Friday, November 27, 2009

Home Time



Looking at Mull in December


Night swallows a last
Silhouette, rigged with web
and running for home.
I sit in the rain:
my coat is two hundred miles away
but my mind's eye is rolling along the ocean
like a pinball,
lighting jackpot after jackpot after jackpot.


I should have been on my annual pilgrimage to Mull this weekend but circumstances have intervened. It’s a priority to make a visit there at least once a year so some thought will have to be given to a last minute breenge in December, against the elements. Mull is the spiritual home, you see, a place of power. Of course you have to ignore the fact that it’s full of folk from Kent, and that the main town Tobermory has airs and graces but there is such staggering beauty in the place, such scope for dreaming. We left my mother there, and there she still is, of course.

A Leaving

Branches cup their shreds of leaves,
there's a wall translated into moss
and two glens, one chipped into the stone
blue sky and sloping east to a dwam of light
like water, the other eery, unbroken
on the loch, though in the wind
the mountains shudder down to my shoes.

In such times it is difficult to see
the start and end of things, which is as well.
This morning I am leaving her on Mull,
as I have done before, only this time
she is scattering through the trees
and the soil and the somersaulting water,
so from now on, no matter the weather,
the island will speak in only one gentle voice.





It reeks of history, of course. The stone circles, the castles, Loch Scridain where the MacLeans anchored their war galleys.







But the main thing to me is the connections, and maybe because of them, strange things have happened to me here over the years. Landslides, love affairs, pitched battles….. and there are lost poems, of course.

Lost Poems

I have come back to Mull
for the poems that were lost here;
overboard from the Lochinvar,
buried in landslips,
left in telephone boxes,
torn to pieces and
somersaulting in the wind.
I am in sore need of them now,
for they were born of bright agonies
before they slipped away:
death, love, betrayal.
All these years
they have been dancing on the shore
perfect as little fawns.
I will set foot in Mull tonight
and they will be waiting for me
by the tree-line at twilight,
wearing the faces I had,
dark, fine and hard.



Near Fionnphort Mary of the Songs is buried. Mary MacDonald wrote "Leanabh an Aigh", the Christmas Hymn 'Child in a Manger', to an old Gaelic tune which she called 'Bunessan'. Poetry, then as now, brought no living so she made an income by making illicit whisky and smuggling it to Rathlin Island off the coast of Ireland.
We were going to the Keel Row in Fionnphort, maybe to do a surprise poetry reading, the type that worked so well last year at the Oban Inn, and failed to work well at the Mishnish,or maybe just to drink and listen to the sea.



Never mind, I'll get there. How could I not? It's like going home.

Going Home

I'm juddering through arteries of rock.
Going home is more than geography:
It's tracing the outline of a well loved face
with the fingers, again, of a child.

Water threads the scalp of hills
and soon we'll tip down to Oban
where the boats are set like buttons
on the belly of the bay
and every pavement used to lead to jam
or little fists of shingle where you could skim
a stone all the way, it seemed, to Kerrera

and where the Columba came
bringing back the half drowned
with their sodden duffle coats
and scarves like pennants home to the warm,
butting in that lst mile through the Sound
while clouds closed like eyelids over stars
and a piper faint as a gull in the roar of the night
played us home, over all the muscles of the sea.

22 comments:

Barlinnie said...

Nice piece. It brought back many happy holidays on Mull with the wife.

Rachel Fox said...

Must be good to have a spiritual home. More the wandering dissatisfied myself.
x

Kat Mortensen said...

The one for your mother is a lovely elegy. The last lines resonate.

I'm not familiar with some of your Scots words (although I've visited a few times), but I do like them— breenge and dwam.

We have a Tobermory in Northern Ontario. It must take its name for that place.

I really enjoyed these pieces. Oh, and that first phrase in the first poem is wonderful.

Titus said...

shug, this is beautiful.

Titus said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
hope said...

What a journey you took us on! I loved "Lost Poems" the best...because it feels familiar. Words that we scribble during the height of emotion, pushed aside and then later we search high and low..and they have escaped.

Thanks for the scenery as well. Have a wonderful weekend.

mapstew said...

I have not been. Yet!
I feel like you are describing a home I have been away from for a long time. And I must go back!

Oh Mull, 'tis surely a place where the Stewarts have trodden?

Tak me hame!

Hugh McMillan said...

Cheers jimmy.

Rachel- having a spiritual home doesn't mean you can't wander dissatisfied round it

Hugh McMillan said...

Kat- thank you. There are a lot of tobermories- it's the diaspora, I think.

Hugh McMillan said...

Titus, thanks very much. You going to see the potery on Saturday afternoon?

Titus said...

Gonna try! Dependent on husband's cough.

Hugh McMillan said...

cheers hope- it's always been a very emotional place.

Mapstew- the stewarts were everywhere, mate.

hope said...

Excuse me Professor, but can you explain the stones to me? Or is that one of those things that no one really has the answer to?

Thanks!

mapstew said...

We're in the minority round these parts, so my Da's tales about us 'coming over' from yeer place must be true! I have been 'back home' many a time, and a new trip is not long off!

Hugh McMillan said...

Lochbuie Stones

There's a brilliant series of stones in Kilmartin, south of Oban, also, but there are stone circles and standing stones everywhere in Scotland. No-one really knows what kind of function they had, whether it was ceremonial or astronomical.

Hugh McMillan said...

That was for you, Hope.
Happy St Andy's Day! Have sent you an e-card, hope you get it!

hope said...

I did indeed and it made my day!

Ah, more reading material to enhance my brain. Thanks! :)

Marion McCready said...

What a lovely post, a windfall of gorgeous poems particularly love A Leaving.

Stooshie said...

My life is about to go into meltdown. How's about we nip up there the weekend before Chrimbo?

Stooshie said...

"lighting jackpot after jackpot after jackpot"

"The other cutting the pack of memories
and turning up ace after ace after ace."

Hugh McMillan said...

I really fancy that

Hugh McMillan said...

aces better than jackpots