I’m playing my annual celebratory
game of Pooh Sticks on the Nith,
safely perched high up on Devorgilla Bridge,
48 going on 10, the world twice the size
& me half as large as then.
By Dumfries, all burns & tributaries are one
blue whoosh of Nith, their names drowned
willingly in liquid twists of sound, Euchan,
Crawick, Shinnel, Cargen Pow now bullying
through the town, wet boisterous boys together.
Great trunks are scudding under, slalomed down from
Auldgirth, Thornhill, limb & root torn & thrown
as if by giants idly passing dark Carsphairn days
away up-river, scattering ducks, barging
their way to Glencaple, Kingholm Quay,
the Solway Firth, then to a beach, & me.
By the time they’ve reached Mersehead
I’ll have willed those thin twigs into mighty trunks
thrown by the giant I thought myself when
days were lighter, waters slower, rivers jumped.
FROM HERE TO KIRKGUNZEON
The clock says 8.15 but nature disagrees
& seems convinced we’re in the Pleistocene,
the Eocene or, at the very least,
Kirkgunzeon. From Sandyhills the road,
the rolling fields, the clustered humps of trees,
the very age itself is swathed in seas of
grey we half expect to see occasionally
parted by long necks of sauropods,
stirred into swirls of milky depths
by half-glimpsed, gargantuan flocks
defying belief, quantum physics, death,
borders blurring into more than fog.
By Beeswing it’s lifting, cows are cows
again, rhamphorynchus no more than
tattered, droukit crows, cottages blinked
into Monday morning normalcy, car
headlights visible, the road a road,
no need to fear the haar-happed elder gods.
It’s half past 8, Dumfries waits
at the bottom of the Long Wood, sad,
slumped, wishing for mist, the past,
something bigger & more real than this.
EORISDALE
Here is a house where no-one lives
by a beach where the wide-water highway is
under hills layered away in typical mist.
Here, we could put down our packs & remain
while the coast idles closer & tide & rain
pull us under & out to ourselves again.
Shifting pink carpets of machair & sand
white & fine will ripple & part unplanned
beneath feet beating brief new paths to the strand.
On the beach, only cattle, beyond, only blue
spooled away to infinity, stitched to the view
by a sky under which I will lie with you
when the roof is the evening, the walls our bright days,
the windows the eyes of our world & ablaze
with the hue of bright moon over Vatersay.
BORDERS
That sound outside, near Sandyhills bridge,
along Barnhourie Burn, a high wild wailing
winding down to a long, low growl of echo,
has me up in my chair, neck hairs tight.
You’d tell me it’s a heron out on the scope
for sprats, perhaps a dog fox losing the head
to the vast dark freedoms of Galloway night.
Part of me wishes you here with your
brush-off urban logic, dismissing
superstitious whims of banshees, bogles,
shades, you who are out there, somewhere,
unaccounted for too.
Yet part of me thrills, the part
still too unsure to rise & draw the curtains,
like a vole forced into the bright
desperation of winter moonlight
on untrammelled snow, fearfully
seeking proof of something other
than its tiny self on the go,
trembling, held somewhere terrible
between warm safety, hunger
& the old need-to-know.
Stuart A. Paterson, born 1966, is a widely published & anthologised Scottish poet. A past recipient of an Eric Gregory Award & a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship, his 2015 collection of poems about Dumfries & Galloway, ‘Border Lines’ (Indigo Dreams), was voted Best Poetry Pamphlet at the 2016 Saboteur Awards in London. His latest collection is ‘Aye’, poems in Scots, published by Tapsalteerie. He lives in Galloway by the Solway coast. More info available at https://www.facebook.com/patersonpoetry/
First background photo “Bridge over Kelvin” by Ian Dick
Second background photo by “Nith Estuary, July 1989” by alljengi
Foreground photo “Scotland-1-20015” by Natasha Chub-Afanasyeva