nine scenes from a diminutive notebook, January 2017

Wintering the storm:
it unfurls so silently as she sleeps alone.

(16.1.2017)

Insinuation. The pathway twists toward her,
and disappointment.

(17.1.2017)

A boy on a bike, its stablisers removed;
his dad runs behind.

(18.1.2017)

The frostbitten path,
angularity of ice, shades and shards
like glass.

(19.1.2017)

Outside, the robin rings the twigs
and starts a round of feathered pinball.

(23.1.2017)

Enter the water
and swim, swim into the blue.
You cross a border.

(25.1.2017)

A heron stood there, statuesque
by the roadside.
Slategrey sentinel.

(27.1.2017)

The cemetery stones standing
in granite lines:
vigilant of loam.

(28.1.2017)

A distant thunder,
roiling, brooding, gathering
at the edge of the skyline.

(29.1.2017)

Notes from the Red Moss, 2 June 2023

stillness on the Red Moss
and flax almost adrift
in soft peat:
from lint holes, the memory
of sunbeam on sundew
and a thousand thousand blues above

jade mounds in bracken, stumps,
lighten
lighten but never
still, always different, ever
the same—
the sun on metal hexagons
on wooden walkways

looking to Bavelaw
in the lee of Hare Hill
I think of Stanley Roger Green
searching for that unfound cairn
while Threipmuir glitters

in scenes from a stillway
of pinecone and feather
can I be dappled
by light, by trees?
a trunk’s bend and
branch’s oscillation
a hoverfly lands on this nearly white page

[words and images from a morning walk through the Red Moss of Balerno nature reserve at the foot of the Pentland Hills near Edinburgh, and then along the shore of Threipmuir Reservoir, Friday 2 June 2023.]

Untitled poem, 20 January 2023

tower between trees
under a growth of stillness
in near-blue

woodpecker’s hit-
or-miss punctuation
of the sentences
playing out in my head
unheard in offices
and factories and
houses beneath this hillside

the metal of the past
twists into a leaf-affirmed
present of trees

the branches soar

Corstorphine Hill, Edinburgh, 20 January 2023

Two Solstice haiku

the longest day’s
cat on my pillow
another reason for sleeplessness

quiet notes of colour
near a winter’s path
distribution of cyclamen

21 June and 21 December 2022

The Teeth of the Sea

At Longniddry Bents,
the teeth of the sea gnawing
the horizon’s blues.
Seven days on from dad’s death,
I walk this unfamiliar shoreline
unsure how I should feel,
and frayed
at the meniscus of making-do.

i.m. James Lavelle, 1934-2022
Longniddry, East Lothian, 19 September 2022

empty omen

this staggering man’s
moment
empty omen

first
to the last
tick ticking
of more than
one and a half billion
seconds

ell, a name
a convert to numbers
unexaggerated
friable waves sounding
from heart and mouth
to a distant star

Shoreswerve or shoresweave: a waterlogged alphabet

Still bent to make some port he knows not where,
Still standing for some false impossible shore.
And sterner comes the roar
Of sea and wind; and through the deepening gloom
Fainter and fainter wreck and helmsman loom,
And he too disappears, and comes no more.
Matthew Arnold, excerpt from A Summer Night (1852)