The Golden Mean (3 page)

We rocked at anchor where the emptying

river spreads its green hand.

Ochre mud thickened the sea.

On the second morning, slender boats

from the forest; they brought birds

the colour of watered oil,

sallow fruit no one would taste

and a leaf folded around a knot of gold

broader than a clenching fist.

She's so real you can hardly see her, printed

like Christ's face into cloth; the linen

rehearsing his wounds while they rusted in the air.

Her eyes turn from the empty warehouse

to the winking lights on the dock, the salt-dark firth

and the far hills brewing cumuli.

Don't be sad
, she says,
Don't grieve for any of this
.

(her footsteps sweetening back to dust)

This sort of emptiness could save us all
.

Buddleia does well here, at least.

It thrives on flowers of sulphur, concrete dust,

coiled swarf and radon's heavy bloom.

No wonder the petals gleam the utter blue

of a welder's flame. No wonder the blossom

rusts so easily, a shiver in the grass-choked guttering.

In summer, butterflies briefly linger here,

all the colours of ash and earth and blood.

See how they diminish towards cloud and light

as their fragile clockwork unwinds through

the onshore wind, high over the dual carriageway

and corner shops, towards the hills.

I'm old enough to remember how dangerous

they were, those steam trains butting the weather

south of Forfar, heading for the big smoke.

They would seed sparks among the dropped coals littering

the ballast by the Seven Arches, sweetening the shale for weeds.

Even as we speak the willowherb is hitching upwind

through the decades; it feeds on old burnings,

hungry for nitrogen. At Doig's Farm, their purple heads

crowd above watermint and nettle, or lean out over

the slackwater pools to marvel at themselves – tall, aristocratic,

raised out of last year's waste, abandonment and fire.

I miss it all so much – family and everything.

Father in that lab coat fathers wear;

always too close, always too distant,

always too keen. You may have heard –

my mother was the product of unmentionable

absences and storms; my siblings

a catalogue of slack, discarded failures.

We are all born adult and unwise;

don't judge me too harshly.

Which of us was not cobbled into life

by love's uncertain weathers? Are we not

all stitched together and scarred?

Step forward any one of you who can say

they are not a thing of parts.

British pearls are exceptionally poor.

They can be gathered up by the handful wherever

surf breaks, but you'll find no colour, no vitality, no lustre

to them – every last one stained the roughshod grey

of their drab and miserable weather.

Imagine all the rains of this island held

in one sad, small, turbulent world.

I can hear them falling as I write. British pearls

are commonplace and waterish and dull,

but their women wear them as if winter were a jewel.

The trick is always to appear fixed,

whatever happens. To hold the pattern

we were born to, though its significance

may be lost to us. Here is where we make

our stand and our love will be defined not by

touch or glance but by the distances

mapped out between us. We'll light

everything that needs our light, steadfast

as the stars we fell from, trusting

in them through disaster and adversity,

though we know in our hearts

they are burning in their shackles, like us all.

Not the browbeaten old king,

or his poor wife handcuffed to her capsized throne,

or their sad and lonely daughter

waiting in the darkness for her perfect monster.

Not the dead swan nailed to its right ascension

or those pointless feathers harnessed to a stallion.

Grant me the bleakness of the northern sky

and a yellow gaze that burns relentlessly

and the scales and the claws and the flickering tongue

of a constellation none of you can name.

It isn't just at night the moon sheds its skin. All day

you can watch white dust catch the light as it settles

on the world, turning distance the watery blue of faded

colour photographs. How long can this go on?

Each year the moon grows lighter while we grow heavier.

Can you not feel it as you walk the streets, how gravity deepens

and there always appears to be more to us than we know there is?

Each new step more arduous. Have you not noticed

how year by year the tides abandon us? Each month

the blood less eager to flow; each month the pain more distant,

more unreal. The day might come when you will forget

your suffering, and reach out to it.

This world is nothing much – it's mostly

threadworn, tawdry stuff, of next to little use.

If only it could bring itself to give us back

a portion of the things we would have fallen

for, but always too busy living, overlooked

and missed. So many small things missed.

So many brief, important things.

It is my intention never to write about this.

As soon as we had died, we decided to walk home.

A white tatterflag marked where each journey began.

It was a slow business, so much water to be crossed,

so many dirt roads followed. We walked together but alone.

You must understand – we can never be passengers any more.

Even the smallest children had to make their own way

to their graves, through acres and acres of sunflowers

somehow no longer pretty. A soldier cradled a cigarette, a teddy bear

and his gun. He didn't see us pass, our light was far too thin.

We skirted villages and cities, traced the meanderings of rivers.

But beyond it all, the voices of our loved ones called

so we flowed through borders like the wind through railings

and when impassable mountains marked the way,

soared above their peaks like flocks of cloud, like shoals of rain.

In time the fields and woods grew weary and the sea began –

you could tell we were home by the way our shadows leaned.

We gathered like craneflies in the windowlight of familiar rooms,

grieving for all the things we could never hold again.

Forgive us for coming back. We didn't travel all this way

to break your hearts. We came to ask if you might heal the world.