The Overhaul (3 page)

it’s uncommonly close;

sequestered in the telescope lens

it’s like a compere, spotlit,

driving its borrowed light

out to all sides equally.

While set in a row in the dark

beyond its blaze,

like seed-pearls,

or coy new talents

awaiting their call onstage –

are what must be, surely,

the Galilean moons.

In another room,

my children lie asleep, turning

as Earth turns, growing

into their own lives, leaving me

a short time to watch, eye

to the eye-piece,

how a truth unfolds –

how the moonlets glide

out of their chance alignment,

each again to describe

around its shared host

its own unalterable course.

Tell me, Galileo, is this

what we’re working for?

The knowing that in just

one Jovian year

the children will be gone

uncommonly far, their bodies

aglow, grown, talented –

mere bright voice-motes

calling from the opposite

side of the world.

What else would we want

our long-sighted instruments

to assure us of? I’d like

to watch for hours, see

what you old astronomers

apprehended for the first time,

bowing to the inevitable …

but it’s late. Already

the next day

plucks at my elbow

like a wakeful infant,

next-door’s dog barks,

and a cloud arrives,

appearing out of nothing.

Mind thon bridge? The wynds

that spawned us? Those hemmed in,

ramshackle tenements

taller, it seemed, every year …

Caller herrin’! Ony rags! On the mountain

stands a lady
…

What a racket! Coal smoke,

midden-reek … filthy,

needless to mention, our two

old hives, heaped high

either side of the river,

crammed with the living, with the dead-beat

and joined by that sandstone ligature …

Did you ever notice

how walking out over the water

made us more human:

men became gracious,

women unfolded

their arms from their breasts –

and where else could children,

beggars, any one of us,

pause and look up at the sky!

And that river! Forever

bearing its breeze to the sea,

like a rustic bride, scented

now with blossom,

now with pine sap,

– But what was the sea to us, then?

What was a mountain?

Yes; us. Me and you.
That
bridge,

long ago demolished

where we first met.

Gie me, ye Po’ers, jist ane simmer mair

an ane maumie autumn,

that ma hairt, ripe wi sweet sang,

’s no sae swier for tae dee. A sowl

denied in life its heevinly richt

wil waunner Orcus disjaiskit;

but gin ah could mak whit’s halie

an maist dear tae me – ane perfect poem

I’ll welcome the cauld, the quate mirk!

For though I maun lee’ ma lyre

an gang doon wantin sang, Ah’d hae lived,

aince
, lik the gods; and aince is eneuch.

Last night, when the moon

slipped into my attic-room

as an oblong of light,

I sensed she’d come to commiserate.

It was August. She travelled

with a small valise

of darkness, and the first few stars

returning to the northern sky,

and my room, it seemed,

had missed her. She pretended

an interest in the bookcase

while other objects

stirred, as in a rockpool,

with unexpected life:

strings of beads in their green bowl gleamed,

the paper-crowded desk;

the books, too, appeared inclined

to open and confess.

Being sure the moon

harboured some intention,

I waited; watched for an age

her cool gaze shift

first toward a flower sketch

pinned on the far wall

then glide to recline

along the pinewood floor

before I’d had enough.
Moon
,

I said,
we’re both scarred now.

Are they quite beyond you
,

the simple words of love? Say them.

You are not my mother
;

with my mother, I waited unto death.

Here is the lighthouse,

redundant these days.

From the keepers’

neglected garden

– the sea, of course

a metallic seam

closing the horizon.

– And gulls too,

uttering the same

torn-throated cries

as when you first imagined

hours spent hunched

against the wind-

abraded wall might yield some

species of understanding.

All those hours, gazing

out to the ocean.

Years ago now.

When I found I’d lost you –

not beside me, nor ahead,

nor right nor left not

your green jacket moving

between the trees anywhere –

I waited a long while

before wandering on. No wren

jinked in the undergrowth,

not a twig snapped.

It was hardly the Wildwood –

just some auld fairmer’s

shelter belt – but red haws

reached out to me,

and between fallen leaves

pretty white flowers bloomed

late into their year. I tried

calling out, or think

I did, but your name

shrivelled on my tongue,

so instead I strolled on

through the wood’s good

offices, and duly fell

to wondering if I hadn’t

simply made it all up. You,

I mean, everything,

my entire life. Either way,

nothing now could touch me

bar my hosts, who appeared

as diffuse golden light,

as tiny spiders

examining my hair …

What gratitude I felt then –

I might be gone for ages
,

maybe seven years!
–

and such sudden joie de vivre

that when a ditch gaped

right there instantly in front of me

I jumped it, blithe as a girl –

ach, I jumped clear over it,

without even pausing to think.

Dusk, and the black rooks

rise from their stubble-fields,

returning to the pine-copse

they quit at dawn.

Kaah … kaah … kaah
… they proclaim

their shared release,

straggling in loose groups

above hedges and the river

as though the trees

were singing, to draw them in.

They go; the peasant earth

they’ve probed all day

beneath them now,

and of no matter.

There are only the trees

luring from their realms of sky

each mite of darkness

to counter the coming night;

and
kaah … kaah … kaah
…

the rooks reply.

She comes to me

as a jay’s shriek,

as ragged branches shading

deerways I find myself

lost among for days,

weeks, till the crisis

passes. When I weep

she strokes my hair

and calls me ‘babe’,

coaxing me to fall

once more for her

scarlet-berry promises –

This time
, she says,
I’ll keep you
,

so you’ll never have to face them all again.

If I could stand the pressures,

if I could make myself strong,

I’d dive far under the ocean,

away from these merfolk

– especially the mermen, moaning

and wringing out their beards.

I’d discover a cave

green and ventricular

and there, with tremendous patience,

I’d teach myself to listen:

what the whale-fish hear

answering through the vastnesses

I’d hear too. But oh my love,

tell me you’d swim by,

tell me you’d look out for me,

down there it’s impossible to breathe –

Nae lang yirdit

but here y’ur back –

turnt tae a blackie

feathert in bark –

Nou ye ken whit befaa’s

folk that wad clype

on whit tends tae us aa

ayont the dyke –

a burnt gleg ee,

twa wire feet,

a thrapple o wid

that cannae wheep

fi the heighest branch

o’ ony tree … Och

how could ye no’

hae gane quaitely?

Bien wi yella pears, fu

o wild roses, the braes

fa intil the loch;

ye mensefu’ swans,

drunk wi kisses

dook yir heids

i’ the douce, the hailie watter.

But whaur when winter’s wi us

will ah fin flo’ers?

Whaur the shadda

an sunlicht o the yird?

Dumbfounert, the wa’s staun.

The cauld blast

claitters the wethervanes.

The grey storm passes

a storm the sea wakes from

then soon forgets …

surf plumes at the rocks –

wave after wave, each

drawing its own long fetch

– and the hills across the firth –

golden, as the cloud lifts – yes

it’s here, everything

you wanted, everything

you insisted on –

Even the raven,

his old crocked voice

asks you what you’re waiting for

See when it all unravels – the entire project

reduced to threads of moss fleeing a nor’wester;

d’you ever imagine chasing just one strand, letting it lead you

to an unsung cleft in a rock, a place you could take to,

dig yourself in – but what are the chances of that?

     Of the birds,

few remain all winter; half a dozen waders

mediate between sea and shore, that space confirmed

– don’t laugh – by your own work. Waves boom, off-white

spume-souls twirl out of geos, and look,

blown about the headland: scraps of nylon fishing net. Gannets

– did you know? – pluck such rubbish from the waves, then

hie awa’

to colonies so raucous and thief-ridden, each nest

winds up swagged to the next … Then they’re flown, and the

cliff’s left

wearing naught but a shoddy, bird-knitted vest.

And look at us! Out all day and damn all to show for it.

Bird-bones, rope-scraps, a cursory sketch – but a bit o’ bruck’s

all we need to get us started, all we’ll leave behind us when

we’re gone.

I am grateful to the editors of the following journals, in which some of these poems first appeared.

Edinburgh Review
, the
Guardian, Irish Pages
, the
London Review of Books, Orion
, the
New Yorker
Poetry London, Poetry Review, Woodlanders.
‘The Beach’ was broadcast on BBC Radio 3.

The quotation in ‘Roses’ is from Rosa Luxemburg.

With special thanks to James Dodds for his lino-cut, ‘Shetland Fourern’.

KATHLEEN JAMIE was born in the west of Scotland in 1962. She is the author of six previous poetry collections, including
Waterlight: Selected
Poems. The Overhaul
won the Costa Prize and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. Jamie’s nonfiction books include the highly regarded
Findings
and
Sightlines
, which won the John Burroughs Medal and the Orion Book Award. She is chair of creative writing at Stirling University, and lives with her family in Fife, Scotland.

The Overhaul
is set in Apollo MT.

Manufactured by Versa Press on acid-free,

30 percent postconsumer wastepaper.