Author: Duncan MacNae

Two eagles flying west
One in golden day’s first light
Then dusk silhouette
Against white wheatfield flies.
Single blackbird singing on a wire,
Liquid tune in the fading light.
Sunlit virga, driving draperies
Of darkness gathering from the east.

A long journey approaching
Anxious I worry my age
Anticipating the long confinement
Hurtling through the air to that
Green island that will not leave my dreams.

I know there is no twilight precinct
No tangled wood of wonder
Only the bustle of cities, touristic hustle
Perils of automotive wander
On narrow roads.

A long journey approaching
Anxious at implications of return
A second appearance inviting appraisal
Summings up, inquiries on my 
Contribution to the world since last 
We appeared unbidden at the place of the head.

A long journey approaching 
Apprehensive I feel my age 
Aching heels, frets that once again
I will miss the trout and the fiddlers
That my beautiful boy’s reluctance
Will turn adolescent surly
That my love’s sorrow at leaving 
The creatures that she cares for
Carries more weight than the imaginary
Stone I pack to set upon ancestral sorrow. 
And the flowers in our own garden blooming
Are as worthy of conceit as the 
Wild orchid of the Burren
That eludes me, entices, unbalances me

A thousand thoughts come racing
Flights hotels trout chasing
Vast cliffs ancestral stones
Museums filled with ancient gold
Precious books, oceans roar
Memory of the heroic martyred ones
Halls of time to deep to hold in mind
Wave skipping pebble fleeing from the shore.
A long journey approaching. 

Rooks shout to one another
From tree to tree breaking the
Quiet of the morning
Morning of resurrection
Resurrection of the dead
Resurrection of dreams
Resurrection of stories
Vague notions 
Too big to be encompassed
To be bounded by my little thought.

Guard us.
Lambs drowse in old fields
Blissful in the unseasonable sunlight
Guard them
Bullets fly around old walls 
Bleeding Ulster’s ruinous ancient pride
On this holy morning, guard us.

Against manipulations of false patriots
Against subtle lies of false shepherd’
Against persuasion to false choices.

Hurtling through green fields
We took asudden knuckle-whitening
Last second turn in the gravel lot
With picnic tables
Where we ate our salmon and brown bread
Swearing we could forsake all other food
Finding ourselves unaware at Rath Croghan
We climbed Medb’s mound, surveying the
Green plain of Connacht through the mist 
Mists of stories, mists of time
Mists concealing walls of stone
Walls of thought, walls of tradition and prejudice.
We marveled at old stories 
Lying beneath our feet 
Rising with the mist 
From dreams to fill the
Waking world with songs
And with tears.

Querencias and Dreams of Return

a deep well of longing 

The title is taken from a phrase coined by William Butler Yeats, “The Land of Hearts Desire”, to signify the personalized home-place / heart-space which we all seek, our querencia, as it is called here in the mountains of New Mexico. 

The loss of such places, and the yearning to rediscover them and to assign meaning to new places, is a crisis in our ever more placeless society. It is a root of our modern alienation. As Scottish writer Alastair McIntosh puts it, “The great disease of our times is meaninglessness.”

 Like many other people scattered across the globe, my family origins lie along the western fringe of the holy islands on the fringe of Europe. springing from a desire to see places that have such ancestral significance to so many, which many of us dream of but have never seen. 

Our grandparents’ grandparents knew the names and the meanings of these places. Long after they were driven from hills and forests they had walked for millennia, these places still exist, even if the names are forgotten and the old power lies silent. 

The poems and images have to do with place and its modern negation-- placelessness. They are about the dilemma that in order to have material progress, modern societies seemingly find themselves compelled to continually erase the past. 

I seek meaning from those lost places that the modern world has displaced and found no replacement for. They are about the significance of a single tree, of a ruined house, of old fields and faces in the grass. They about standing like stone, about going to water. 

“Let what can be shaken, be shaken
And the unshakeable remain.
The Inaccessible Pinnacle is not inaccessible
So does Alba surpass the warriors
As a graceful ash tree surpasses a thorn
Or the deer who moves sprinkled with the dewfall
Is far above all other beasts
- Its horns glittering to Heaven itself.”
Hugh MacDiarmid, Direadh III

Beyond the ruined tower on the hill, looking over lonely mountains
Beyond the fallen croft, woods growing up through the hearth
Beyond the abandoned schoolhouse leaning empty in the wheatfield
Beyond drowned towns, groves of our ancestors
Beyond that nameless place in the fir wood, 
Shining with salal and huckleberry 
Laid low, obliterated, erased by the chainsaws
Beyond impossible promises mocking us
Yellowing newspapers, political pamphlets, 
Books of forward looking poetry
Worn out shoes, junk autos, broken kitchen appliances
Beyond you, beyond me
Beyond the limits granted by power
Rises new strength, new nation, new people in an old place
Rises kindness, fulfilment, meaning, a place in the world
Above the wreck of history rises my country that could be.

The swindlers sit in the high place
The cheats take the prize
Screen shows their sad face
Repeats all the lies
Exalted ambition
Truth and honor dwindle
Shame of a nation.

Your flat-black wall 
Adorned with spikes
To burn and rend and tear
Is the reflection of your twisted soul.
Caged children desperate families 
Sick in their parking lot pens
Sleepless in your asphalt heart, 
Show the lie in the lofty words -
Freedom, justice, valor.

Run on for a long time, you’ve run 
On for a long time
Better for you the millstone.
Rotting in your gilded sepulcher
you won’t be mourned.

When all your planning for currency schemes,
Social structures of equity,
Programmes for the diminution
Of sad loneliness, choosing of anthems,
Disputations over tartans and the body of John Knox 
Mouldering in parking space number twenty three
When all the analysis of Ireland’s borders and the vetting
Of a new Scandalignment of niceties
I say when all that is through
You’re going to have to show the lying
Manipulating murderous divisive bastards
The Door.

Leaving Auld Reekie in a rented Vauxhall
Looking for the ancestral hill
Driving on the left (so unremarkable to you)
Crawling through roundabouts of Fife industrial estates
(Business Parks in my Amerenglish)
Nae vacation this – cam we tae California?
Roads narrow, reaction time shrinking
As we see those first terrifying signs
ONCOMING TRAFFIC IN CENTER OF ROAD
We narrowly miss whisking awa’ tae Dundeee
And I doubt a grisly end in some
Crossbow killing housing estate
(Apartment complex in my Amerenglish)
Then tractors and auld hotels with standing stones 
(Look! Is that an oil platform?)
We are tailgated headlight flashed near sideswiped
Hooted at by claxons of rental BMWs
Yellow heraldry suspicious of Sassenach American German
(The difference is slight)
Until I am compelled to give my best world-shattering 
Johnny Cash salute - erect middle finger pointing awa’ tae hell
More tractors 
Muddy rocky road
Abandoned stone barns
We missed the road back there - there was no road
And there, our eponymous hill and the burn of our name
We stop by woods next to the barley field
And I dig a white stone out of the mud for my father.

But wha’ went ye intae this wilderness tae see
A man in comfortable clothes?
Comfortable clothes are found in rich men’s houses
I went to see the sproutin’ seeds o’ freedom
Or a muckle o’ independence
But, ach no, I slept in a rich man’s house
Auld Reekie uisge warehouse 
Turned Air BnB
I ate in fancy restaurants
Where arrogant waiters judged me by my shoes
And refused us seating in the speckled cowhide booths
In short, in long,
I contributed to the slavery
To the subjugation of the place I long to see free 
Dream to help set free
Oh, I glared at the big Sassanach beratin’ the wee bookshop clerk
About the despicable lack of choice in notebooks
Alba Saor!
But where were your banners , your marches
Your speeches and pamphleteers?
In the whole country I caught ne’er  breath o’ the wind o’ liberty
Not until I got to Eire and met those grim looking bastards in Bogside
Marching for Catalonia in the police wagon’s flashing glare. 
Wheesht, here’s to Eire, and to Catalonia.

Once you have been called a mucker
Once you have felt the unbelievable
Heaviness, dead resistance of the mud
And thought in your deepest mind
I can’t do this
But then kept mucking through 
The five a.m. hangover fog
Followed close by the blinding sweat
Pooling in your rubber gloves
Filling your cold boots, kept mucking
Filling the holes your feet leave behind
Musty chemical concrete reek
Steaming up in the foggy dawn
Kept mucking while the cement
Burns your arms and the place on your cheek
Where you forgot and wiped the sweat away
Kept mucking long after your arms and legs 
Are no longer yours and the finishers start
Complaining about your grotesque incompetence,
Then you can never go back to the kindly lie
That work redeems, lifts up, builds the soul
You’ll know then that it is heavy
It is cold, lives in the dark, gnaws and feeds
On men’s elbows and shoulders and knees
Casts aside their bones in lonely places
Leaves them empty, wanting only to be sated
With sex and warmed by booze 
You’ll know a mucker is a monster
Slipping down the walls of the abyss
You’ll know, on the day you refuse
Or are unable, or forget finally
To go to the pour 
That no one will wonder where is he
There will only be the unbearably 
Heavy brutality of the concrete 
And they will only think
Dammit
We need another mucker.

Four more inches of snow
Buried the coulee last night
And us living in a cardboard box
In a gully by the dam site
Where the pipefitter’s pet fox
Gets more human kindness
Than the dirty little kids who steal
Condensed milk from the fat grocer
While the old lady makes a couple bucks
On the old mattress we brought from that
Faraway farm, keeping the ones who have work
Sated behind the blanket hanging
Four more inches of snow in the coulee
God help us if we ever leave this place.

From the top of this windy wheatfield hill
Wrapped in my old coat against the chill
Comfortable in the white pickup from long use
While the radio drones news.

Down the toboggan run of Division Street
Past the finest house in town, now empty,
I motor on this wintry morning
Tires slip as I hang left onto Highway Two
No matter how careful on gas and wheel.

Old commercial buildings stand hollow-eyed
In spite of all their brick solidity
The stability of this place is now the stasis of 
Hospital bed and graveyard.

A light shines in the old pharmacy
Now administering fantasy and caffeine
Sovereign remedies for modern ills
Grocery store, beauty parlor, license office
Bastions of the necessary, the desirable, the mandatory
All the rest stand empty – old pizza parlors, repair shops
Gone the hardware store, gone the diner

It takes a long time to get past this
Little half-deserted town
Full of the husks of big ideas
Desperately postponing the inevitable
As we all do, even as this poem does,

Not wanting ever to quite get to the sign 
That directs us to Grand Coulee Dam
Not wanting to turn north at the sewage plant 
Where once the horse racing brought people from all around

Where once a pleasant lake beguiled crazy bachelor
To build cabins, now collecting the shite of
Dam electricians and old people
Some halfwit booster built a 
Dirtbike track and frisbeegolf course
Here at the edge of the sewage.

But who am I to deal in such impolite reckonings?
My own sins are much the same, relate me to
This place – 
Never satisfied, always scanning the sagebrush horizon 
For the promised line of cottonwood trees, feckless,
Never finishing what I start, given to 
Wishful thinking, self important – 

Nonetheless, I turn left
Climbing little hills, barely seeming hills,
Wheat stubble coming through the snow in 
Corduroy patches like worn out pants
Holy old George Washington’s silhouette portrait
Reminds me to never tell a lie and to 
Hang on to that dollar bill, our natural religion.

Through the freezing fog the 
Boot tree looms 
Giant cottonwood filled with shoes of 
Long departed track teams, 
Two ravens pick old bones
Ruined windmill, obsolete water-bringer.

A shadow is on my heart, we’ve reached
The crest of the hill, high water mark of giant floods
All downhill from here, past the two farmhouses
That never show signs of life, into the mouth of 
The canyon, down through a gash in the rock
Black basalt worn like broken teeth

Dark fir tree incongruous after the open plain
Exiled here far from the sea, last of their kind
So the old lie says, that once thronged
A living river, still here they are
Carrying life and spreading seeds to the wind 
In despite
 
Here in the cold canyon shade, 
Here where the sun never shines
Here in the last refugium of life
As it has been

Springs of water from the rock
Chthonic caves along these sleeping
Rock walls, Amelanchier flowers,
Wild turkeys strutting by the cottonwood stream, 
Shelter from the wind.

But now, finally, the moment I’ve been postponing
Desperately directing my mind to other things
Pale waters pool below me,
Concrete obscenity shining bright, 
Drowned towns, watery graveyards, disappeared forests,
Mechanical victories, electrical sublime, eighth
Wonder of the world 
(as the shit-heel small town lawyers had it)
Annihilator of dream time, bringer of onions and
Plutonium.

Lights glare on the pooled water
I pass ticky-tacky palaces of retired engineers
Waiting for death in the sand 
and the sagebrush, graveyard conveniently at hand
A junkyard, a church no one attends,
Crumbling concrete block disaster
Broken down cars, more empty shops.

Sits-in-the-middle still sitting 
Though the waters have filled 
Rattlesnake Canyon, and the rock.
I try and remember, if I ever knew,
As I pull up to the guard shack to show 
My picture,
What the hell was Coyote really after?