The Overhaul
Authors: Kathleen Jamie
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winds up swagged to the next … Then they’re flown, and the cliff’s left
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ALSO BY KATHLEEN JAMIE
Poetry
The Tree House
Jizzen
The Queen of Sheba
The Way We Live
Black Spiders
Waterlight: Selected Poems
Nonfiction
Among Muslims
Findings
Sightlines
The Overhaul
POEMS
GRAYWOLF PRESS
Copyright © 2012 by Kathleen Jamie
First published by Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, London.
This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and through grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, Amazon.com, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.
Published by Graywolf Press
250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States of America
ISBN 978-1-55597-702-3
Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-902-7
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
First Graywolf Printing, 2015
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014950980
Cover design: Jeenee Lee Design
Cover art:
Shetland Fourern
, linocut by James Dodds
for P. and D. and F.
Now this big westerly’s
blown itself out,
let’s drive to the storm beach.
A few brave souls
will be there already,
eyeing the driftwood,
the heaps of frayed
blue polyprop rope,
cut loose, thrown back at us –
What a species –
still working the same
curved bay, all of us
hoping for the marvellous,
all hankering for a changed life.
Every mid-February
those first days arrive
when the sun rises
higher than the Black
Hill at last. Brightness
and a crazy breeze
course from the same airt –
turned clods gleam, the trees’
topmost branches bend
shivering downwind.
They chase, this lithe pair
out of the far south
west, and though scalding
to our wintered eyes
look
, we cry,
it’s here
1. OSPREYS
You’ll be wondering why you bothered: beating
up from Senegal, just to hit a teuchit storm –
late March blizzards and raw winds – before the tilt
across the A9, to arrive, mere
hours apart, at the self-same riverside
Scots pine, and possess again the sticks and fishbones
of last year’s nest: still here, pretty much
like the rest of us – gale-battered, winter-worn,
half toppled away …
So redd up your cradle, on the tree-top,
claim your teind from the shining
estates of the firth, or the trout-stocked loch.
What do you care? Either way,
there’ll be a few glad whispers round town today:
that’s them, baith o’ them, they’re in.
Full March moon and gale-force easters, the pair of them
sucking and shoving the river
back into its closet in the hills, or trying to. Naturally
the dykes failed, the town’s last fishing boat
raved at the pier-head, then went down; diesel-
corrupted water cascaded into front-yards, coal-holes, garages,
and
there’s naethin ye can dae
,
said the old boys, the sages, which may be true; but river –
what have you left us? Evidence of an inner life, secrets
of your estuarine soul hawked halfway
up Shore Street, up East and Mid Shore, and arrayed
in swags all through the swing-park: plastic trash and broken reeds,
driftwood, bust TVs …
and a salmon,
dead, flung beneath the see-saw, the crows are onto at once.
Again the wild blossom
powering down at dusk, the gean trees
a lather at the hillfoot
and a blackbird, telling us
what he thinks to it, telling us
what he thinks …
How can we bear it? A fire-streaked sky, a firth
decked in gold, the grey clouds passing
like peasant-folk
lured away by a prophecy.
What can we say
the blackbird’s failed
to iterate already? Night calls:
the windows of next-door’s glass house
crimson, then go mute
Then specialists arrived, in hi-viz jackets and hardhats
who floundered out every low tide
to the log-boat, lodged
in the mud since the Bronze Age. Eventually
it was floated to the slipway, swung high
in front of our eyes: black, dripping, aboriginal
– an axe-hewn hollowed-out oak
sent to the city on a truck.
What were you to them, river, who hollered
‘Shipping water!’ or ‘Ca’ canny lads!’ in some now
long-forgotten tongue?
an estuary with a discharge of 160 cubic metres of water per second
as per the experts’ report?
or Tay/Toi/Taum
– a goddess;
the Flowing(?), the Silent One(?).
Nowhere to go, nowhere I’d rather be
than here, fulfilling my daily rituals.
Why would one want
to absent oneself, when one’s commute
is a lonely hillside by-way, high
above the river? Specially when the tide’s
way out, leaving the firth
like a lovers’ bed with the sheets stripped back
baring its sandbanks, its streamy rivulets,
– the whole thing shining
like an Elfland, and all a mere two fields’
stumbling walk away …
Someday I’ll pull into a passing-place
a mile from home, and leave the car,
when they find it
engine thrumming quietly
Roe deer,
breaking from a thicket
bounding over briars
between darkening trees
you don’t even glance
at the cause of your doubt
so how can you tell
what form I take?
What form I take
I scarcely know myself
adrift in a wood
in wintertime at dusk
always a deer
breaking from a thicket
for a while now
this is how it’s been
Imagine we could begin
all over again; begin
afresh, like this February
dawn light, coaxing
from the Scots pines
their red ochre, burnt-earth glow.
All over again. South
– facing mountainsides, balcony
above balcony of pines – imagine
we could mend
whatever we heard fracture:
splintering of wood, a bird’s
cry over still water, a sound
only reaching us now
Who lives here? Don’t
you remember that hill? How it
shut out any winter sun –
or those ash trees
sheltering the gable end?
Hefted to its own land
like its few yowes –
Today the wind’s swung north –
in overcoats and headscarves
two women are crossing the yard
As if yoked together,
they stall, and turn to face us –
and though you look
from one to the other,
one to the other,
you just can’t tell
which is daughter, which mother …
This is what happens.
This is why we loosed our grip and fled
like the wind-driven smoke
from the single lum
in the crooked roof that covers
both women and beasts, a roof
low and broken like a cry
Moon,
what do you mean,
entering my study
like a curiosity shop,
stroking in mild concern
the telescope mounted
on its tripod, the books,
the attic stair? You
who rise by night, who draw
the inescapable world
closer, a touch,
to your gaze – why
query me? What’s mine
is yours; but you’ve no more
need of those implements
than a deer has,
browsing in a glade.
Moon, your work-
worn face bright
outside unnerves me.
Please, be on your way.
I watched a hawk
glide low across the hill,
her own dark shape
in her talons like a kill.
She tilted her wings,
fell into the air –
the shadow coursed on
without her, like a hare.
Being out of sorts
with my so-called soul,
part unhooked hawk,
part shadow on parole,
I played fast and loose:
keeping one in sight
while forsaking the other.
The hawk gained height: