High on the brae
that was our backyard
a little lively stream,
the Allt an Eireanach,
is scrambling downhill.
Somewhere between the falls
and the old bridge
it loses its Gaelic
and as the Kirkton Burn
strolls through the farms,
meeting up with
the Calair and the Balvaig.
Together they’ll journey
to Lubnaig, Leny and beyond
—but that’s another story.
In the cottage of childhood
through the heedless years
those falls were background
music to every season,
always within earshot,
rumbling, hushing, roaring
headlong in spate or
a douce summer runlet.
Lying adrift
on sleep forsaken nights
I’d trace the steps of the burn
back home in the dark,
climbing pool by pool
up the glen and out
above the treeline,
narrowing as the slope steepens
to the cradling summit,
the brooding black lochan there.
*
Across the way,
the Calair Burn
descends its water ladder
from the Glen Buckie moors,
from Allt Fathan Glinne
and the meeting of the waters,
by Immeroin and Ballimore.
Before canyoning
to the floor of the valley,
the welling confluence,
it pauses at the Mill Pool
(the lade once fed
a waterwheel now
still as a stopped clock).
Here, when spring rains
called silver to the brown streams
and by night the salmon had
slipped like a rumour
over the lip of the pool,
I’d drop a line
where the torrent entered,
a swart, swirling pot I
half believed to be bottomless.
A tableau of memory
framed by hazel and pine:
a figure kneeling on a rock,
the rod’s antenna, line
held between thumb
and forefinger like a pen.
The loudness in the hollow
shrunk to near silence.
Stillness. Imminence.
*
West of the village, near where loch
sleeks to river, stands Stronvar Bridge,
its five cutwaters combing the Balvaig.
From its humped back I’m gazing down
on where the weed wavers, trout
hang in the slack behind the piers
and, in due season, come the great grey
shapes of salmon, pilgrims
to the spawning redds
in the shadow of its arches.
(A flash, a gleam there
as a hen fish turns,
scooping a nest on the gravel bed.)
And there, by the margins,
under the mallard patrol
and the swoops
of fly snipping martins,
minnows, fry, parr
quicken the current.
A river never
looks back, but if it did, the Balvaig,
glancing before it turns
on the first of the
blind bends of its way,
might see a boy
leaning over a stone parapet
staring and staring through the slid veil of water.
*
Gravity, I’d learn, is what draws
all streams, all rivers seaward.
Nothing more (though the pulse
of their course
is polyrythmical melody)
and whether they run
from Eden or Babylon,
the slopes of Helicon
or a small Highland glen,
their end is the flatlining estuary
and that one-fold shore.
And I grew downstream
where city noise
drowns out their tamed flowing,
where bridges
are for crossing quickly or,
if the time is right, for burning.
Where years are to be lost.
To be lost and found again.
*
Sooner or later from the faces
ranged before me comes the question
What made you become a poet?
and I’ll talk about early influences,
about models, mentors, goals
—all true, all sufficient reasons—
while somewhere
behind the walls of the room
I’ll be hearing (my Heliconian springs)
the Calair, the Balvaig
and the Kirkton Burn
as they pass by
brimming with gifts, gifts
unsought for, and unreturnable.
Cover image by Paul Edney