letter from deeside (poem)

old pasture fence, kinloch rannoch (not deeside) , april 2010

poem draft.

letter from deeside, march 12.

in the backseat of a car rolling through deeside
the air is shocked with starlings; across the field
rooks peck away in the melting, & i will that
distance to melt, bring you here reeling beside me.

i want us to be the earth that piled the stones
here, in long crumbling fences dreamed
up between the roots, the yearly remembering &
forgetting held in the rings of trees;

i want to walk with you in those peripheries
beyond the edge of the fields, into the margins
of this country, among the soft yellowed bones
of sleeping grasses and the tea-coloured burn;

where the land is the same colour as spring
where we come from, the place where you are
now & the place that is ours & no longer
as we remember, shifting like a solar glory

over the peaks of our peregrinations, on
the river like sun-beaten copper, weaving
between the bare birches & overflowing
the trembling spring sands of the bank.

sometimes i just want the stillness that
can never be, for it’s too much an ache,
this passerine life: never perching anywhere
long, perpetual migration between continents—

but in the backseat of a car rolling through
deeside i suddenly felt you near me, curling
around gently my fingers like the soft claws
of a bird, wings shaking out breath:

& i felt then a nearness i never imagined,
& i felt myself touch with your own hands.

this is what i am made of.

this is my home; the land i am made of.
(a home for pollen)
(a home for seeds & vitamins!)

(a home that longs for water to visit)

(a home for wind)(this is a boll, a weevil's home)

(a forest of old wheat bones)

(a vast home, at the edge of the earth)

(cones, the tiny homes for seeds)

(double-storied home for magpies)

(a home for buds & leaves)

From Erin Moure's poem 'The Unseizable Elegy', in her new book O Resplandor:

VIII

To spring from our own earth

in the very sowing of such light; though winter

now ices lichen at the oasis of our dawn, spring

will write the length of laughter.

Springing from my own centre
where, human and alone, i'm haunted

by the net of love,
or purely and simply when winter
falls away and spring

is misting space in a wide circle
seeding hearts intimately
with the space of love's own unseizable margins.

Amazingly there is a cure

in spring,

the knowledge of seeds that speak life in the sowing

as earth already speaks of earth.

But more urgent than anything
we are seeds, we are
what wanders in all partings still,
and our place is also in the light that streams from eyes
of from a field, the field of grasses
grown before our eyes -- us with our ourness
not yet undone, though some say it hardens as do molten metals,
yet we still sow fire with our beings
to help us work in work's torrent
in the place of cherished tremors
in which our work is yet to be born.

More urgent than anything

we are seeds, and implicated

in the rising of our own selves as we hazard a way outward

to where exaltation rises,
to where parting bears the name of spring.
To be in being and laud the phenomenal, again and again

laud the phenomenal.

To be yet in being

these seeds spring up for us, unseizable

in our own earth.