The Caiplie Caves Read online

  will not leave me. All burned in body,

  in contemplation, as the lonely burn,

  a musical state. The brethren assemble

  for a meal, or, from the last free place in America

  watch the Navy at war games bombing

  the Chocolate Mountains,

  but Snakeman prefers to exercise his hobbies —

  salvaging undetonated shells, pointing

  guns at people, antagonizing snowbirds

  and short-term RVers communally parked

  near the East Jesus Sculpture Garden

  and preaching the ethics of solitude.

  By vocation or necessity the future transforms

  in the heat of the impartial desert.

  Tourists and scholars of human interest

  from villages along the Nile, or funnelled

  through Niland, which the census

  grudgingly designates “a place,” seek insight

  but wish someone would do something about the trash.

  Leonard Knight’s Salvation Mountain beckons

  in three-storey robes of multicoloured latex.

  He clocked in with a half-bag of cement and some paint

  and kept at it for 26 years. But just as Anthony

  decamped to his Inner Mountain

  so Leonard did to the Eldorado care home,

  and even the tattooed hermit of the Isle of Skye

  took up a flat in Broadford. A cell

  can teach you everything. All it asks is

  you give it your mind. Snakeman wars against

  the body that would destroy his spirit.

  Someday, he says, I will be all flame.

  “WHEN SOLITUDE WAS A PROBLEM, I HAD NO SOLITUDE”

  Experience teaches, but its lessons

  may be useless. I could have done without a few

  whose only byproduct is grief;

  which, as waste, in its final form,

  isn’t good for anything.

  A helicopter beating all night above the firth,

  a druid shouting astrology outside

  the off-licence, will eventually

  put the Ambien in ambience.

  Our culture is best described as heroic.

  Courageous in self-promotion, noble

  in the circulation of others’ disgrace,

  its preoccupation with death in a context of immortal glory

  truly epic, and the task becomes to keep

  the particulars in motion

  lest they settle into categories whose opera

  is bad infinity.

  Isolation. The odd auditory hallucination.

  The meagre profile of a widow’s cabbagerow

  corresponds to needs must,

  but also to its architect’s state of mind

  at the time. Why do I not move on? Why

  hang around here while grass

  grows up my chimney?

  Every choice is a refusal. For Christ’s sake.

  I am guarding the walls. Like punctuation

  it could make all the difference.

  TENTSMUIR FOREST

  The sign denoting a negative quantity indicates,

  also, subtraction. The symbol for equivalence

  means also alike. The deadliest mushroom is

  among the most delicious. Distinct

  in their intensities of purpose. Her children found her

  on the kitchen floor, plate on the table,

  pan on the stove. A life foraging in these woods,

  she should have known. But to pour out

  is not to spill. To spill is not to lay oneself down.

  A MISCALCULATION

  Like a king from a promontory

  the kestrel presides from an updraft, an array

  of barely perceptible movements sustaining

  balance and attention, and the woodmouse,

  the shrew, the secondary characters,

  know whose watch they’re under. There are no

  bystanders among them. The razorbill’s piety

  winters at sea, secular and medium-sized,

  black above, white below; while

  frontloaded with military tech

  gannets send tones of the aquatic scale

  straight to the emotional signature clusters,

  though we human proprietors of emotion

  are to them as circumstantial

  as the shadow I cast over a vole’s workday,

  my presence too general for relevance.

  It was November. I made these notes,

  then in absentminded self-disgust

  set out on the path from Crail

  and by sunset, at 4, could neither return

  nor make Kingsbarns before dark.

  Though no one knew where I was, real danger

  lay elsewhere. No cows even. Just sleepless

  fields staring skyward and the firth prowling

  the forest of itself, what’s hidden as well as

  what hides it. To turn back would have made sense

  but I chose otherwise, a lamp post

  at what I assumed was the golf course

  a fixed point I couldn’t seem to advance on

  like a misinterpretation pursued because now

  it is your life. Proportion vanished. A creature

  scratching at a stone dyke was big as the North

  Atlantic, and my body, not as old as when visible

  became, not one with mind, but indistinguishable —

  consciousness feeling with the blunt toe of its boot

  as its footprints fill with groundwater.

  THE SPIES

  Where two convene, a third is always present.

  This makes the world seem small

  and satisfies our need

  to be observed and understood.

  Polishing a cup behind the bar. In the background

  weighing grain. Hovering over us

  a few paces behind, or racing ahead, innocently

  buzzing like a toy, like the boy

  who bags your pheasants then

  reports you to the king.

  The scenery interprets us

  and we are also the hyper-vigilant scenery

  sanguine in our right to own the frontiers

  in our photographs, drop

  some payload, linger at neighbours’ windows

  with trauma sensors all lit up,

  to rat each other out

  with the assistance of an airborne scrap

  of the 21st-century unconscious

  beside which the old machines of delivery appear

  inefficient, comical, overlarge, like a Quaalude,

  quaint as any former bond between

  the watcher and the watched.

  Laws of causality and continuity reside in

  the vertical din. For over such forms as my heart

  is wont to range, did my eyes then range . . .

  MERCENARIES KNOW THERE’S ALWAYS ROOM FOR SPECIALISTS IN THE MARKET

  “Security contractor” is the term preferred

  by a growing industry of private actors who,

  at the sharp end of operations,

  aren’t kidding ourselves about the economy.

  Money is a country I can take with me.

  I walk through the battlefield

  as through my home town, self-actuated,

  valued for my talents. In this territory

  also known as Fuck You. Your home town

  is now my home town.

  These abstract northern wastes

  are even more so when you’re in them

  fighting alongside those you’ve fought against.

  The Picts, fortunately, are unmistakable

  in their fondness for nudity and tattoos,

  in their grim, barbaric language

  whose struggle to remain alive is bold

  and clearly futile. Homer, in Smyrna, blackwater

  of the Meles flowing through him,

/>   knew some individuals are born in combat

  and others ruined, frantic with belief in meaning

  as a thing outside them

  they can’t find. All saved, nonetheless,

  from poverty, dishonour, boredom, irrelevance.

  A durable disorder is in our best interest

  to sustain, and loyalty to a paycheque purer

  than to a man, or god, and more flexible.

  Non-linear. Mission-based.

  If the plan does not fit the game you see,

  call a few audibles, and change it.

  THE MERIDIAN

  Fishers, who mapped Kilrenny steeple

  as a marker to direct them at sea, call it St. Irnie

  to this day. I can’t bring you back.

  My imagination’s not enough. Or maybe

  it was lost with you offshore among the rigs,

  between domestic and foreign sectors, its beacon

  unattended. A loved thing shared and doubled

  is in solitude never whole again.

  The harbour’s full of sightsee daycruisers,

  private recreational vessels, a few trawlers left

  to cross swords for Talisman Energy’s odd jobs

  on their bellies in the mud. When the sea,

  even knowing what it knows, dares flood back in here

  with whom will I watch flat fish rummaging

  in the sediment, the Canadian sport fisherman

  in new gear, baiting his hook with a fillet?

  WHOSE DEATHS WERE RECORDED OFFICIALLY AS CASUALTIES OF “THE BATTLE OF MAY ISLAND”

  1918, last of January, not late, but dark for hours

  Sliding under the Forth Bridge toward the North Sea

  Cruisers, battleships, destroyers, and the K-boats

  Big, steam-driven pigs

  Wallowing in the troughs and undulations

  Under radio silence, and no lights

  Pursuant to worthless intel

  To opinions more plausible in formation than they might otherwise appear

  En masse, you can’t see past them

  Is he still a boy

  Sailing under the flag of error

  And, as it happens, low cloud cover

  On a collision course with the unforeseen minesweepers

  On board K-11, or K-17, turning hard to port

  If not exactly on a dime

  Or K-14, whose rudder jams full right, K-22 who slams into it

  Then is run over by the oncoming HMS Inflexible

  Who hears his name called, as if in twilight sleep

  A second flotilla, led by HMS Fearless

  Unaware the ships of the first have turned around

  Increases speed to 21 knots

  They meet head-on east of May Island, which barely looks up from its desk

  Intuition breaks in two and heads for the bottom

  Along with the wreck of the K-17

  Whose crew is in the water

  Feeling the warmth of the self against cold abstraction

  No group of people has more in common

  More fear in their blood than oxygen at this point

  Unstable land, unswimmable water, air needing light

  As it was in the chaos at the beginning of creation

  Behind Fearless, and to avoid HMS Australia

  K-6 rams K-4, which sinks with all hands

  Remaining capital ships and destroyers of the 5th Battle Squadron

  Bear down on the scene

  On the men in the water

  Whose eyesight has never been clearer, how cruel

  I saw not it, but the place where it dwells

  Chains of the wake around their ankles

  Propellers tearing through them

  Seven stars of the plough obscured by weather

  Badly discordant atoms in the one place night seems to be pouring out of

  Whose grandfather was a shepherd

  How can he sleep in such cold

  Face up or face down

  In sheets of fuel

  The unbreathable aftermath

  104 killed, a conservative estimate

  No enemy engaged but error

  In the historical present, a modest commemorative monument

  With its back to the sea

  SONG

  Ships arrived to harvest souls // I saw stones become a church //

  I saw the church filled with gold // and the pit with souls who harvest gold //

  I saw more fields cut from the forest // I no longer saw the forest dwellers //

  As an egg to a bird, tree to a stone // I saw trees turn into ships, and sail away //

  II

  NO 59981 05825; 56.24324° N, 2.64731° W

  Make your preparations. Supplement a lack

  of expertise with curiosity undeterred

  by the vandalized interior, histoplasmotic

  pigeon shit, trash of its pilgrims who’ve written

  on its forehead and eyelids their symbols

  of blessing and protection: Pictish z-rod

  (indeterminate), crosses Latin and Greek,

  Mairi + Ian, Saor Alba. Iron and magnesium,

  the contemplative oxides. Axis of

  the main cave, NW-SE. You will see,

  among spirits of the exhumed, the holdfasts,

  will know the place by its local name

  and your readiness repaid. Another landmark

  fixed in the mind of the navigator.

  He remembers a friend

  from his travels

  dispersed atoms sullenly reconciled, I woke

  to a human noise conceived outside me, for once

  and a bundle over to which I hauled my body’s carbons

  a griskin

  hard bread

  for thirty years an otter brought fish to Paul the Hermit

  yes, well

  and neither can I subsist on grasses and spring water

  as did Kentigern

  another story there, his poor mother

  what a place

  unwilling to let me expire in their quarter

  or in the hope it buys favour

  people leave food

  I wish they wouldn’t I wish they would

  some remember me from when I was a person

  their backs to me now, a child’s small frame

  or yards of female fabric describing wind direction

  Jesus is love, but bank the coals or die

  hands wrapped in rags, heaping stones for a cache against

  wild pigs and others, light to moderate snow

  horizontally north-south

  I recognize this rough farm cloth, its provenance

  a wife from the hill of daughters

  whose husband walked a path as if to shame it

  although you did not sit, did not loosen your coatcollar

  before first talking to her

  I must not soften my blisters with water, she said

  and her neighbourhood with druids up to here

  The earth may provide for them

  but by Christ’s fingernails not what grows from or grazes

  upon my own. Dogwalkers, granary robbers,

  mannequins, litterers,

  Brother, their poetry is truly awful.

  her warm kitchen, honey and dry leaf smell of cut barley

  spade leaning in a corner representing mortality

  Eejits drunk and sunburned by the dyke,

  one a stretched rope, one a shrivelled root, another

  an angry little spider. You laugh,

  but when schoolboys pelt them with rocks, God help me, I understand.

  To look at them is to have one leap into your hand.

  our talk, the good and lowly vegetables she prepared

  memory

  I would rather starve now than suffer it

  Like Cormac Ua Liatháin, he sought

  his desert in the ocean

  if one asks for a sign

  must on
e accept what’s given?

  the hazards of catching authority’s eye have been well borne out

  May Island on the palm of the horizon, take it away

  a proper island, unlike Lindisfarne

  gifted to beloved Aidan, who is likeable

  and good

  but one might long even for Iona in sight of this outrage

  this wellhead

  thorn in the sea

  I wanted an answer, not a choice, it’s too late in life

  a task, if not completed, might at least be finished with

  now a cipher has fallen from an ancient book

  logos, anti-logos, an intellectual violence

  crouched on the offing like a word crossed out

  blood

  when one doesn’t expect blood

  see how it draws around itself

  the hospital curtain

  Hostilities were inevitable among the four peoples

  clustered around the Forth-Clyde line

  kingdoms like these don’t collapse all at once

  even in my white martyrdom the wars find me

  as far-off fires use the wind, as seeds will

  or burrs that travel in the fur

  what can I do

  a creature isn’t thought from its shell, my knife extracts it

  to nourish me wasn’t in its life plan no kidding

  I’ve settled bottom-first into the mud of this thinking

  pulled the mud of it to my chin, but even a toad

  leaps through its tent flaps in spring like a one-man band

  what can I do, blink first in this standoff with the May

  in its cop sunglasses trying to break me

  I don’t trust it

  and who would seek with me a community of refuge there

  even among my fellow half-people

  denuded of vegetation, all remainder

  estranged by wandering from our body mass

  if no one follows shall I lie alone

  at my own graveside, on a mattress of the dead

  with no cover over me

  Now blood on his lip

  for some reason

  Servanus, desiring a place less pleasant, came here

  and flourished in an argument

  that the authentic sacrifice is a pure mind, clean spirit

  conscience without guile