The Cream of the Well

Valerie Gillies from Cream of the Well

The Rink Light plays on the Rink, on birches in the broch, its outer wall.

You are here with me in silence.

A doe hare comes this way, in no hurry, not expecting to find humans here, loping close enough to touch.

Her warm brown back blends with the feather-grass, her fur a burr-elm of reds and yellows.

After her come two jack-hares, one solid, one spindly, following her trail with twists and turns, tides to her moon.

Most marvellous, moving smoothly, the run of the hares is the lie of the land.

There are times when the creature is a ghost.

We think they have all gone, till we turn and look behind us: in the shadow of a shadow a golden hare rests in the birchwood, touched thousands and thousands of times by the sun.

Reeds I pull tall reeds for a child to take from the mud shores of the Mugdrum gathering a handful of cuts, razor nicks lacerating finger and thumb.

Early this wintry morning we spread our hands in the dew of the grass on our way out of the reedbed from estuary to terrace.

What Virgil did once for Dante when he washed his face with dew and plucked a reed belt for purgatory up ahead, we do too.

Reeds we bring from the tide spring from a new root they wave by a child’s side move with a human foot and tall as the sharp sea rush long shadows cut out on our right two men walking close by us on the shoreline of light.