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

The New Year poem

I don't celebrate Hogmanay - never mind why. I prefer to go somewhere with Jane for a walk in surroundings new to us or familiar, with a piece-box of salmon sandwiches (pink salmon, of course) and a flask of black coffee. It's been our thing for so many years that I've forgotten when it started.

This poem was written in the mid-1990s and published in 1999 in the poem-card Roundabout Livingston. The poem-cards were collected and put out as a Kindle e-book as Recycled Cards (available from Amazon).

The Ne'erday blaws

With no time for boozy sentimentality
we picnic by the sea each year.
Seeing existence as continuous
we have now no need of bells, besides,
there are, in each of us,
too many bitter thoughts
and sad reflections at this time.

Better to be blown by the first gusts of January,
seeing a brown and silty sea,
mounded by the gales,
appearing higher than the roadway.
We walk through an empty Culross,
discoverers of a new history.
We smile at each other
as rain slaps our faces,
crazy in alone being here
and delighting in being alone
but for the sermon-ready rooks
hopping solemnly in the shelter of the abbey ruins.

At North Berwick, past the socket
of an old eruption - green ash and purple blocks -
we turn a corner and hear the clicks
of crossbills feeding in the stunted pines;
on the sands a vortex of waders dodges each wave.

In Crail harbour
a seagull becomes part of the reflection,
paddling through windows, walls and lobster-pots.
It pauses before a mountain of floating snow
pretending to be a cloud -
the alchemy of winter skies.
In the sunset we drive home,
the light dimming quickly
as we cross the bridge.
The flicking cables make
a silent film of our flight
arching over a glittering Forth.


We walk through our local streets
seeing "For Sale" signs like corpse-markers
on a medieval battlefield.
The season calls for the placement of tokens
in graveyards - a colourful splash,
for Scotland's towns are mostly drab,
dull dwelling-places merely.
It reminds me of Black Forest window-boxes -
all those salvias defying the grim green spruce.
In our first winter in Mid Calder,
walking through the foggy woods
I heard, unseen, the calls of whooper swans,
an eerie sound at the time,
but no more significant than
"Here's tae us, wha's like us?"

"See yis a' next year?"
And I don't think.

We'll be looking out to some sea,
planning the fierce joys of sudden summers,
the new sights and novelties
reflected in each other,
for what we do best
we do best together.

At our ease we've grown,
and growth, if anything,
is what is meant by
what we are.

Copyright © Colin Will, 1999, 2015