Just Dali and I
know the gallery assistant
is dropping off

Etude

The music stopped.
I’ve no idea what it was,
but it stopped.


Four a.m.


Wandering through the house,
I step out of the street light on the wall,
and listen.
Behind a closed door,
unconscious mutterings
and a shift in the balance of the duvet.


An open window brings in the night,
no longer soft with woodsmoke
but hard.
A silent shadow from the trees
tears a life from the grass.
I close the window.


Brass peddles are cold on bare feet
and the keys edges are rough on the fingers.
pushing up through the grain of ancient ivory,
The key depresses
to that half way point,
the point of resistance,
uncrossed.


On the stand
that piece that caused so much trouble during the day.
Fingers find their shape,
rattle the felt hammers
and in my head
music.

Scallops
trawled from the seabed -
a granite pebble.

Gone to seed now
bluebells under towering ferns - -
oak leaf shadows

In the trees shade
Irises gather and wait - -
the bees visit

Triangulation Points

I


The sun and I
looked down upon the Muckle Toon
and over the hill
to a plain of trees and fields.
Beyond that,
Criffle and the Solway,
then, at the edge of the day,
a haze,
where the map makers wrote,
“here be monsters.”


How quick the cloud set in,
that, by the time we were out of the heather,
the first great drop had fallen
and the race was lost,
so we walked
and skimmed a few stones in the river
before tea.


II


The Buddhists on our hill
billow saffron on the air.
Grinning as the Nikon snaps
and records a day from meditation.
Below the relentless city
marks each hour and station of the day
with angry horns at junctions
and deliveries to shops.


Newly hand in hand
we turn our backs upon the ageless faces
and descend through the grass and heather,
to the future on the wind.

III


She never sat on my shoulders
like her little brother,
for in her fear,
she covered my eyes.
So she held my hand,
and we walked,
and looked at the sea,
and talked about why the sky is blue.


We saw it once,
small, triangular,
a shadow on the horizon,
but that was it,
the Ailsa Craig,
cold reminder of our volcanic past
lurking, inaccessible
in our periphery vision.


So she held my hand,
and while the grip was unblighted,
we walked
and overturned a stone.


IV


Here, beneath the castle walls,
the wind brings brambles and snowdrops
in strict rotation.
Never a Gallovidean –
an onlooker, an outsider,
directing from the sidelines.
From the chrysalis of remote fatherhood,
watching the sun grow higher
day by day
over the triangulation points,
warming a woody old clematis
and shortening shadows.

A line of trees
mark an ancient boundary - -
grazing cows

Outside the sun shines
as I walk in bare feet - -
wooden floor.

The first bramble
black but still bitter --
sunlit butterfly