all in the same boat

all in the same boatÂ

All in the Same Boat and Other Poems

First published as a print pamphlet by White Craw 2007 This edition 2016

This is a freely licensed work, as defined in the Free Art License 1.3, the text of which can be found at http://artlibre.org/licence/lal/en/ This license grants the right to freely copy, distribute, and transform this work without the author's explicit permission.

Acknowledgements

Front cover illustration: digitally remastered from a photograph of a painting by Tom Henry entitled All In The Same Boat. The original image can be found at: http://www.traceymcnee.com/index.php?page=henry#

Back cover illustration: digitally remastered from a photograph of a working drawing by Douglas Robertson. The original image can be found at: http://www.douglasrobertson.co.uk/wordpress/?p=143

With thanks to

Tom Bryan and Linda Cracknell

Brownsbank Fellows

All in the Same Boat

What’s that you’ve found in the water, son?

A bit rope that could foul our propeller if only we had one…

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

A boat lying idle on the sand, a sea as flat and deep as a mirror, the haziest of heat hazes; knotless threads the three of us twirling in the updraught of an afternoon…

So we heaved it down to the briney and jumped on board…

But it turns out there’s no more to see or do out here than there was back there.

Becalmed we are, impaled, with nothing but the stretch of an empty shore to look back on, a dribble of footprints still smattering the sand.

Waiting for Godot…

Jeeze­oh!

I’m sure there’s something we could be doing.

I just wish we’d remembered to bring the oars.

after a painting by Tom Henry

Adam und Eva

The serpent had barely departed, the tip of its tail a last lingering caress, light as an afterthought, around Eva’s unbraceleted ankle, when they awoke in an apple­snap to their nakedness.

Each immediately shot a hand to cover the respective half of their sexuality, and Adam’s face slid to simian fear and bewilderment.

Eva, on the other hand, smiled knowingly, weighing her breast, foreseeing its possibilities.

after a lithograph by Max Beckmann

Forward Looking

Amen to that, she said, cementing the last word into place like a full stop.

Turning sinkwards. she plunged her red hands into the steaming suds and scrubbed and scrubbed, her wagging bum a counterbalance to the chop of her arms through the laundry.

Behind here now, the matter slid from the air, like the trace of bursting bubbles that dribbled down the sink­cupboard door.

And I would have said more, but already she was looking out the window, at a vegetable patch that needed weeding.

i.m. Marion Anderson

broken bough...

hanging year after year groaning in the wind leafless stripped of bark bare and bleached its song harsh and thrawn defiant secretly alarmed at one more summer one more winter long

after hermann hesse

Brownsbank: Midsummer Night

We forget the time, it is still so light as we stand here talking yet.

Through half­open eyes the world takes our measure, wishing us asleep.

The trees have drawn their shades and turned the sky’s blue flame down to a peep,

and what dark there is hangs strawberry nets over the still quick colours.

There is the silence besides, deeper than the dusk, sharper than the stars,

that loudens our voices, more clearly enunciates the words we exchange.

We talk in murmurs; yet still the night growls at us to keep the noise down.

for Josephine and the two Junes

Greeting My Grandfather

He stands, filling the doorway with his silhouette, milk­pail in hand, dungarees tucked into his boots.

His family are gathered to welcome his homecoming with smiles and laughter, and the sun­darkened scullery is filled with music, out of the blue, like birdsong.

It is all too much for me.

I let go my mother’s hand and stutter across the floor, crying, M ilky! Milky moo!

Milky moo man! taking my first words and steps together.

My mother’s loosed hand rises to cover her mouth.

Her mother finds something urgent to do in the sink.

The milky moo man crouches on his hunkers to gather up my falling, almost upsetting his milk­pail with the broadness of his smile.

i.m. John Anderson

Fishing Bird

A fishing bird strokes the blade of its shears against the shoulder of its long jacket, to wipe away the dribs of its killing.

There is no sentiment here, no moral scruple one way or the other; just what is necessary and consonant with its nature.

It dinner past, the bird lifts it eyes to horizons that lie beyond an untroubled sea.

after a sculpture by Tom Fitzsimmons

Meridian

Too brash to be sunlight, this weight makes brick of the yellow earth, intensifying gravity, pressing must from our flesh.

We can no longer be bothered to join the other visitors to the château.

The door opens a wound quickly staunched once the petitioners pass through, leaving us alone by the shuttered well on the farther margin of the courtyard.

Too hot and silent even for lizards.

There are north­facing gardens on the slopes behind the house, from the shadows of which we could take hummingbird sips of coolness.

But we choose to stand in the noon instead, shadowless and desiccate, dust and bone, sun­beaten by the minute’s stillness.

Too hot and silent even for lizards, I take your hand and touch in its dryness the paper­thin passing of this moment, your eyes shaded by the brim of your hat, the meridian bisecting my shoulders.

for Ruth

two girls on the train to lanark

that girl has hot pink nails and a penchant for imitating others

she claws and paws at the world wanting this and wanting that bristling with bling and gadgetry

this girl wears tattered jeans a t­shirt coomed with cat hair her head a knot of rats’ tails

there is no money in her pocket she is alone with only her train ticket

razor eyes

and a penchant for envy

george mackay brown

were he to open that tight­snecked mouth of his I wouldn’t be surprised to find a flame still burning on the wick of his tongue

for that’s what he kept there in the pan of his jaw permanently dipped in the oil of his islands and trimmed to poetry

the lamp he set in his window as he peered out into the haar beyond stromness harbour light beside the ocean of time

after the bronze bust by Alex Main

from whitecastle hill

1 brand new light crinkles like cellophane on the fields wakening the birds

2 scarves of mist muffle the neck of Whitecastle Hill a curlew beckons

3 latches click, doors close figures move upon the land singly, intently

4 the sky is the bright iris of a peacock's eye wide and unblinking

5 starlings swoop and swirl in a curling wisp of smoke slowly dispersing

6 the sunlight settles in a lawnchair and watches its shadows playing

7 the sky expands and deepens as the earth contracts hunching its shoulders

8 the setting sun slides its knife between cloud and earth releasing a skylark

9 the peacock swells and spreads a tail of stars across the darkening sky

10 midnight comes and sweeps the valley clean with its broom moonlight laves the earth

Brownsbank Cottage

A breath of wind catches in the gean­tree, fluttering the dry leaves and the small change of the sun, and it seems for a moment that the light is whispering.

There are ghosts in this place.

They are to be heard in the mouse­scratchings, the seedpods cracking in the tindered broom, the suck of the draught beneath the kitchen door.

The Grieves still move through these two rooms in slow mutual orbits, with no need for words, familiar and comfortable in their companionship; two chittering lights, fingering the relics of their lives and touching lightly the lingering echoes of the laughter and the poetry with which the silence thrums.

And on such an evening as this, when we have silence yet over the Border hills and the gloaming gathers close about the door, on the doorstep his voice still softly sings:

The rose of all the world is not for me…

for Linda Cracknell

View from Knowehead Farm

The hills have soaked the blueness from the sky, and dyke and whin are bent as mindings of relentless winds.

Deep shadow­fissures split the flesh on ancient brows and hollowed cheeks.

Snow patches liver­spot the braes.

Yet here I stand on this knowe’s head, in this late winter, the enduring eye through which these hills disclose themselves.

after a painting by Eileen Hood

little mitchellwood

letting the deed show in clearing and copse the sunlight sings of a loving labour lilting the seedheads echoing birdsong

it is we who make the woods in which we dwell through the care with which we bear its trugs of light hand­crumble its soil enlacing them with lillikines of leaf long limbs of poetry our solicitude

wind trembles the green of little mitchellwood dappling the air with whispers

Old Acquaintance

If we’d met in the street, I wouldn’t have known you.

Thirty years have bearded your jaw and filled your face and haunt your eyes with tales you bring back from the sea of serpents and monsters.

But you throw me a line, which I catch and loop through a ring on the dock, and which sings and dances in the space between us, as, together, we pull the boat to its mooring.

for Calum O’Donnell

the risen christ 1917­19 *

spiritual and worn with suffering

mighty symbolic warning to all lands

I ask and you show me the wound in your hand let me place a finger there to test my wakefulness

a single slender tone spun from the polyphony of screaming shells

flensing winds

erupting earth

a tall unwavering votive flame distilled from the conflagration of your sickbed

cross­ridden

this you have become ‘ecce homo’

a forsaken cry in the wilderness whose music rises a hundred feet high

after the figure by jacob epstein

* 'The Risen Christ' began as a portrait of Epstein's friend, the composer Bernard van Dieren. It was begun in 1917 when van Dieren was ill, and Epstein wanted to make a mask of him looking 'spiritual and worn with suffering.' After making a mask from clay, the piece then developed into the figure of Christ. Work was temporarily put on hold when Epstein was enlisted in 1917 but continued a year later. The artist considered the figure to be an anti­war statement and

declared that he would ideally like it to be remodelled and made hundreds of feet high as a 'mighty symbolic warning to all lands.'

‘The Risen Christ’ is in the collection of the National Galleries of Scotland and is currently on display in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery

Hazelnut Shells

It is as far as I can reach, this terrace where you sat munching hazelnuts and watched the river thread its sinew through the Pentlands’ eye.

Your look as raw and hard as stone saw this sky, these hills; this wind lifted your hair and brought to your nostrils these scents of water and of earth.

Eight millennia between us; yet shoulder to shoulder in the same land we sit, you feasting on hazelnuts, me picking up your discarded shells.

after a dig by Biggar Young Archaeologists at Weston Farm for Tam Ward

Men at Work

jackdaws try to fill boundless space above the wood with curse and swearing

workmen walk the roof looking for broken shingles linked by ropes of breath

higher than the world their stature is unconstrained heads touching the sky

should one of them slip he would swoop, rise and settle back on his rooftree

Castlehill Symington

There is nothing to be seen of the iron age fort that once kinged this castle, but some half­dissolved earthworks smothered by turf and melting over the crown of the hill;

even the dirty wee rascal, who haunts your visits here and runs to you with the tale of his life, is only a stumble in time that you catch and steady and keep from falling out of memory.

There is significance surely in the fact that it’s a child who scrambles over these ramparts and prefers to their refuge the sanctuary of a mother’s eye;

an iron age child, into whose waiting you are at last delivered as he greets your homecoming.

for Lara Boyd

tyne at pencaitland

your laughter’s light you caress deep your kisses love the harm they do

your eyes ­ blue iris blooms your face ­ chaste as water lilies

you flee ­ a fluid parting your hair falling in gentle tangles your voice ­ a treacherous depth

your arms are supple reeds long river­grasses whose embrace enlaces chokes and strangles

beneath your eddies in drifts of riverwort lights are extinguished

On Biggar Pond

Today, the boating pond is almost deserted; only the waterbirds remain this late.

A breeze combs the surface, teasing out its tresses in rippling waves across the pond’s mirror.

Two swans, staid and stately, sail seven seas among a busy harbourful of ducks and gulls;

strung out in their wakes bob a squadron of cygnets, fully grown but still moulting brown and grey.

The trees on the south bank nod their heavy shadows low over their own reflections, sun­spent.

aithsting

we pulled our boats high up out of the voe

they took root where they lay and grew into houses

we were glad to be at journey’s end

we lit fires and burned out salted clothing

we raised circles of stone for there were no trees

our houses grew into crofts our crofts into a township

we coax a living from thin soil sheep and the fishing

it is not much – we know – we know but we know where it comes from

Yr Wyddfa

We sit on the edge of the peak and dangle our legs in the cloud.

The sky sparkles blue above us, the sun’s hand is on our shoulders and our shadows, in long jagged puddles, spread across the cloudscape.

Only an eagle surfing the feeble thermals surpasses us.

We look as far as the eye can see across the silent expanse and the distance looks back at us.

The horizon’s uncertain curve vouchsafes no Ynys Môn; there is only ourselves, the depthless blue, the sun’s hand on our shoulders and our shadows reaching into space.

Intifada

There were portents and auguries, signs that something was afoot: a star blazing intensely in the sky; strangers buying drinks, asking questions…

Word was that the king was nervous, that he’d redoubled the street­patrols.

There had been dawn raids on the houses of known troublemakers, arrests, detentions…

Rumours flew like archangels.

A leader had emerged, they trumpeted, around whom all the elements of insurgency would gather their disparate forces…

In the hills that surrounded the town agitators roused the shepherds.

When a baby was heard fretting in the night, the king grew pale and sharpened his sword...

Christmas 2004

Ending

The candle goes out with a little smoke flourish nudging me awake

I must have fallen asleep , I mumble, my mouth still full of slumber

I sort through our limbs deciding which are mine, yours shove feet into shoes

I should go , I say swaying among the bottles rolled drunk on the floor

Rubbing your eye and temple with your ring finger Mmm , you agree

You go back to sleep slipping sleek as a selkie back into the sea

Fathoms multiply between us as you plunge down to the ocean floor

The click of the latch as I leave closes more than a door behind me

white craw 2016