Saint Andrew
elbow deep in fish heads,
hands scaled with his toil,
his glazed eyes upward
a vision spoken in tongues
garbled from late night shebeens,
assignations with the nameless
fruit of hidden stills.
on his arms the faded
blue of the saltire,
the death to come,
a thistle in outline,
hard edged, bristling
with thorns.
The Sail-Loft
landed sail,
the copper red
of sunset,
an unsteady passage,
irregular as the pages
of burnt books,
sea-nets, ash tongued
and windless, spread
in the rafters,
canvas draped like shed
skin, a moult of
moth wings.
the roof creaks in the sun.
the dust holds
its breath.
and faint, faint,
the resting sail
tells of the voyage.
Bivouac on a Scottish Hillside
there is no army here,
no campfires and no camp followers.
and that glen below
is shelled with empty walls,
broken shielings,
denuded even of sheep.
here, beneath the treeless scarp
is the peat-rut cry of deer,
the endless shivering of grass,
a great silence, reaching up
and up to a cloudless sky.
here, the ecstatic being is…
Uisge Beatha
they called it god’s breath
the seventh day elixir,
milk of amber burns,
spill of yellow grain,
the long weeping
of hills in autumn.
these were deities once,
crumbled and nameless,
hearth gods, who swallowed
the sun against the winter dark.
we wash our throats
gladly with their echo,
emerge tear-streaked,
like transfigured saints,
the ingrained grime
of our deeds hidden
in the desperate clasp
of hands, all the while
the glaze of our eyes,
shining, shining
bright as icons
Jags
Partick Thistle, club of artists, terraces
crowded with creatives, battling the police
in swift arguments over the finer points
of the soccer dialectic. Or filming the game
in grainy super-8, slowing down the action
even further, until the white passage of the ball
is suspended calmly over the green prism
of the pitch, egg-like and serene against
a waving background of claret and amber,
an image to draw gasps from thinking
folk all the way from London to Venice.
Team talks have been replaced,
jettisoned in favour of happenings,
where strikers strike poses, strolling
around Foucault like cats, surefooted
but always with an eye for the main chance.
The midfield occupy the centre in brooding
silence, awaiting the arrival of the defenders,
the beat defenders, hard-eyed, wreathed
in smoke and last night’s cheap perfume.
They scorn tactics, go with the flow,
a goal is, after all, just a goal.
Partick Thistle, club of artists –
there are those believers, holy fools,
who say when the long trophy haul
is finally over and all are wreathed
in triumph, that fans and team will join hands,
from those grey bearded terrace Montaignes
to the wild eyed home goal revolutionaries,
twitching with fervour and ayahuasca,
shouting incantation and aphorism alike.
There, in that briefest of moments, Firhill
victorious, will be seen to levitate.
Brockville
Unbowed by their banishment to the away end,
that uncovered crucible of decayed foundry brick,
the opposition support, gobshite presences fresh from
their corroded Fiestas, unfurl their banners and, cans
in hand, perform an ironic lower division mexican wave,
catcall our soft southern drizzle, our slow hand clap.
We huddle together, parka’d like yaks in the dreich
afternoon that is December. I will not leave this brief
warmth to brave the toilets, the awful chasm of cracked
cement, frozen rivers of urine cake, nor will I join
the queue of iron-stomached hardies who dare a pie,
better men than me, who only stands and shivers.
Goalie, you’re nothing but a yellow ball of fluff,
one of the terrace stalwarts erupts, a remnant from
days when creativity rather than crudity ruled the chant.
The goalie leans disconsolate against the nearside post,
the canary of his jersey, a maillot jaune of victory
in any other sport, sags under a slurry of rain.
The ball idles in midfield, that bone on bone
zone of the late tackle, rolls slovenly across
the centre circle mud, before an agricultural
punt forward, the baited breath hail mary
of the long pass, connecting with the our striker’s
head like a butcher slapping a side of meat.
The ball is an arc and the goalie an instant between
stillness and movement, a blur that could be Boccioni,
gloved hand palming over the bar then, looking upward
to his terrace tormentor, grins to desultory applause.
Aye, good save son. And we too clap our mittened
hands, playing our part, the game rather than the man.
Morgan Downie is a poet, short story writer and visual artist. His published work includes stone and sea, a collection of poems about island life mainly centred on the Western Isles, and distances, a Romanian- English photopoetry collection. He lives on the Scottish mainland even if he’d rather be on an island.
–Art by John McSporran