The Resonant Shore

Fireside Spectacular

Late-night with whisky, the biscuit-tin reverie -
Shadows in hats on a harvest field
And a letter from France.

The worst already over, and no illusions left.
A final fusillade of entertainment -
We were all phantoms.

Whir and ting
Of the crofter's clock, an heirloom,
Enthusiastic on the mantelpiece.

The Heroic Age

Books are celestial -

Required on every voyage,

A trunk with maps and curios,

Hearts bound with triple brass.

Pot-bellied Innkeeper,
Doctor and Squire -
Proprietorial laughter,
Claret, beef, port.

A private world of eloquence,
Felicities in Latin;
Heavy coats and walking-sticks,
Church bells and sin.

Vibrant language radiant
From London to the Hebrides,
With genial enlightened Hume
An image of how human

Life might be.
The low spark on cobblestones
Lights up the fond
Rambunctious literati.

Memoirs of the Sage of Rogart

The Gulf Stream brings warm rain and the seeds of palm trees;
Old Tom Morris's Tain is arrayed on the resonant shore.
Miller arrives with a crunch of gravel, fills the doorway.
Glenmorangie, late lantern-light, and treasure,
Sketched ammonites, Victorian geology.

Moment of ritual stillness; a splash of seal or dolphin.
The hickory whoosh. Stevenson's stylish Forgan woods -
We're stride for stride - rattle in handsome withered leather.
On the dunes, in slanting rain, we shelter in a doorless shed,
And listen to the weather; now hailstones pound it.

Turn inward, homeward. Circling ghosts and gulls;
Remote high cries in the gale on linksland: 'Found it!'

Visible from Trains

Who is the ancient kilted Seaforth

visible from trains,

ecstatically

golfing alone on linksland?

Everyone he knew is dead, even

the shimmering girls in Singapore.

Last days, thrilling, buoyant underfoot;

head down against the wind, advancing,

all memories intact, arranged for telling,

into the teeth of His warm gale.

The Whisky Mind

November night after the cold river, when warm

In the stone kitchen MacDiarmid was stirring rebellion,

The gamekeeper's kind-to-me wife put a tray of biscuits
And a specially-made cup of tea into my hands.

The men were talking kindly, drinking whisky,

And no-one was angry with me for being there.

Old Mr Ross put his feet up on the silver bar of the range -

Unbooted, socks dishevelled, the heel and toe darned.

MacDiarmid, philosophical, launched into ardent poetry -

Resonant, unstoppable, the fiery certainty of the whisky mind -

Shouting across the Cairngorms to our pre-eminent

Precambrian and Silurian hills, where we were transfigured -

Immortals, enriched by the poor rocky landscape

And the oldness of everything.

Linksland

A luminous funeral -

The style's good-humoured

Scotch laconic.

Faces

are reunited with their names;

Time-travellers alight, caress

Familiar tea-cups.

Communing eyes, ecstatic,

Glisten like the black cars

Trembling on the verge.

Believers, thinkers, arm-in-arm -

Far out

On linksland.

Great-Uncles

I am the one who was shipwrecked
Off the coast of Africa;
Who saved the life of Lovat's daughter,
Swept along by the Beauly in spate.

I have inherited the Second Sight -
The same fine bones, a tendency to silence,

And the confidence that comes from knowing
Impatient death will have to wait.

Leaves of the same book,
Leaves of the same tree;
The thing that's looking out through all our eyes
Plays on, disguised as me.

The Makars

hidden by stables and heaving leaves,

a barn, abandoned to spiders.

dusty sun-shafts -

hush...

unearthly craft! elliptical -

a shining web spectacular, spanning a vault

from rusted plough to roofing spar,

ethereal, alight;

and this without a chart or compass -

the cross-examined seven-year diploma's

adjudged by silken makars inessential

to calculate and weave unerring flight.

logistics o' an engineer;

artfu' scamperin' architect...

at height, they're watchin', hecklin' :

wight!

whaur's yer mimar sinan noo -

yer frank lloyd wright?

Fiddlestick's End

Grandiloquent
We drift from sandstone houses
On a raised beach above the firth,
Crunch in warm boots through a picturesque blizzard

Swirling under street lights
To eventually descend on Alasdair's house
At the foot of Castle Brae,
Glenmorangie in every pocket.

Fire in the big room, unstoppable musicians.
In the kitchen - close the door -
The talkers, and the New Year phone calls
From exiles in England.

Out on the hills to see the dawn,
Cloud-hidden, ice on the roads.
Driver and passengers, sun-dappled,
Snore in a ditch.

MacDiarmid

At heart a Murray,
Monumental.
Mental.
Made frae girders.

What is to be done
With the rose-growing poets
Describing each other as important
In the Sunday Papers?

To hell wi' happiness -
See 'em grieve!
More Scotch! More ice!
More fire!

And the Prose of Stevenson

Imagist, arabesque - Old Bill Bones'
Inn on a cliff, a china-blue sky,
White linen snapping in a cold spring wind -
His memory or mine?

Chaos has invaded the Admiral Benbow,
Pirates are wrestling in the room downstairs
And my father is dead, or useless,
My mother is crying -

'Jim!'

As if it were yesterday -

Spindrift, within;

The illusion of time.

Blind Pew and Borges dance like Astaire
In the brain of the old divine,
Tap-tap-tapping forking paths
On a clifftop of the mind.