Limp-covered, unprotected, paperbacks

have grown their marks the way a body might respond

to wounds in childhood, accident’s distress;

grown them from the chop of steel,

the nicks in blades that sheared them square

to leave raised tracks that curve across the page-ends

like a scar.  They bear these too: the indentations

pulsed through covers that fade out only

as the plot develops, characters begin to grow. And there

the corners start to crease, each random scalene

waiting for a thumb to smooth it out,

to claim the place back from somebody pausing in a past

which left these pits and scores

by accident, from skill a little less than it might be,

or pressing time, preserved here in the strata of a book.

Each third of a pint

was passed round the class

till all

had their bottle and paper straw,

a hole poked into the foil,

and time to suck

the warm as blood,

or chilled from frosty mornings

goodness

governments they’d never heard of

put their way.  One extra,

two or three

if more were absent,

made the rounds, an object lesson

in the doing,

in the agitating

all were urged to do

to churn the stuff to butter, fresh

as their amazement

at the trick.  The solid,

chilled and spread on biscuits,

oozed and crunched on gappy teeth,

imaginations sparked

and harking back

to frozen bottles, winter crystals

icy on the gums,

the mystery of transformation,

milk persuading them of change.

The best pop is like a rush of lust – Alastair McKay

The deuce coupe threads the dunes, back of the sands:

her daddy’s car, but he will understand

that parties must be seized, she says, like days,

thrown as hand-made pots, agreed the way

they’ve signed their surfboards, waxed them down

like documents.  In this grey town

the sounds of doo-wop only surface from the drains

that overflow, the malice of late summer rains

determined in their pock-marked progress

over sands and shallows, all that acned skin, to mess

up every wrung out joy that they display,

gleaming in convertibles: the Wilsons, Jardine, Love, gay

in some forgotten sense.  The discs stack up,

the portable Dansette slaps platter on to platter, enough

to wind the provost up, his bike a solitary patrol

against the shameless pleasure of it all.

Awful in his cycle clips, flat cap, he gets around, his face

a sucked in breath of disapproval.  Go on, chase

the blues away before he gets on to your back.

The surf is up.  The wind is from the north.  But fuck,

all summer long this is as good as it will get.  The needle

hits the groove.  Love’s voice.  You paddle

out beyond the waves, youth tied on with a cord.

She watches you, God only knows, holds your reward

in supple limbs.  You feel the surge.  You sing it.  Sea

rips at your board.  She says: Sing it one more time for me.

Long gone, those derelict tenements,

half-demolished,

a row of parlour walls stacked up

like sample cards

for someone’s granny’s wallpaper.  Their slivers,

flapping in the wind,

goodbyes.  Unlaid,

their fires all died, burned shadow

black into the grates that stamped each wall

with absence, empty

as some broken jug which stood once –

held the milk, some flowers, loose change

for the meter, warmed the baby’s bottle – whole,

on each one of these mantleshelves,

in living rooms complete

with hearthrugs, tables, easy chairs,

the neighbours in to borrow tea, just

floating there.

from The Book of Belongings (Arc, 2009)

Teamwork, you said and grabbed the corner

of the sack.

                     Too late.  My tensing back,

unused like yours to working with its hands,

went crack, as strain was felt and slack

was taken up.  We soldiered on and stones

built thick and fast.  Time dribbled past

and you, my senior by a score of years,

worked steadfast hour on hour.  I gasped

and, fighting to keep up, the stones became

this wall.

                  Now, looking at it all,

you off to more jobs still to do, it seems

a small thing to have made me crawl

from chair to chair, with aching back,

feeling much as stones inside a sack.

Let us make man in Our image, after Our likeness

Genesis 1; 26

We leave the table near to midnight.

Later cleared, it gives the game away:

a drift of salt, the crystals poised

against the bread crumbs, flakes of rind

that war for space upon this surface,

catching in the clefts of skin, the rough

of cotton,  as we swab it down. Enough

to brush this tribe into the rubbish

men will take to rot in landfill; enough

to trust that one day wood will plane

into a surface welcome to the touch,

will take the glossing of a sponge

unsnagged.  We quit the task, pinch

salt grains from our palms, accept

decay is evident and all there is beyond

this thickening of the gut, shines back

from waxed wood, marble’s mirror sheen,

wars too for space, a floater in the eye,

until it sticks there, snags the tissue

of the brain, makes us look through all

the surfaces we polish, searching for

our faces, for some deeper, richer grain.

from The Book of Belongings (Arc, 2009)

She knows that she’s the only one

for miles. The rattling space

of countryside, the empty plain

unsettling her, the urban Jew,

drawn back to this black soil.

The township’s there, the name

still on a wall.  Her own, surviving

in some faded list, its spelling

recognisably the same, enough

to trace the lot the house stood on.

She knows before she sees it

it is gone. They all have, ashes

blown across the plain, a trace

of carbon on the surface of the snow,

hidden under still more recent falls.

In this one place of graves she’s found

they linger on, the family name

so worn away it might be nothing

more than wish-fulfilment, hope.

She stoops to smother it with snow.

It reads again, a white script

ghosted by her fingers into stone.

from The Book of Belongings (Arc, 2009)

The former Craiglockhart Hydropathic, used during the First World War as a hospital for shell-shocked officers, now houses Edinburgh Napier University’s Business School.

Maybe they’re here somewhere, lost

in these crowds of students, informal

in their tweeds, plus fours –

Sassoon, the elder, Sunday golfer;

Owen, bookish, gangly, pale – mingling

with the queue for the refectory,

snatching nervously at fags, ignoring

notices forbidding all those here

to smoke. You catch a glimpse

you think, later, in the distance

– backs straight, military haircuts –

turning down a corridor you glance along

but they’re not there.  No, no-one is, though

low light slants through window frames,

plants these crosses on the wall.

A grim reminder [was] found up the chimney of a New Town home, [as] builders took away bricks from a blocked flue…

Edinburgh Evening News

It dropped into their hands out of the soot,

this token of the past, now stiff with age.

The leather hard, the lace long burnt away,

they held it up, a blackened child’s boot.

Today, perhaps a boy of six could force

his foot in here;  a century ago

a ten year old might even fit this sole

abandoned in the flue, lost in the course

of haste.  Into the stack, his knuckles raw,

the threat of fire to goad him from below,

he must’ve let it lie, and scaled the dark

desperate to move, to sweep away the work,

the boot still on the other foot, they say,

his master always there, a cry away.

from The Book of Belongings (Arc, 2009)

When Elizabeth I was informed of the death of Essex she was playing the virginals.

She lifts one hand and then the other.  The blade

has done its work, they come to say; he will trouble her

no more.  Her hands alone

deny this fact as, pausing at the virginals, her stare

is fixed on nothing.  Straight ahead she sees him

kneel, the rise and fall

of no more than an hour ago,

that makes the measure bitter to her thoughts,

its music pointless exercise that she, from her position,

must resume.  Her hands rest

on the keys.  Black and white is how she sees it,

this curse attached to rank. Her ladies watch 

as no word passes from her lips.  She lifts one hand

and then the other.  One note in precedence

begins it all again, a harmony restored.

I was a child nobody wanted. A lonely girl with a dream. . .
  Marilyn Monroe

There are ways of acting which can be taught;

if the actor uses The Method

it will look a lot like real life.  It may even

start to feel like that.  It is as plausible as a dream. 

She wasn’t an orphan.  She had a mother,

had a father, living in a mansion in Beverly Hills.

Sometimes she thinks: If I was pretty enough,

my father would come and take me away.

In the orphanage she stares through the window

at the distant neon

on top of the RKO lot,

sees it flash and thinks, someday.

A Method actor will do something false

until it becomes second nature.  That way

they will not be playing at it.  No-one

will be able to tell the difference.  Perhaps the actor

will not be able to tell the difference either. 

Sometimes, if a life is awful enough,

there will be comfort in this.  A doctor says: Child,

save your tears!  You may need them.

from the writing of Alastair McKay

first published in the anthology Split Screen (Red Squirrel Press, 2012)

is who we’re hearing in the basement.

Midnight, and we’re taking the back stairs up

to that attic room.  Morning,

and he’s crossing the yard in sunlight,

his voice lifting once again.

A fragment of some lyric, chant de Renaissance

filters the air clear.  And this

he gives to wine, to cellar after cellar

of the stuff – a chill runs through it. 

Somewhere between a tenor and an alto,

this rosé voice spans

a rack of notes. Each song soaked bottle

opens for our lips.  The chill is there, the suck

of grape on land, of some acoustic property

on liquid, flowing now

into our throats, the song dissolving inwards,

taking clarity, the flinty soil,

the element of joy, to tune our tongues.

Clos de Vaulichères, Tonnnerre, France

from The Book of Belongings (Arc, 2009)

Something persuades the bitter fruits

that sweetness must be bought

with more than tears,

more than patience in the tending

of their needs, more than tasks

as endless as the seasons

still demand of those

who cut the stem to grow the shoot,

who risk the thorn

that worms into the flesh,

the gout of blood

that berries on the surface of the skin,

who cradle in the hollow of their palm

the thought of ripening,

something provable with time,

a certain knowledge

                                   of vitality, of zest.

This is a script to hazard a guess at,

a language of skin and growth

shifting before the eyes, unobserved.

The little that’s read

from knife cuts, from twists of wire,

the necessary nail hammered home,

translates to a human scale,

preferring these years to the centuries

bark has sheathed each tree.

Behind this ring a rope burn has left, is time

for the washing to dry,

the garments to fade, be passed on

beyond derivation. Which is there

for the taking alone

in these nicks, intrusions in bark

these laughter lines, birth marks, scars,

like this set of initials, thickening with age,

rehearsing a future in stone. 

from The Book of Belongings (Arc, 2009)

Although the dyke would seem to point her back

to where the walk began

she’s lost

until these swans wing into view, heading out

for somewhere

that this silt has not turned back to land

which they could walk on,

she could not

for fear of sinking to her knees. Her eyes

track every wing-beat as the wind

decides their course,

forces them to heel about, to tack against the gusts

that push them her way,

right above her head. It’s there

she sees the glint of water flashing in their eyes,

hears the self-same wind

articulate each feather in their wings,

show her the way

determination works. They land on what she sees

as scrubby grass, and only later

will identify as water,

fen that would have stopped her in her tracks

which lead now – boots on flint,

impacted soil – the way

the swans flew:

banked, oblique but homing

by some instinct, for the place they left behind.

Blakeney, Norfolk

from The Book of Belongings (Arc, 2009)

Whinstone, rough as banter,

lets them in,

its grammar leaving space

for something

small enough

to pass as thought,

allowing sense

to mutter in the skirtings,

habits as ingrained

as accent in the brain

and harder than its markers

to expel.

Something tolls, dead in the water,

from sixty years back; chimes

in the stonework of the brain

the way a mother’s voice is never

quite forgotten, the sounds of childhood

carry through somehow.  And you

look downwards at the brink, knowing

that the eddies washing on this shore

have inhabited what’s left of life

that quit this valley by decree.

The banking stretches out behind you;

notices on poles advise against

a list of things from which the years

have cut you off, the way these waters have

from house and plot, familiar homes,

the chapel where you pumped the organ

for the psalms.  Ignored, the gables rise

like bibles in a rack from where

you always knew they would, in time.

And now the drought has dropped

the level of the water twenty feet, enough

to recognise where lanes had been,

how houses all had hunkered in together,

formed the township that you left

to which you have returned, a memory

in someone else’s book: an old man

staring out across this reservoir, as deep

in thought as are the sounds

of church bells, accents, running water,

steeped in sixty years of loss.

Meteorology

Behind Your Eyes