Kathleen Jamie

This is the multitude, the beasts you wanted to show me, drawing me upstream, all morning up through wind- scoured heather to the hillcrest. Below us, in the next glen, is the grave calm brotherhood, descended out of winter, out of hunger, kneeling like the signatories of a covenant; their weighty, antique-polished antlers rising above the vegetation like masts in a harbor, or city spires. We lie close together, and though the wind whips away our man-and-woman smell, every stag-face seems to look toward us, toward, but not to us: we’re held, and hold them, in civil regard. I suspect you’d hoped to impress me, to lift to my sight our shared country, lead me deeper into what you know, but loath to cause fear you’re already moving quietly away, sure I’ll go with you, as I would now, almost anywhere.

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 traveled 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 rock pool, 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 harbored some intention, I waited; watched for an age her cool gaze shift first toward a flower sketch pinned on the far wall then glide down 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.

Well, friend, we’re here again — sauntering the last half-mile to the land’s frayed end to find what’s laid on for us, strewn across the turf — gull feathers, bleached shells, a whole bull seal, bone-dry, knackered from the rut (we knock on his leathern head, but no one’s home). Change, change — that’s what the terns scream down at their seaward rocks; fleet clouds and salt kiss — everything else is provisional, us and all our works. I guess that’s why we like it here: listen — a brief lull, a rock pipit’s seed-small notes.

It was winter, near freezing, I'd walked through a forest of firs when I saw issue out of the waterfall a solitary bird. It lit on a damp rock, and, as water swept stupidly on, wrung from its own throat supple, undammable song. It isn't mine to give. I can't coax this bird to my hand that knows the depth of the river yet sings of it on land.