun, and wind, and rain.

Ice shaped the uplands,
filing mountains to points
or chiselled ridges
on which the distance balances.

In summer, on Schiehallion,
cloudberries ramble over the quartzite cobbles,
before the winter-whitened ptarmigan
peck over the snow crust, scavenging seeds.

The calc-schists of Ben Lawers
are over-grazed by sheep (and botanists),
and on the one way up
peat-slopes are cut to slurry
by tourist trainers.

Luckily once, the wrong path up Cruach Ardrain
revealed a field of saxifrages,
not known to unlost walkers.

On the high moors, soil and grass
scab the tops of rock outcrops
where rabbits bob and sentinel.

Wrens flit in archipelagos of gorse,
yellow-edged, and dead-centred;
flowers verging with the trefoils
while track-side whin-pods pop in the heat.

A ewe gives a mother-worried bleat
to her hidden daughter
cropping grass between the junipers.
Their meadow is dimensioned by orchids
and fanned by butterflies
rushing for thyme.

A hoodie stalks the crag’s grey summit
then glides in the updraught
to a rowan perch -
an outpost of his circuit.

Moss and fine grasses
flush the larch-wood’s floor
between cast branches
with their grey crusts of lichen.

Deeper in, ferns feather the clearings
where each toadstooled hump
conceals a tripping stump.
Blaeberry patches smother unplanted outcrops
in green and reddening leaves on wire stems.

The pine’s green candles relax and darken
as the needles wax.
Old trees are many-branched,
like Caledonian menorahs
under rounded crowns.

Coppiced oak woods
yielded stripped bark
for tanning leather.
What’s left, neglected,
are shaky poles, thin growth,
feebly-rooted, or rotted
into woodpecker drum-holes.

Alder’s roots, knotted with nitrogen,
flushed clean by the spring flood
exposed at summer’s ford
where we back-packed the kids,
freezing feet sliding
on the slippery boulders.

As the stream’s course swivels
the trees are undercut
until a final blow
will topple them into the burn.

Green hair streams in the shallows
as if a vegetable Rapunzel
lies entowered below the waterline.

The soft bells of water over rocks
die to the silent power
of the broadening river
pushing to the sea.

On the islands
the machair’s multi-jewelled blanket
is Hebrides Heaven
for ascended larks.

Down south, behind the dune slacks,
sea-holly prickles picnickers’ toes
as their baggage brushes ragwort skeletons
cinnabarred with caterpillars.

On the flats, beyond green banks
which bolster and bend the water’s flow,
mud-plants, sea-rinsed, grow green skins
like paints on a black and smelly canvas.

Kelp throngs the surging sea-front;
tugged from every side
its living glue holds it fast
as the slow waves of the moon’s weight
raise continents of water daily, nightly.

Free-floating aggregates of organelles
pump sunlight into sugars
below the surface turbulence,
making a crop which turn
the world’s cycles of air and earth.

The true ‘Flowers of Scotland’
are the landscapes where they grow.
Plants have no tongues to tell
their provenance;
no patriotic theme-songs
twist through the thistles,
and nationality is more arbitrary,
than climate, latitude, or soil.

They are here because
this is where their seeds fell
and found favour,
spreading the green stain of life
over Scotland’s bedrock.


Copyright © Colin Will 1997, 1998, 2018

Seven Scottish plants

Seven Scottish plants

Armeria maritima

Thrift is the star of the machair,
scattering pink balls of bloom
which jump from spiky tufts.
Don’t be miserly -
spend on thrift.
It needs no sailor-songs
or sea-salt seasoning,
but dry land suits it
once it’s beached.


Fragaria vesca

To gather wild strawberries in the woods
you need a very small basket, my dear.
Easier to bring them home
pre-eaten,
as memories of how each fruit
hit the tongue,
flooding your mouth with flavour.
Jam would seem a labour of Hercules
and leave the foxes unsweetened.


Crataegus monogyna

Hawthorn hedges
show the edges of ownership
in white lines of flourish
which cast a sickly sweetness
to each breeze.
The berries are an un-rorie red,
a modest shade,
and half-hidden by leaves.
Frost-softened, they form
a redwing’s feast.


Erica carnea

Bell heather banks
on a certain dryness.
Its grey-green leaves
are tight to the stems.
Its bells ring the changes
from palest pink to purple-red.
Whatever the colour,
bumble bees booze on them.


Sambucus nigra

Elder flowers
are champagne-sweet -
blanc-de-blanc -
unlike their rank-smelling stems.
The berries, picked black,
make a fine wine -
as gamey as Gamay -
and the more we pick
the less the birds overeat.
Let’s drink to slim thrushes.


Trollius europaeus

Beside a ditch,
surrounded by thousands
of its open cousins,
a solitary globeflower
displays its golden ball,
a closed churn
among the butter’s cups.


Anemone nemorosa

Among the first to fumble
in the waking of spring,
the wood anemones’
pink-flushed white stars
come out to twinkle
before the beech leaves
send them back to sleep.



Copyright © Colin Will 1996 and 2018

These poems were first published in Nomad magazine in 1996, but have not been published in any of my books.

Easter 2017

I believe this one is as close to an Easter poem as this old Buddhist can get. It was published in Sushi & Chips (Diehard, 20016). The place that inspired it was St Abb's Head. I was watching the guillemots on the rocks, and it occurred to me that the word for the red-legged guillemot is the same in Shetlandic and Icelandic - Tysties. They are special birds..

Tysties

(St Abbs Head)

Guano stains run down-rock

almost to the line

greened by sea-surge.

Shell-Grip, courtesy of barnacles,

roughens landing pads.

Neighbours sense snack-time,

whirr away, arrowing waves,

fly through their thicker element,

stab, engulf small fish

whose ends know no salvation.

A pointed egg rolls on rock

ledge, falls or is saved,

pouched and warmed. The choice

is the wind’s, or the gusting gull’s.

Meanwhile, taut in his tree,

the lanced man stiffens,

circlet of barbs, fly-crust,

selects himself, victim and victor.

She pictures him,

tries to work out

how it all fits, as if it should.

Between ‘can’ and ‘must’

is a Poisson distribution

with ‘may’ on the curve’s

culmination. No guarantees,

no certainties, no knowns

but the ocean’s vastness

and life’s shortening odds

against the blind beaks.

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

The solstice poem

Posting today for the winter solstice, this poem took its inspiration from William Dunbar, that marvellous Makar, who may or may not have taken his surname from the town where I now live. It's known his family had land in the area. At any rate, I like to think there's a connection. This is a dark poem, and I make no apology for that. Sometimes it really is dark.

This poem was written in 2009 and first published in The floorshow at the Mad Yak Café (Red Squirrel Press, 2010).

The Low Point

(after ‘A Meditatioun in Wyntir’, by William Dunbar, c 1460- c 1520)

“Dirk and drublie days” right enough,

but the heavens are not always sable –

some days there are true skies, and a wind

shifted from Siberia, to seek unfurnished skin.

Today the longer dark hours are filled

with entertainments then curtailed. It’s hard

to imagine what true darkness meant

for plays, poems, music – summer pursuits all.

Scratching by candle, each scrivener wrought

on quires of deckled paper, by goosequill and gallol,

words of wisdom, terms of love and learning,

some meters of beauty to catch future’s eye.

Warring motives lay on from every side.

Despair’s the easy one now, so much bad news

in these cold times, suggest the one

begets the other. Patience dismissed,

and fortune damned – predestiny leaves no room

for innocent actions. We may as well be doomed

as blessed, and with an equal chance. Causality

is on a winter break, along with warmth and light.

Slyly, with some pretence of favour, chilly whispers

question why I carry forward a life that soon

I’ll leave behind, with loves and friendships

broken links, unconnected leads and empty ears.

The forgetfulness of age is a brotherly service,

for remembrance of ourselves in youth

would give us pain – the way we were,

the things we did, the chances missed.

And death to come is final leveller;

low or high, we similarly stoop to enter

the same one-way system, a singularity,

the dimming doorway to a hall of nothing.

But yet, four minutes today, five tomorrow,

the nights imperceptibly shorten, and at some point

I’ll know times have changed, that summer pleasures

lie ahead, and will return. The ball rolls round.

Copyright  © Colin Will, 2009, 2010