The ambiguous poem

Sometimes I don't want to be crystal clear in a poem, even a short poem. Sometimes I want the reader to figure out the meaning without having it spelled out. Poems that make you work a bit tend to last longer in the memory, I believe.

This one, written as far back as 1993 and published in my first collection - Thirteen Ways of Looking At the Highlands (Diehard, 1996) - is an example. To have been explicit here would have been wrong. It's a very short poem, but probably needs reading two or three times. I've long forgotten where the particular setting was, but it was a beach with shallow water where you could walk out a considerable distance without getting out of your depth.

I haven't read it in public for years, but every time I did read it, someone would come up to me and ask, 'Did you mean ... ?' And yes, I did. The sea is a scary place, and maybe it's not always obvious why it is. Sometimes you do get out of your depth.


Tides

Walking far out in the clear green sea,
watching waves at eye height
just that little bit further,
I begin to fear, not being overcome,
but losing, for no reason,
the urge to resist letting go.



Copyright  © Colin Will 1996, 2015

The quantum physics poem

Although I worked in geological and botanical organisations, I've got a fairly broad grounding in the other sciences, and quantum physics has always fascinated me. 

Back in 1998 I walked the Fife Coastal Trail in five sections over some summer weekends, and I managed to write a poem in each section. Four of them were first published in the magazine Fife Lines, but this one wasn't taken. It did come out in Snakeskin, and in 2011 I put it in the Kindle edition of Seven Senses, where it's in the company of the other Fife walk poems. It's available from Amazon, where I've published several out-of-print titles. It pleased me to imagine Fife fishermen named Heisenberg and Schrödinger, and to place the uncertainty principle and Schrödinger's cat paradox in their watery context. I also love the Scots word 'plouter'. It's what I do. It's what most of us do. 

I haven't quite managed to write a poem about collapsing wave functions, but some day I might.

The physics of fishing
(Fife Ness, 1998)

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


Copyright © Colin Will, 1998, 2011

The early morning poem

I'm an early riser, always have been. When I was working I lived at some distance from Edinburgh, so I had to drive from Mid Calder to King's Buildings or later The Botanics. After we moved to Dunbar I joined the ranks of rail commuters, shivering on the platform at Dunbar Station to wait for the 7.40 am train.

I didn't mind getting up at 6:15; the house was quiet, and I had my routine, a shower, coffee, making up my sandwiches for lunch, then leaving home, usually before the family woke up. From autumn to spring it meant I left and returned in darkness. And I found that I got up early even at weekends. Since retirement in 2002 I still get up early, maybe around 7am. It has its compensations though, seeing dawns, hearing birdsong and the sounds of towns waking up. Here's a poem from those working days - I wrote it in 1993, and it was published in my first collection, Thirteen Ways of Looking At the Highlands (Diehard, 1996):

Opening gambit


Dawn's the finest time there is.
I can't fault it; clear or clouded,
it's somehow always novel,
watching skies open towards a sunrise
behind the hills, or pinkening
the city's castle- and spire-lines.
Heaven knows I've seen enough of them,
but there's always the hope
of life becoming brighter
in the hour of the world's lightening.

Copyright  © Colin Will 1996, 2015

The gym poem

I've mentioned before, probably several times, that I go to a gym regularly. The habit started probably some time in the 1980s, when I was working as Librarian at the British Geological Survey, then based on the University of Edinburgh's science campus. There was a gym there, we were entitled to use it, and I did, often in lieu of lunch.

When I moved to the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh in 1988 I missed it, but for a time I was allowed to use the University's facilities at The Pleasance. Then the rules changed, and I couldn't use it, so I sometimes went to a private gym, but most often I used the gym at the Commonwealth Pool. Then I got too busy, and didn't go regularly, until after we moved to Dunbar in 2000. There's a gym here, in the Leisure Pool building, and after I retired in 2002 I was eligible for reduced rates. For a very small monthly payment, I have unlimited off-peak access to the gym, the health suite and the pool. I try to go three times a week, and I'm convinced of the health benefits. But it's also a social thing. I have friends who go there regularly, and we find the time to chat between struggling with the treadmill, the cross-trainer, the resistance machines and the dumb-bells.

So it maybe won't come as a surprise that from time to time I'm challenged to write a poem about the gym, and once or twice, I have. This one was first published in the New Voices Press anthology, Working Words (2008), and is included in my 2012 collection, The propriety of weeding, available from Red Squirrel Press.

Working Mothers

Monday morning, kids crêched,
time to hit the gym
for a weekly workout.

Time to catch
the latest chat,
as you run for dear life

facing the mirror
of yesterday’s extra helping,
seeing tomorrow’s toned

and youthful body;
squeezing out the weekend’s toxins,
working up a sweat,

a schedule to tuck and tighten,
to firm and reform your figure,
recover your before-baby body.

Row, run, step, push,
the cycle of exercise freewheels
to the sounds of rap and chatter.

Meanwhile, in the corner,
a puffing Gran tries to reset
her own odometer

to ten years back,
hoping for twenty more,
betrayed by connective tissue

which snaps when it used
to stretch, by ballooning veins
and the hourglass streaming faster.



Copyright © Colin Will 2008, 2012

The geological poem

I'm calling it that, but in reality I've written quite a few poems which feature geology and the other earth sciences. I did Open University courses in Geology, Geochemistry and Geophysics back in the day, and I worked as Librarian in the British Geological Survey for fifteen years.

This one's also a local poem, set in the Bathgate Hills. I moved to Bathgate as a teenager in 1957 or 8. Much later Jane and I first set up home together in Bathgate, and our two sons were born there, so I know the Hills very well. Geologically, much of it's a volcanic atoll with a fringing coral reef, Carboniferous in age. There are a fair number of volcanic dykes, and a couple of them are associated with lead ore deposits. Near Knock Hill, the Silver mines were discovered in 1605 by a Linlithgow collier named Sandy Maund, and mined out by 1613. It's a high-temperature orefield, with silver, lead, zinc, barytes, nickel and arsenic minerals found in a feeder dyke - possibly an old 'black smoker' hydrothermal deposit. I explored the mine in my younger days, and researched the history too, finding shafts called God's Blessing and The White Hole. So that's where this poem comes from. It was published in my first collection - Thirteen Ways of Looking At the Highlands (Diehard, 1996).

Mining silver


“God's Blessing” ran out too soon.

Where the Silver Bourn flows below Cairnpapple’s kist,
Sandy Maund’s ‘wondrous ore’ shone like metal hair,
till Saxon miners clipped it all away
in seven short years.

At Windywa’s the minister’s flock diminished
and he migrated, his line returning as Lord Beaverbrook.
Inside Aitken’s mine the timbers can be squeezed like sponge;
a fat toad squats in an alcove, in the dark,
and round the entrance there are burning nettles.
On the spoil heaps dead hens advertised
nickel, arsenic, and cobalt too - the Devil’s metal -
for blessings are seldom wholly Divine.

The dark and stinking muds in tropical lagoons
at Pumpherston, Uphall, Winchburgh,
transformed to coked and calcined oil-shales; voids
to swallow schools (the price of cheap land),
and hideaway shooting galleries
for the Linhouse Water sniffers.

At Knock you’re on a wrecked reef,
a fossil black smoker, plundered for profit, like the rest.
From the atoll’s stump view
Ochil and Pentland scarps, below, between,
remember coal swamps as you breathe
Polkemmet’s brimstone.

West Lothian’s an extractor’s Paradise;
new holes are easily punched in the Central Belt,
and the folk are so well used to their waste lines that
the Westwood bing’s preserved, for Heaven’s sake.

By the ‘Blessing’ shaft yellow iris flags waggle
in the summer breeze, and there’s always
a lark nearby, with his silver flute.
The grasses ripple by like waves of hair,
or fronds in a coral sea.


Copyright © Colin Will 1996, 2015

The holiday poem

Whenever I go somewhere different, like Abroad, I make notes, keep a journal, but I also try to write poems, maybe a first draft. Then I come home and polish them. Back in 1996 we decided to take a gite in the South of France for our annual holiday, which was usually in July. We picked the property from a Gites de France catalogue, and booked it without knowing the region. Getting there was interesting. We drove down to the Channel Tunnel, then on to the Autoroute and down to the Languedoc. We did it in a single journey, without stopping, which was a bit crazy, but we were younger then, and we took turns driving.

We arrived in a small town called Paraza, not too far from Beziers, and on the bank of the Canal du Midi. It was very hot, and we were exhausted. The property was tiny, and on three floors, without air-conditioning. The toilet and bathroom were down a flight of extremely steep stairs in the basement, bedroom and kitchen on the ground floor, and the lounge upstairs. Half of the roof had been cut away to form a terrasse, which was pleasant in the evenings, but unbearably hot during the day. But it had THAT view over the Canal, which was beautiful. We explored the region, visiting Carcassonne and the Cathar strongholds. I started to learn about the history of the area, and had the first glimmerings of an idea for a novel (of which more later). 

I loved the place. The poem was published in Seven Senses (Diehard, 2000).

Out in the Midi sun

This is the place where fruit truly ripens.
In the shop I buy that dawn’s crop
of what we thought were pale boulders in the field.
The melon’s hard rind’s concentrically cracked
around the stalk’s remnants.
Revealed, the luscious perfumed flesh,
holding the night’s coolness,
has the tang of toffee.

A thousand and more miles from the cool crags
and liquid hillslopes of my grey home
I shade my eyes from a hot heaven sun.

Haze lifts off the heated ground
and builds to clouds
whose tops boil and billow
then float off on a sea-sucked breeze,
pulling in more Med moisture
until two cloud-heads merge
in a kiss of wispy fists.

I’ve half a month of Midi memories;
of rusted ochre gorges;
the dust-green of spiny bushes;
limestone pinnacles, fortressed
against the Inquisition’s prying armies;
of beaches where breasts are pointedly
not noticed;
where colours are all colours
and all shadows are black;
where a roadkill snake,
out from its orchard,
paid the price
for crossing back to Eden.

Bee-eaters buzz the plane-trees
in iridescent bomb-bursts,
and drowning cicadas somersault,
trying to fly through water.
Vineyards work harder in the heat,
transforming light into sweetness,
water into soft wine to warm
the awesome black and starry nights to come.

Copyright © Colin Will 2000

The judging poem

Having just finished judging a competition, and subsequently blogging about my judgely process over at the Sunny Dunny blog, I thought I'd post this whimsical poem from The floorshow at the Mad Yak Café, published by Red Squirrel Press in 2010.

Judging nature poetry

Typescript poems festoon the branches.

I walk through the grove,

letting blackbird’s alarm

alert me to today’s winner.

The whale’s verse boomed and chirruped

on the constancy of krill and swimming;

why life is a fluke

and so hard to fathom.

To the beaver, all was willow,

and how sweet the bark of birch

in the deep clay dam of winter.

Doves sprang to the defence of wars,

for the multiple freedoms

loosed each successive armistice

from the pious hopes of peace.

A neighbour’s cat praised

the stupidity of sparrows,

the playfulness of fieldmice,

and other victims.

The prize was reserved

for the eloquent silence of vegetables,

in which the wisdom of artichokes

brought forth a flowering

of edible metaphors.

Copyright  © Colin Will, 2010