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“... Descent Edinburgh Turnhouse, November 2009 I There’s something of the sky in everything or so it seems tonight, lights swimming up from hill-farms in the Pentlands, close to snow between the dairy-yards and presbyteries that straggle out, in spokes of white and gold to stars and clouds beneath the eye of heaven; II and always it’s there, that soft attentiveness, not looking down, or watchful, more a bandwidth in the squalls of microwave to which some wisp of distance in the heart could tune itself and find, beyond itself, a wavelength it could take for now or never ...”

“... Desire When we’re apart I imagine us in Japan, two hundred years ago, behind a screen, or watching the snow from the yawn of a paper room, the lovers in some shunga by Harunobu. It’s that formality we sometimes need to feed desire: intimate, yet giving in to light and shadow, allowing the other space to be intact and seen, like the single pine in a yard of gravel, revealed by the tug of the grain and this curtain of snow ...”

“... Pluviose There is a kind of sleep that falls for days on end, the foothills lost in cloud, rain in the stairwells, rainspots crossing the floor of the Catholic church and the sense of a former life at the back of our minds, as if the dead had gathered here in shapes that seemed at least familiar, if not perfect. As children, we were told they came for our sakes, bringing secrets from the cold, the loam on their eyes and hands a kind of blessing, but now they are here, in the creases and lines of our mouths, speaking through us to friends we have never seen, or only to the rain, because it sounds the way it sounded then, when they were young, setting a ladle aside, or a finished book, and the world almost come to an end, when we stopped to listen ...”

“... Faith The tent show had been and gone and now there was nothing but rust and sunlight, like a poultice on the grass, candy and broken glass and a spare tatter of hallelujah blown through the dust where somebody passing through had stopped to write a half-dozen half-formed letters we couldn’t decipher out where the trailers had stood at the edge of the night and the May Queen was lost for hours before she was missed, her mother asleep after back-shift, her father a rumour, a story the woman would tell of a distant summer; idealised, hazy at best, he had left her one morning at dawn for the Sanskrit of rain ...”

“... I walk in a shower of ice on the Finnmarksvidda: freezing rain, not snow; hard pearls of ice, stinging my face and hands as I make my way to the frozen lake. No sign of life – just scats and moulted hair; but something calls from far across the water, some elemental, lost beneath the sky, darker than flesh and blood when it calls again then waits, as if it wanted me to answer and snow beings to fall – huge, sudden flakes, drifting between the birch trees, blurring the moss, as if some festival had been resumed, the ceremony of another season ...”

“... Annunciation with zero point field Sitting up late in the dark I think you’re about to tell me that story I’ve heard before of a creature pulled from the ice, or prised from a ditch, its body a hundred years old, but the eyes intact and hardly a trace of decay on the frost-white skin; and later, how they cut along the spine and found two spurs of cartilage above the shoulder blades: not wings, or not quite wings, but something like a memory of flight locked in a chamber of bone it had barely abandoned ...”

“... Self-Portrait as Picture Window First day of snow, the low sun glinting on the gate post where a single Teviot ewe is licking frost-melt from the bars, the other sheep away in the lower field, the light on the crusted meadow grass that makes me think of unripe plums so local an event it seems, for one long breath, that time might stop; or, better, that it isn’t me at all who stands here, at this window, gazing out, not me who woke up late, when everyone had gone to work or school, but someone else, a man so like myself that nobody would spot the difference – same eyes, same mouth – but gifted with a knowledge I can scarcely register in words, unless I call it graceful and nomadic, some lost art of finding home in sheep trails, lines of flight, the feel of distance singing in the flesh, that happiness-as-forage, bedding in, declining, making sense of what it finds ...”

“... O nobly-born, listen. Now thou art experiencing the Radiance of the Clear Light of Pure Reality. Recognise it. O nobly-born, thy present intellect, in real nature void, not formed into anything as regards characteristics or colour, naturally void, is the very Reality, the All-Good. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, tr. W.Y. Evans-Wentz I Scotlandwell All summer long, I waited for the night to drive out in the unexpected gold of beechwoods, and those lighted homesteads, set like kindling in the crease-lines of the dark, catching a glimpse, from the road, of huddled dogs and sleepless cattle, mustered in a yard as one flesh, heads like lanterns, swaying, full of muddled light; light from the houses television blue, a constant flicker, like the run of thought that keeps us from ourselves, although it seems to kindle us, and make us plausible: creatures of habit, ready to click into motion ...”

“... Hendrick Avercamp (1585-1634): A Standing Man Watching a Skating Boy No doubt, in a year or two, this child will be gone; rumours of war in the air and boys at that age always impatient for something. The wide road that leads to the pond runs all the way out to the press gang – you can almost taste the glare of blood, the panic in the ranks, the dead laid out in seams of fire or lye (thus have they loved to wander; they have not refrained their feet); but, for now, he is safe; and the father admits to a moment of guarded pride, which is never quite free of misgiving (look at how close he stands to where the boy is balanced on his skates, a kind of beauty in the act of concentration ...”

“... Notes towards a Devotio ModernaIAs if there was a sky where we couldpause a while, like medievalpilgrims, we are patient to the lastand have no thought of After, or the godsthat might have been: the green amidst the black,the changelings, or the newly resurrected.Unlike the saints, we have no usefor angels, all thatbright dust floating downfrom worlds we have no reason to pursue;though sometimes, in the house we learned by heartas children, everaftered in a fogof Sabbath and the scent of mother love,we let some devil in to make its bed:wind in the ashes, chemtrails in the cinders ...”

“... But oh, that magic feeling, nowhere to go. Lennon-McCartney I Driving to Mirtiotissa We learned to avoid the village to drive through the olive groves                                                       evading children and dogs                             and old men with sodden voices calling to one another through the trees the way we avoided noon                                            or the sickening halt of the butcher’s doorway leaving the white-hot streets and the slide of traffic islands of rubble                              flashes of broken glass oil-slicks and fruits-spills                                           the sudden untenable light cruising the dirt roads and alleys on blue afternoons for something we almost found again and again: a sand-lizard perched on a rock or a clump of thorns the fretwork between its fingers                                                     the fire-coloured throat the spiders in the gaps between the rocks goats in the weeds                                their slack mouths and sun-bleared eyes remembering panic that faint trace of shit and vanilla that hangs in the shade ...”

“... entwined.           Our neighbour                           John who spends his free time diving plumbing the sea for evidence and spilt cargoes         who has burrowed in the mud to touch the mystery of something absolute         can tell you how                         out in the ...”

“... God answers our prayers by refusing them. Luther I A Place by the Sea Because what we think of as home is a hazard to others, our shorelines edged with rocks and shallow sandbanks                reefs where navigation fails we mark the harbour out with lights and noise: flickers of green and scarlet in the dark the long moan of a foghorn                                        when the daylight thickens and stills and even when we speak of other things our prayers include all ships                                       all those at sea navigators pilots lobster-crews the man who is yanked overboard on a line of creels whole families of boys and quiet fathers lost in a sudden squall                                 a mile from land ...”

“... From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity. Edvard Munch I Landfill In ways the dead are laid                           or how they come to lie I recognise myself                   insomniac                            arms angled       or crossed: children in skull caps soldiers with hobnailed boots or sandals placed like gifts beside their feet priests at the gates of death                               or afterlife their vestments stained with malt and carbon            fingers rinsed with camomile                or honeyed meadowsweet resemble me            laid sleepless by your side as if there were something else                                 some chore or rite to be completed ...”

“... Although it sets out to explore the lives of Fred and Rosemary West – along with Peter Sutcliffe, the most notorious figures in recent British criminal history – Happy like Murderers reads more like a novel than a documentary. In this respect, it recalls Truman Capote’s ‘novel of fact’, In Cold Blood, which made compelling fiction out of the brutal and senseless murder of an apparently typical American family in rural Kansas, and created a new genre on the way ...”