Douglas Dunn

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From "St. Kilda's Parliament" (in "St. Kilda's parliament")

On either side of a rock-paved lane,
Two files of men are standing barefooted,
Bearded, waistcoated, each with a tam-o'-shanter
On his head, and most with a set half-smile
That comes from their companionship with rock,
With soft mists, with rain, with roaring gales,
And from a diet of solan goose and eggs,
A diet of dulse and sloke and sea-tangle,
And ignorance of what a pig, a bee, a rat,
Or rabbit look like, although they remember
The three apples brought here by a traveller
Five years ago, and have discussed them since.
And there are several dogs doing nothing
Who seem contemptuous of my camera,
And a woman who might not believe it
If she were told of the populous mainland.
A man sits on a bank by the door of his house,
Staring out to sea and at a small craft
Bobbing there, the little boat that brought me here,
Whose carpentry was slowly shaped by waves,
By a history of these northern waters.
Wise men or simpletons - it is hard to tell -

But in that way they almost look alike
You also see how each is individual,
Proud of his shyness and of his small life
On this outcast of the Hebrides
With his eyes full of weather and seabirds,
Fish, and whatever morsel he grows here.
Clear, too, is manhood, and how each man looks
Secure in the love of a woman who
Also knows the wisdom of the sun rising,
Of weather in the eyes like landmarks.
...
Here I whittle time, like a dry stick,
From sunrise to sunset, among the groans
And sighings of a tongue I cannot speak,
Outside a parliament, looking at them,
As they, too, must always look at me
Looking through my apparatus at them
Looking. Benevolent, or malign? But who,
At this late stage, could tell, or think it worth it?
For I was there, and am, and I forget.

From "Remembering Lunch" (in "St. Kilda's parliament")

...
To come down south from the country in a freshly pressed suit
Is no longer the exercise in youthful if gauche dignity
It was once in days of innocent enthusiasm without routine.
And so I look forward to my tweed-clad solitude, alone
Beside a widening estuary, the lighthoused island appearing
Where waves of the sea turmoil against the river's waters
Baring their salty teeth and roaring. And here I can stand-
Forgive me my fantasies as, Lord, I surely forgive you yours -
In a pretence of being a John Buchan of the underdog,
With my waistcoated breast puffed against the wind. What do they long for?
Propping up bars with them I can pretend to be as they are
Though I no longer know what they are thinking, if ever I did,
And, raising this civil if not entirely sympathetic interest
In what they feel, I know it contributes little to them,
Adding, as it does, to a change in myself they might not notice,
Causing me this pain as I realize the way I must change
Is to be different from friends I love and whose company –
When the last carafe was ordered, an outrageous remark spoken,
Or someone announced his plan for an innovating stanza
Or a new development in his crowded sex-life - whose company
Was a landmark in my paltry accumulation of knowledge.
Perhaps, after all, this not altogether satisfactory
Independence of mind and identity before larger notions
Is a better mess to be in, with a pocketful of bread and cheese,
My hipflask and the Poésie of Philippe Jaccottet,
Listening to the sea compose its urbane wilderness,
Although it is a cause for fear to notice that only my footprints
Litter this deserted beach with signs of human approach,
Each squelch of leather on mud complaining, But where are you going?

"Loch Music" (in "St. Kilda's parliament")

I listen as recorded Bach
Restates the rhythms of a loch.
Through blends of dusk and dragonflies
A music settles on my eyes
Until I hear the living moors,
Sunk stones and shadowed conifers,
And what I hear is what I see,
A summer night’s divinity.
And I am not administered
Tonight, but feel my life transferred
Beyond the realm of where I am
Into a personal extreme,
As on my wrist, my eager pulse
Counts out the blood of someone else.
Mist-moving trees proclaim a sense
Of sight without intelligence;
The intellects of water teach
A truth that’s physical and rich.
I nourish nothing with the stars,
With minerals, as I disperse,
A scattering of quavered wash
As light against the wind as ash.

"The Kaleidoscope" (from "Elegies")

To climb these stairs again, bearing a tray,
Might be to find you pillowed with your books,
Your inventories listing gowns and frocks
As if preparing for a holiday.
Or, turning from the landing, I might find
My presence watched through your kaleidoscope,
A symmetry of husbands, each redesigned
In lovely forms of foresight, prayer and hope.
I climb these stairs a dozen times a day
And, by the open door, wait, looking in
At where you died. My hands become a tray
Offering me, my flesh, my soul, my skin.
Grief wrongs us so. I stand, and wait, and cry
For the absurd forgiveness, not knowing why.

"The Clear Day" (from "Elegies")

Sunlight gathers in the leaves, dripping
Invisible syrups. Long afternoons
Have been reduced to this significant
Table, melodious ice cubes shaken in
A blue tumbler, lazily tipped vermouth
And a hand measuring it, a propped elbow,
A languid eye, while a reflection on
A leaf turns into everything called summer.
The heat haze ripples through the faraway
Gardens of strangers, acquaintances, of those
I can put a face to. With my eyes shut,
Squeezing the soft salts of their sweat, I see
Beyond my body, nerves, cells, brain, and leisure.
Blue coastal persons walk out of the haze.
They have outflown the wind, outswum the sea
I think, and feel, and do, but do not know
All that I am, all that I have been, once,
Or what I could be could I think of it.
These blue pedestrians bruise the edge of me
To a benign remorse, with my lessons.
With my eyes shut, I walk through a wet maze
Following a thread of sounds-birdsong in
Several cadences, children, a dog-bark,
The traffic roaring against silence as
A struck march drowns it out, simple tunes of
An amateur pianist, a vulgar shout,
A bottle tapped against a thirsty glass,
The burst of its pouring, and the slip
When the chilled glass wets a wet lower lip.
I could not guess at what the pictures are
In the eyes of a friend turned round to watch
Shrub shadows dapple a few yards of lawn
As his smoke clings to his thoughtful posture.
Tonight, I will look out at the dark trees,
Writing this in the muddle of lost tenses
At an o'clock of flowers turned colourless.
Then, as always, the soul plays over mind
With radiantly painful speculations.
I shall sieve through our twenty years, until
I almost reach the sob in the intellect,
The truth that waits for me with its loud grief,
Sensible, commonplace, beyond understanding.

From "Love-making By Candlelight" (from "Northlight")

...
Skin looked like this two hundred years ago
When candlelight lapped the erotic straw
In hilly farms where windowed candlefire
Burnished imperfect glass. Portending haws
Hung on the leafless bush, amazement’s bud
Red on the acres of nocturnal snow
As uplands rose to tufted winterlight,
In their celestial altitude
The eighteenth-century stars.

This is how it must be, shape-shifting fire’s
Impatient nudity and ours
On the big bed. A molten vividness
Dismantles gender and the way it moves
Identifies a married venery
Timeless in the bedroom of the species —
A Pictish smile, a medieval kiss,
A whispered pre-industrial draught
On our contemporary bed.

Played on by fire, those clustered cornice grapes
Outwit their plaster: cornucopia’s vine,
Pompeian opulence, rumours
From far back, echoes of Florentine
Intrigue, Renaissance footsteps in the hall
Where gossips overhear indelible
Echoed courtships; and these Muscovian furs
Were linen until fire reshaped
Their transient destiny.

"Hush" (from "Elegies")

Shh. Sizzle of days, weeks, months, years...
How much of us has gone, rising and crying.
\iv skin seeps its pond of dew.
Air sips and licks as I walk out today
In the transparent jaw of the weather
\When the first leaves are greening.
Behind me I can hear
A click of fantasy heels,
But there is no one there.
She is with me, as I call to see
A sick friend whose skin is drying
On the bones of her spirit.
I stand on the sad threshold with my flowers.
How old this is, and how the heart beats faster
As I wait at the bell like a mourning wooer,
As the dog barks, as I give my flowers
And a secret wind blows in from eternal woods,
As my flowers sigh, asking for water.

From "The People Before" (from "Northlight")

...
Night swells with navigation’s stars
Honed to a masterpiece of quiet.
Dismantled commerce hungers for its jute,
Esparto, timber, coal and mariners,
Prosperity and credit.
Lighthouses warn the swimmers on a lost trade route.

A candleflame, held by a child
Walking past, reddens a window, her face
A spectral captive in the window’s glass,
Her neck a ruff of fiery nightgown lace.
Coniferous estates, the winterfield,
Submerge their farms in foliage and grass.

More geese rant westward, flock by chevroned flock.
The house of us now, love, of you and me.
I turn a blacksmithed key in its lock.
Feeling its freezing metal on their hands,
These other people turned this iron key.
The lunar honey fell on Buddon Sands.

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