Author: Duncan MacNae

Almost at times I can see the old ones 
Along the big cut of the arroyo
Where the tall cottonwoods drink
Glorieta Creek, digging clay.

Handing up the baskets filled with 
Red earth, carrying the baskets along
To the new church rising amid the 
Burned ruins of a mighty edifice.

Making bricks, soaking clay in the pit, chopping straw
Treading all together, scooping the pliant mud into forms
Half a vara long. 

Then, as now, raven perches on the rising mass, 
Hawk circles, rattlesnake shelters in the shade 
Of the corner facing the mesa, thunderheads
Building in the afternoon.

I wonder did the black-robed priests try to stop their singing, 
Or whether the music came like the laughing of the jays 
Among the piñon trees. 
We sing at our work even now, unravelling repairs,
Chasing down the hidden channels where water
Courses inside eroding walls – even I sing
Throat tight with cultural restriction, but I sing – 

“Get back, get back, get back to where you once belonged”
The rhythm fits slap of mud, scrape of steel trowel, 
Gentle heave of heavy brick into the soft mortar
Bed waiting to receive. 

No digging in the arroyo, no baskets for us 
Modern masons raising a stabilization encasement- 
We get our clay from Victor’s cousin in the big green 
Navy surplus dump truck, mix it in the concrete pit
With the Bobcat’s front end loader, don’t even bother 
to chop the straw. We tip in the vat of plastic concrete
adhesive, shovel the soupy mix into plastic lumber 
forms that bear no relation to varas or the length of
our tired forearms, cover the drying rectangles 
with a brown tarp to keep the wind from them, 
the never-ceasing, all-devouring, brick-cracking wind, 
then scrape them down leather hard and stack them to dry.

Some of the bricks will sit bravely on top of the wall, 
some are cut to bits to fill the hidden interstitial hollows where 
water flows unwanted in the big September storms, channeling
out ancient adobe, washing down the leavings of ages we pick 
Up at the base of the walls – children’s teeth, old men’s knucklebones, 
A deer femur, a rose-headed Conquistador nail.

Mix earth with water
Mix, stir with the hoe until it takes
That creamy froth that tells it is 
All mixed through. 
Then wait. 

Overnight let the moon swell the clay, 
Stars, dew wet the clay, in the morning stir
The clay again and again.
Slap a big handful against the wall
Lifting upward in an arc
Like a gritty meteor
Rising from the earth, shuffle
A step the left, slap again and ride to the sky.

Cover over tracks of rain, cracks between courses
Mica sparks glinting in the sun, stars in a muddy sky
Covering, nourishing, sustaining, preserving
Replacing the skim of plaster that washed to the ground 
In the last summer rain, that cracked in January’s hard frost
Sloughed away in spring snow, crumbled away in drifts of 
May flowers. 

Cover before the rain comes again with the cholla blossoms and
Fourth of July fireworks, summer rain, summer’s grace, 
summer’s wasting strength. All the time knowing the 
work is futile, a nail in a sandcastle, string for a snowman,
this melting-soft cream layered on the melting mud wall, 
Plastering over of the past, continuation of the past, 
Act of faith in a world to come.

My people are those who never got where they were going
Who never made it to that sunny California farm or
The green Willamette valley, who didn’t know the 
Orange groves were stolen.
Turned back at the border, with whom the 
Thought of flight,
Taking leave, moving on, 
Is always in our hearts
We are always leaving
The farm that turns to dust
Boarding the waiting ship while 
The houses burn
Skipping out in the middle of the night 
Without the kid’s toys, rent unpaid

We are tumbleweed people, piling up
In unused church parking lots, railroad sidings
Filling the roads and the abused fields until 
A spark ignites us and we rage
Or another wind arises, driving 
Us to the next rest stop on Interstate 5 
Where we can get out of the car on green grass
Put out a sign begging for food and gas

What did we leave behind?
A house with broken windows, sounds
Of children playing, grandma’s cooking
That can never come again 
We left the creek full of trout
The green hills full of new sheep
High places where our grandfathers carried stones
Our old way of speaking. 

What did we bring with us?
Stuffed animals, a bibleful of names.
The phone number of a man we can see for work.
A pistol under the seat.

What did we leave behind?
Names of trees, seven words for rain 
The stone at the meeting of the ways
Bones of grandmothers grandfathers
Babies that never saw the dawn
The sigh of waves on white sands
Song of the wind in old branches
The beach where the fishing is good, 
Sunny spots in the wood, the place of peace.
Querencia still in the corner of our hearts,
Our querencia our desire now only in our heart.

Fields full of feannagan curving sinuous 
In the flat place by the fairy river
The hum of bees in thistle-grown gardens
Calls to us, wakens us to our yearning
For nostoi - after all the whirlpools and the monsters
To walk again ancestral woods

How will we return?
Burn wisps of longing
Incense of disappeared thistle gardens
Sing salmon by the failing falls
Sing old hurts, old houses, old walls
Mouldering in the oak wood
Whistle for wind to bear dust 
Slurry sand with tears, erode greed,
Eat away fear of the rich man’s dead white hand 
Hiding in the bunker.
Take rosemary for remembrance, rue for regret, borage for courage,
Meadowsweet to heal the broken,
Bury them in a three a.m. hole dug 
At the crossroads of our hearts.

From this broken circle, this nation lying crushed,
Will we return in a hundred thousand tour busses
Tennis shoes squeaking, baseball caps turned sideways
Kids looking bored at their phones?
Will you greet us if we come back as born again lairds
Dropping fat stacks for kilts 
On the royal mile, dreary reanimation 
Of the greed that sold us away?
Perhaps the wheel will turn again, thousands 
Sailing drifting back like seaweed
From Nova Scotia, sneaking ashore
At night in leaky rowboats

Would it be worth it then, if we could then return
To each other, tune hearts to old songs
Ask “Are ye well? Are ye well?” eyes shining 
As we pass on our way
If then we could gaze clear eyed at the murder machine
That drove us away, pulls us apart
Takes everything, everyone that ever matters 
And breaks them, dirties them, cheapens them
Tells us the lies we still hold dear
That never ceases to remind us what depraved
Murderous cannibal savages we are
Our ancient languages pidgin garble
Our haggis and skirlie indigestible
Our substandard children irredeemable
Our mothers and our sisters disposable
Our brothers and our sons fit only for
Cannon fodder, booze, and pills?

This is the burden of a broken people
Burden of fathers, burden of the auntie
Who is little Ethan’s mom
Burden of nations borning nations dying
Vision of a watery sun coming through 
Clouds swept across high mountains
Far from the sea. 

What is this nation? This country
Patrimony motherland soul’s home
Querencia land of heart’s desire
It is the mountain we are climbing
One slip one tumbling fall tumbling
Onto another cartwheeling building
Speed over the ice, the snow,
Boulders of forbidding dreams 
Until we break on the old stones below
The old hunt, old unfaithful lovers,
Old wars, old lies, old cities 
Burning beneath a waxing sun.

So what went we into the wilderness to see?
Our songs must now be more than elegy,
No home no home we found, so 
Vaguely comical we return to 
Old imaginings, the glory of the old north
The tartan of the ever battling unknown clan
But now I’ve gone and ruined any worth 
This rambling song ever had
With the old north and those faded screen print
Tartans and that damned doomed raid on Catraeth
Chasing us across time, down mountains
Over seas through the sagebrush 
To this gully in the land of the bottom dollar
This home of no home

You have seen us
Ridiculous with our plastic heather blossoms
Noisy off the bus or walking heads down hands in pockets
Knotwork tats and bulging bellies, pink shirt, white tennies 
We have heard the permissible marching songs
The pipe band plays only two
And didn’t the doomed lads look fine marching off to die

And who are we anyway, nameless rabble
Stuck to the teats of the sanctioned societies
With their portraits of the so called chiefs 
Who sold us away for a fine house
And a deer park and some grouse?
Who are we to claim this sad inheritance of stilted marching bands,
Joyless dancing, harmless bale tossing, log heaving, fat-bellied feats of futility?
We are the ones they skipped away like white stones and green
From the crow haunted beach at Camas an Darach
Skipped away over the water like stones to Carolina, to Nova Scotia,
To the ends of the world, come the long way around
In our polyester tartantry, stumpy-legged children 
Brandishing a plastic dagger.

You ask us what we come for
You wonder why we come back
And strut around like we own the place
And spend too much money driving around non-stop
Looking for blackbirds by the shieling 
The woodland clearing alive with bees and 
Our great great great great grandpa’s tame hedgehog
For our vanished Eden that never was -
No, not Eden. Eden was the first
Home that we lost and judging from the 
Stories, I guess our people
Have never stopped running from the
Angel and the flaming sword.

Rising from the green hilltop
Shining white as the swans sleeping
In the grass of St. Stephen’s Green
No bronze figures stand guard here
No columned gate, but blocks 
Of disembodied granite ranged in front,
This entry a dark hole into the past

The tour group assembles
Listening to the interpretive talk
Astronomical alignments, hidden meanings
Avenues of light cut through the vanished forests, 
Wolves howling in the dark wood
The people waiting for the divine light 
To return to the world, to light the glorious
Dead one more time, pierce the foggy dew.

A mighty stone blocks the way
Covered in indecipherable spirals
Turns of river, turns of mind
Visions of forgotten power
Coursing of wind, a mare dropping 
Her foal in the spring grass
Rooks gathering in the twisted trees.

The time has come, we pass,
The honored ticket holders, 
Into ancient spectacle, file ahead ,
Turn shoulders, squeeze modern bellies 
Between the carved stones, pass through 
The dark womb of the white cow
Arrange ourselves in the chamber
Of forgotten mysteries, garbled tradition
Unreconciled meaning, stand in the false
Illumination of the electric light.

We hope to see forbidden things
We see
Stone corbelled on old stone
Fading fractal traceries pecked into the rock
Vestiges of ochre
Broken bowl at the heart of it all
Smashed with a pickaxe to yield
The unreal fairy gold
That vanishes with the dawn.

Light fades and we are as we began
In the dark, wondering, my mind lifts 
stones of the past, no escape from the past, 
Yesterday’s sacrifice of Lyra McKee in Derry, 
the women at the ford,
sickness of the men of Ulster, 
hero tied to his tree, mad king in his tree
Wakening of things 
Best left in the dark. 

Now only the faintest glimmer of light from the past
Barely perceptible in this oldest darkness.
There truly is no escape, so we return
To touristic spectacle, the light bulb
Casts again its three hundred watts
Down the sacred womb.

We see the broken bowl illumined
There is no recorded blare of brazen 
Celtic trumpets, but the English woman
To my left has stopped her anxious
Stage-whispered monologue
Comforted by the return of the 
Synthetic sun.

Tumbled stones, golden leaves, bitterbrush blooming yellow,
Broken windows, scattered words, drowned peach orchards, 
Talking river,
Piled stones, embrace of earth, startled deer, quail fly up.
Love forever, the just country, screams in a haunted wood.
JFK no more, the new thing, and that damned thistle 
Eternal in our hearts. 
Cowboy boots, the 1983 Nissan we shot to pieces with 
assault rifles, coffee maker that gave a thousand mornings solace from the rainy dawn.
Old family pictures by the river, bedsheet covered with trout.
My love in the morning garden, hair golden nimbus in the sun.

Tower of tumbled stone. Hewn blocks of white granite
Lie scattered across the grass. We agree, my son and I
Who have slogged through bog gorse and past incurious sheep
We agree that hauling blocks of stone to this hilltop
Is work we are not suited for.

The loveliness of ruins covers all in its gauzy glamour of romance
Yellow roses lie on the cold white stone, 
remembrance of someone’s beautiful boy
Redeem this spot, this windy hilltop 
Looking out on a hundred thousand stones

This windy hilltop was not always a refuge of solitude 
Once it was new, menacing grey in the weak sun
Occupied by red-coated soldiers  
Mechanical messages clattering out from
A tower of oppression, 
A place of fear
An eye of empire watching for invaders who 
Sang the rights of man

A knot of soldiers on this ben and that and the next
All along this rocky gorse bound coast
A whole island under their mechanical surveillance 
Nation circled in code
So quaint, so modern, so now.

Towers of surveillance, glowing eyes in our night 
Secret patterns pass along sightings, investigations, 
Movements of militias, gatherings of disreputable poets,
Caravans of refugees, convoys of drug mules, 
Vegan restaurant workers in black masks, horseless cowboys
Protesting a thing they can’t see beyond its flag
Can’t feel beyond the club and the burn of pepper spray:
Otherwise just librarians and the guy at the DMV, 
Electricity and your student loans, fighter planes and forest fires.
Hard to grasp, difficult to know or to love, 
Resistant to the mind.

The coded balls and flags rise and fall clatter and flutter 
Always watchful. 

Tower of control beating out
The repeated tattoo to a conforming heart
Breasts and genitals of all sizes and descriptions
Acts of unspeakable intimacy stripped of all
Intimacy, turned into a marionette show,
Shadow play of control.
We purchase our own conformity
Counting our Black Friday good fortune
As we are robbed in mechanical servitude
Catalogued by our browsers as the drones come
Bringing groceries, hell fire, Chinese food, 
Messages from the dead and the disappeared
Reappearing forever on Facebook. 

Tower of wonders drawing us from our castle
Rising above stone maze of streets, seven stories above the city,
Illusions, projections, mysteries, simulations,
Lightning orbs, mirrors of deception 
Transforming us into Neanderthal or manga sumo samurai
Unstable bridges of swirling light, going nowhere
Impossible to stand upright
Things impossible to name
Ephemeral marvels, transient miracles
Mind dazzlers, eye foolers
Capturing the unreal city 
Unawares

Tower of faith, lighthouse of my youth glimmering luminous 
Across heart’s horizon, now invisible as the earthly Pacific
Thundering on distant headlands, almost I see it at times
Feel almost the tidal pull that drew me from the pew
Down the aisle give testimony make right offer myself
Living sacrifice commit to carry the Word to far peoples
Who had only heard from Methodists or from papists
Who had no sure concept of the importance of all-you-can-eat 
Buffets after the morning service, or voting Republican.
Who had only the Word in their own heart language, ignorant of God’s English
Who had no red white blue baseball caps, no snowmobile jet ski video games
Or many other blessings of the Lord, had only

Bread water each other

But why should I trivialize, what is laughable about
Comfort, community, the humanity
I felt singing together, psalms rising round my heart 
In a surging tide, lifting prayers toward the sky
Where are such comforts now found, 
Children at play on the field, the sound of laughter
Good smells from the fellowship hall kitchen
Smiles from the old people, gardening tips, 
Politics absent from my memory, 
How could there be any
Politics in that city we were looking for?

That sea of faith stretched round 
Our hearts is now awash with micro-plastic patriotism, 
Discarded lies, detritus of food court moneychangers
Cheap pop praise electronic fills the holy places where 
Wolves come to pray, where burdens are bound to 
Human souls, chains forged strong for commercial gain, 
Building fund, car salesman preacher’s fraudulent handshake
The shepherd hungry for lamb chops.
Ya’ll come over for dinner now, or we can all go out
To the outback steakhouse and spend week’s wages 
For indigestion and try to forget the pangs of spiritual famine.

I distrust all intentionality in these pages
I distrust your acceptance of my making
This broken reed, wrench with rounded jaws, 
Splintered peg, nail in the sandcastle of dreams.
Why should I make it clear for you? 
Why should I make an allegory for you?
Will you understand all my talk of vanished songs, 
Of old stories, birds, the sound of waves?
Will you disregard? Then disregard
Will you make these vague intuitions the predicate 
Of your lies? What would you gain with such tricks,
Such sleight of mind? 

These babbled words are the indescribable bluegold 
Of the sky before dawn, a bare bulb shining out over miles of wheat field
Sagebrush coyotes the quail in their covert
Assign other meaning to them if you can, but know that
They are life in death, life in spite of the machine the eye the drive for profit
Life for my people our people all people
Life for our gardens and our sons, life for our daughters 
Life for old songs fading from the world and blossoming new again
Life in the face of power control subjection.

Tower of profit shining gold in immutable blink of digital eye
Tears of children, loneliness of women, manly anger, human despair
Weighed parceled divvied out by the gram, a hundred thousand
Hogs for slaughter, unearned increment on the Trail of Tears,
Gigantic dams drowning the salmon, prairies turned to dust
For a pocket full of grain. 

Ten thousand years of life – buffalo tongue and fertilizer
The whorehouse for your sister, five dollars for you daughter
(won’t you take a look at her) 
Your son crushed by logs, torn by machines
The young abandoned to meth in the dying towns, cannon fodder
To keep the oil man’s party running high, beaches choked with plastic bags, 
Forest burning on the mountain. 

Honest hunger, honorable poverty, faith of the poor, pride of the simple
Are not for them, not for the tower of profit. For them all night raves with
Russian models, tequila mixed with pills, plastic surgery transformation
Into Artemis Aphrodite Apollo, for them raptor pickup trucks, tickets for the game
Big game safaris, non-stop porn, big thick ribeye steaks, the cup of beer that never runs dry, 
As they try to fill the hollow empty of songs of children, tests of strength, pride of potatoes 
Chiles from the earth, the gnawing fear of what comes after, the knowing that we’ll never 
Quite measure up without our false bravado and our big machines.

The tower of profit sweeps the table in the rigged game
All the gold, all the silver
All the land, all the water 
Your grandmother’s antique table, fossils of ancient sea shells, 
Arrowheads from the plundered field, ancient coins, the song of the loom
Ring of the hammer on the anvil
All must be brought to the tower

The welcoming of new life, graduation pictures, your wedding day,
Ambulance ride on the night when you pass from this place
All must be brought to the tower
Your first kiss, the nipples of your mother’s breast, flowers of regret and Yearning, every river running to the sea
All must be locked in the tower
The sky, light of the sun turned to electricity, the gold on the moon
All belongs to the tower
Elk on the mountain, salmon in the stream, grouse hiding in the wood
All cattle of the tower
All for the rich man’s pleasure
All must be brought to the tower

Build house of mud bricks, of logs, stones from the field
It is not permitted
Catch rainwater, split shingle, become part of the land
It is not allowed. There is a permit, the plan must have 
The stamp of the engineer, the water was already stolen, the bricks -
What does it mean not to believe any more in brick and stone?

The tower is built of plastic lumber, 
Oriented strand board, plastic, paper, substantial as a wasp nest 
In a rotten log. Built in a day by a van fulla Mexicans from Yakima
They sure know how to work, all done overnight, 
I wasn’t payin by the hour. Just a big load from home depot 
and that van fulla Mexicans from Yakima.

The tower is built of burning thatch, 
smoldering roof beams of the old houses
Grandmothers’ tombstones, threads of smashed looms
Cries of children abandoned in the snow
All the things we have let slip through our hands
All the things we have let go

What can I say in the face of such power?
I will tell you what I will tell
I will tell you I have climbed mountains 
Muscles burning upward through the manzanita
To stand at last at an edge of the world
Haloed in dying sunlight against the void below
I will tell you I have walked ancestral sands spangled with starry cockles
I will tell you of ptarmigan hiding in the rocky heather
I will tell you a thousand fragile things, 
Insignificant, weightless, so remote and alive
that towers and unsleeping malice mechanical in the sky 
mean less than nothing
I will tell you of the hydrostatic force behind a thousand dams
I will tell you of their power melting like dirty snow, 
Powerful plans scattering like dry leaves in 
Forests our fathers’ fathers’ fathers walked.
Crowns of flowers shooting up through the snow, migrations of birds
Accumulations of dust in unused rooms
Of you and me, of our love and all that moves the world.

I.
Just a few days left
Until we fly away 
Leaving the garden to the blackbirds
The house empty and pronounced nice
By the realtor
Leaving behind the measuring wall
Showing the boy’s hand-span growth
Driving away from this was home
Leaving bad diagnoses and mad sadness
Here at the edge of the edge of the wheatfield
Of the world. Leaving a friend or two
Who are also bent on leaving
Leaving is what they do around here
Going away, never to return, 
How would you ever return?
How would you find again
The old music teacher’s house
On the edge of the world 
Except by the sunflowers and the 
Strains of Morning played 
On a phantom clarinet?

II.
The last day at the office
A day of returning and reckoning, 
Inventory item reconciliation, the
Signing of forms, surrendering
The corporate identity, shedding
Rituals of coming and going
Back to the source goes the laptop and credit card
Along with false industry and assumed expertise
Meet the envious glances with magnanimous good grace
Let your former colleagues maintain their illusion of stability
Maintain safety meeting and project kickoffs out of kindness
Off you go! Riding away into that 
All-American sunset.

III.

Leaving Grand Coulee Dam
Yesterday, I cast no backward glance
At the greatest thing built by the
Hand of Man
Occupied by other thoughts I gave no lingering look
To that Wonder of the World
No sign announced my departure
Reaching the top of the canyon 
Place of emergence onto the expanse of
Plateau. Pillars of dust rise on the land
The wind stirs the wheat, barley dances
In the spirit, along the barbed wire strand
Edging the road, straight and taut
Seeing for the last time the oasis of a farmtown
Green and dun wheatfields stretch away to the
Empty horizon

IV.
Last Saturday morning in the little house 
The little house at the edge
Edge of the wheatfield
Edge of the world
Last leisurely morning coffee looking out 
Across the scablands
Calm before disruption
The movers come tomorrow
Carting everything away
Leaving us here in the empty
As at the start, cleaning and clearing
And then the road.

V. 
The house full of boxes
Treasures in corrugated incognito
Stuffed with brown paper, cocooned
With little care
Rock collections, rifles, cooking pots
Books barometers toys
All away today on the truck
Reclaimed at some indeterminate
Time. Furniture goes, leaving us 
In an empty house. Dangerous
 Place, to clean and cull the leavings
Live out of suitcases, eat in socially
Distanced restaurants
They won’t burn the roof timbers
Or leave the bureau in the road
And friends bring us a love feast
Before the leaving, before the road
Before the wind, behind the sun.

VI.
I kindled one last holy fire
On that rainy cold July morning
Last of the twisted juniper branches
Small split of mountain larch
Piobrach playing on the laptop
Comfortable rumble of the drier
Dog asleep on the hearth, an chat griosach
Empty house, numinous space 
Caught between the coming and the going
All the morning fires, meaningless
Household fights, meals with
Friends, never to be completed
Repairs. A face looks back
Another darkly forward

House filled with echoes
House filled with rememberings
House filled with suppositions
Expectations, asssumptions
All dwindling behind us in the noonday
Sun, all fading into new endeavor
New hope, new places supplanting
The old. History in the camper shell of time
Progress is a rest stop
The days tick by with the mile posts
Past wheatfields, abandoned farms, dammed rivers
Clusters of commercial towns, ancient hills, 
Horse heaven
 weapon dumps
Moving from danger to danger
The peril from which there is no escape.

VII.
Fleeing south in an overloaded pickup – 
Cats dogs pistols all the dangerous goods the movers wouldn’t take
Through plutonium onion fields watered by the drowned river
Across wagon-breaking mountains 
Empty voids of sweet clover and telephone towers 
Pinon pine at last with the juniper
Coal miners’ last stand turned artsy summer town
We rest in a pre-fab cabin smelling of RV sewage
Another void of book cliffs and badlands
Rock castles rising against distant
Blue mountains. Family deprecations and 
Incantations. Across variegated
Mountains, through the Potato Administrative
Council’s domain (no red star on the sign?)
Mary is driving now all the time, I sit inert and sick
Dizzy and chemo nauseous we cross into Enchantment
Muddy rivers, old cottonwoods, and the wind
Until we reach the holy city under dark mountains
Holy sky filled with virgins’ weeping
Never reaching the ground, curtains of night
Spread across the burning sky

Morning full of old ghosts, dawn struggling to break iron clouds
Remembrances of coming into  a far town in that ’51 New Yorker 
He was so proud of
Thirty dollars in pocket, kids in tow, just enough to get us that 
Welfare apartment, a cockroach there for every good intention.
Machine gun fire from the new places
At the bottom of the hill.
But I was happy to see an old man
Cane pole, going fishing happy even here
I could practice that most 
Practical magic until I saw a muddy trickle 
Filled with trash a long way from my Montana 
Crystal creek teeming with cutthroat.
And what fire filled my father’s brain
Feeding cattle on that bitter morning
Calling him away to southern theology
And why do they come, these half-forgotten
Sorrows of morning with no heat or breakfast,
Useless things come to me
On the morning of old ghosts.

Too much sorrow, too much violence
Handed down like worn out clothes
God, Christ, Mary, Michael, all the angels
Whatever saints can hear, 
Guard this beaten Baptist from old fears.

Ask me again and I tell you that I am
A beaten Baptist doubly predestined elect
Lonely in our chosen solitude, set apart
From what to whom? The world is a 
Vale of sin and tears, world to come
Clouded by our fears 
Of vague retribution 
Of eternal doom
No peace, no peace I find
No heaven can we hold when everything
Fair and beautiful is corrupt and suspect.

Maybe it’s the eternal potluck!
Hot dish of pearl on folding tables of gold
Robert Redford angel pretzel dishes golden gate
Street tacos from the manna court as much as you 
Can fit into your sanctified immaterial belly
Eternity in a short sleeve white shirt 
Red white blue clip-on tie
Never-ending special service
(still casting sidelong glances at 
the way that angel gown falls in folds along 
her flanks) 
Extended through the ages singing the songs
That make your jaw tired and your heart restless
Leaning on the pew out of habit
Since now you can sing eternally with never weary jaws
And your back will never hurt again as you stand 
Singing the hundred and eleventh verse of
Victory in Jesus.

Ask me again, and I’ll tell you I’m a beaten Baptist
Can’t keep up the false enthusiasm, the car salesman pitch
For peace that passes understanding
Tired of wondering about the dread 
Punishment handed out like poison
Halloween candy by the source
Of all Light and Love
Sick of this modern god of the flickering screen
Of the quick commercial success
Jaws tired, so long ago, of mouthing
Words that make no sense
Legs weary from standing in the pew of conformity

Ask me again and I tell you I’m a beaten Baptist
Who dreams a heaven filled with 
Songs of birds, music of crystal 
Streams teeming with trout
The beauty of the young never fading
A new world untainted by our sadness
(But maybe a little harmless axe fighting)
The cup that never runs dry of honey wine
Company that never turns tedious or
Depressed in drink 
Song and story never ending, craic of ages
Agelessly calling to memory all that is worth keeping
And I guess, maybe,
Over there in the walled off corner
Like the tired old joke we can’t stop telling
The eternal business meeting of
Unbeaten Baptists, for those who can’t quit,
Still want to count, for those who still need
That old time religion.

On this first summer morning
My mind bounces off elections and schoolhouse gunfire
Gathering instead with the small birds,
Nesting with the birds of Scotland, that place
Now nested in my cliffy heart. 

First of all you greet me, little bird of possibilities, 
Nimble Dreathan-Donn, prophet singer, little 
Brown druid in leaf-dim Edinburgh park
Fixing me with your combative shining eye
Interrogating my return from exile, to this
Place by the wall mourning the dead, 
Mourning the loss of a nation, brave men, those who mattered, 
Little bird of possibilities, little Dreathan-Donn. 

But your neighbor there, Bru-Dhearg
In the next tree, red breast glowing 
Like a coal in the shadows
Seems a little worried, a bit harried by my presence
I see from my field guide that maybe 
You are a returning exile as well -
Though no bird is called exile -
Perhaps you just arrived from Brussels and finding
The rents so high in Auld Reekie 
You worry I’ll come and roost 
Wild-bearded in your tree, that
You’ll be compelled to feed me, bring me 
Bread and watercress in my touristic madness.
No worries, Bru-Dhearg, red breast
I’m staying in an apartment over on Charlotte street
and Air BnB hasn’t taken all the trees yet.

Ah, comic relief from this cold 
Stone on my belly, thistle in my heart
The gull perched on the Prince’s head 
A customary spot judging from the birkit
Stripes running down the regal neck.
In my American generality I can’t 
Tell whether common herring little black-backed
Lesser or greater, or even a not a gull
Acknowledging the skua and the auk
Though perhaps not perched on a New Town 
Monument, unless he was a west coast radical
Which I like to think he was.
Faspag faillteach or faolleg, I salute
Your sensibility and smile 
Whenever I think of centuries of accumulated 
Shite running down Georgie’s neck
And serves him right, auld sod,
For all the tartan stealing phony Burn’s night 
Log tossing toe dancing dreich that
We’ve all had to swallow like our 
Stale shortbread birthday cake from the Auld Sod.

Fleeing the city, the high rent and waiters who
Judge me by my shoes, seeking ancestral ben and burn 
Among Fife barley, I’m astounded at your glowing
Girth in the drizzling wood, Calman coille
Roosted by the coirre of my name, 
Strapping big bird calling peace upon my 
Eponymous hill, I feel instant fondness for you, calman
But regret to say that the frontier dies hard
In my American mind and I can’t help 
Noticing that you look delicious, and now
The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds 
Informs me that you’re a pest, unwanted among the 
Oilseed rape, and they’ve tried shooting you
That most American solution, but it doesn’t seem 
To dissuade you from roosting and feeding 
Nesting and watering by your native burn.

Up into misty hills in a rented Vauxhall
Sentimental we stop to piss in the heather
By the motorway and there you are,
Black one of the woods, rare Coilleach-Dubh.
But, ah my heart, you lie car-slaughtered on the verge
Gone forever from the ben that bore you
No more sweet blaeberry no more will you go
With Liath-chearc to the best cotton grass 
So the young ones will be strong. They say the fences kill you
And the foxes, but I see twenty of you fallen before
Hurtling steel, their tires muttering like the crying wind
On this asphalt gash through these emptied hills
Where you lie crumpled on the pavement 
Oh Coilleach-dubh, oh black one of the forest.

So how, after your tragic denoument, grief 
I can’t get out of my mind, Scotland’s history written in microcosm,
How can I comfortably bring up your neighbor
Tail constantly bobbing, crowding the cow pasture, 
Breac an t-sil  black and white in your fool’s coat, equidistant in the paddock
One by one leaping with abandon, catching insects, dozens of you
Heedless of fence or fox, perfectly at home in folk museum car park.
Slightly overdressed, off to Spain for the winter
A hundred thousand of you and more to come
Perfectly postmodern bird perfectly adapted for modernity
If slightly ridiculous.

What is this the reader asks what is this is I ask in reply?
What should a poem about Scotland be? What is a poem about birds?
Once I could have proclaimed in Latin line panoply of
Species genus order family
But a poem is no nature show
And I’m no Attenborough so though 
The critic declares these foolish stanzas
Anthropomorphic personificating nature fakery
I think them more likely a desperate attempt 
To understand each other, 
Living things sharing this rock heating in the sun.
So take my anthropomorphizing nature fakery for what it is

It is Cathag swooping low over wind twisted trees at Camas an Darach
Black shadow over white sand, water all the jewels of the sea 
Dim islands glowing hills shells shadowed by lapping wave
Cathag rising and plunging on the wind, tumbling over cliff’s edge
Cathag soaring blue eye shining, playing in the wind that wears away the rock
It is the wheeling flock of wondrous birds, the voice of the joyous birds
It is Gille-brighde searching among the seaweed, it is winged shadow
Moving in the pools of a rocky shore.

It is all the birds I never saw, 
Traon coarse-calling for the sun; 
Iolar, clamhan, sulaire
Soaring over sgurr, knife diving by the skerry
You wheel beyond my experience
Gyre above my soul circuit
I seek you now in other skies, other beaches, 
Behind the wind, before the sun.

Then at last, latha na latha, westing beyond west
Beyond islands, beyond towers, riding on the black sea loch
Eala, swan in dreams
Eala, full of grace
Eala, white on the black sea loch
All my yearning has a focus, my strange dreams of transformation
This arm clothed in down where the shirt couldn’t cover
This spiteful exile filled with malice, searching always 
For the willows and burns of an ancient childhood, my 
Clumsy years of discontent, dreams of return,
Song that few ever hear, beauty in omniscient sadness,
Silent with your mate on the sea loch
Eala, full of grace, swan of dreams now to me 
In this hard white country
Far from the sea loch.

Tea at three when the sleep won’t come
My forgotten name and the nameless itch
Intrude on the witches hour,
My fate the ditch, as crickets call from
Morning glory bower.
Sunday morning sick, window light
Illuminates the suburban refuge
Head or belly seems the choice,
All preparations amalgamate short of cure,
Beating words against the page, persisting
In a new and bigger book. A year 
To go perhaps, all flowing to the inevitable
Sea, incurable cough coming like the tide
On a quiet morning.

Echoed voices this middle watch
Murmur down the hall
Reciting snippets of old stolen stories
Dragon fire in the night, drawing blades,
Arrows of hope slaying fears, perpetuating
Illusions. 
Reminders of the plagues come before us
Ancient rebellions, long betrayed loyalty
Death of heroes. Long sleep of the brave
The king praying in his spidery cave.

Flat-topped mountains watching over all
Peeking purple hazed over fantastical
Pillars, towers of red and white, 
Yellow cliffs, muddy river meanders
Around the old church
Busloads and bicycle tours congregate
Under sunshine powerful as water
See where the famous painter walked
Her house, vegetables gardens, borrowed 
Horses. See where those older horsemen
Watered their steeds, new church rising
Among the cottonwoods. Infant voices
Echoed from ancient cliffs
Virga falls over distant mountains.

Now day is done sun goes down in golden
Glory, monsoon darkness fleeing
Across green and purple mountains
Flower of the hour dances on
A scented breeze. 

Holy as the growing tip of whip-thin cottonwood shoot
Holy as a piece of planted ground
Holy as deer passing in the night
Death’s unholy power now broken
And ended, lingering only as shadow.

I see the sun wheel in front of me
Over my shoulder, above my head,
My heart, my hand, behind my back,
Tracery cross ringed with circles

Not dividing, but encompassing
Reconciling all things – reconciling
Man to God, man to man, to woman, 
To the earth – healing, uniting
Subsuming hatred into love
I see the Son, Lord of all. 

And when that long-appointed
Reconciliation finally finds me
I will spend ten thousand years
Beneath the new-starred sky
Ten thousand years dwelling in the breeze
Trees reaching for a new sun
Ten thousand years of wild fruit
And crystal stream water
Every bird my friend, every eye
A new star, every sound of wind
Taking my turn in the eternal song.

Valley of bones, valley of vision
Sleeping houseless sockless soapless
With three fleece dog blankets against the wind
A trail bar from the bag, or a charitable cheeseburger.
Christ have mercy it's six degrees and the wind's 
Blowing down like hell out of the mountains
The wind blowing down from the mountain