Issue 7: David Kinloch

Salt

I tasted brine on the air

the moment before I saw them;

it was like learning to swallow again

without shuddering after the caravan

had brought oysters to our desert:


they were out of place, out of time,

muscular yet feathery, straight-

talking and winging it. You had to take them

with a pinch of salt though news got around.

No wonder the men of Sodom

wanted to sleep with them:

season their palate with something


different.

               When I peered

back through the blindness,

the fire and the brimstone,

it was me I tasted on the desert air.

I stiffened and swallowed hard.

Ruth

Ruth stands in the field and sees that it is hot and hard and dry,

feels she must not stop, say ‘No’ to Naomi,

who chafes her dead son’s wife: ‘Turn again,

go back; I’ve no more sons in my barren womb for you to marry’.


‘No’, Ruth says, and bends to gather up stray

barley heads that lie like individual bells,

notes lost as the harvest’s hum is baled

in neighbours’ barns. She works all day


careful of all that falls away,

then places her basket on the threshing floor:

at first she sees a simple glean of corn,

of grain, a glean of yellow thyme and wheat,


but as she stares a shoal of herring

weaves the wicker, dark glass glints,

brass shavings gleam, she sees

in part and finds her tongue.


‘Where you go, I will go’, she says to Naomi,

turns to the owner of the field,

proposes marriage, feels the kick of David

jump up the weir of generations,


the King who will love Jonathon

and the endless line of women who will give birth to God.

Virgin

When I was a girl, each time I turned

a corner there was a rustling, as if

someone had just left. It was hard

to wait until I could be spoken to,

and terrifying when the child took root

in a bed no man had visited.


It was hard to wed an old man

just because his gift of withered branches

bloomed on the alter that I served,

harder still when I noticed how the calm,

distracted boy always looked right past me

to the sunlight at the window.


He was the quietist activist I’ve ever known;

love was a miracle for him; to me

it was real, even when he noticed I was there

and turned aside. He preferred men,

ate and laughed and slept with them.

I feared for him, placed my hands like wings


upon his head. He shrugged them off

and after supper, in a local park,

they arrested him. It was hard

to see his fine, emaciated face

when I stood beside the bier

with the disciple that he loved.

Martha

Och, Mary just stares up at him, like, with her big

rabbit eyes. But there's pots and pans to be cleaned

isn't there and feet to wash and corpses to lay out;

I bustle round him and he tells me you're an awful bustler

Martha; — he remembered my name! — asks me if I think

my brother Lazarus will rise again; he'll rise again

on the day of judgement, says I; says he, I am

the resurrection and the life; says I, well help me

resurrect this bucket for the well. It has a hole in it

and Lazarus will need a bloody good wash

when you've finished with him, there's a dear.

Mary Magdalene

What I remember is a terrible dream;

of something hanging nearby, above me,

just to the right and I couldn't look up.

There was blood. The whiteness was tremendous.


What I remember is that I was weeping,

that I turned to the gardener — who looked like

my husband — and cried that the body had gone.

He told me to look inside, to look within:


two words, so I think he meant my inside.

I tried but could not find it. Their questions

never stop and I feel my bones going off

to preach on their own, each one with a slightly


different story. Some days I put on my red dress,

sit with my alabaster jar, to bring it all back;

even the sins. They write it all down.

But what good will that do? 'Scratch that.'


‘Start again’, was his favourite saying.

He didn't bleed.

The whiteness is tremendous.

Wood

Heartwood in softwood thought of Adam

and the chair back he gave the young gardener.

Sapwood in softwood remembered the shadow

cast by the apple on bark; springwood,

too young to recall much at all, imagined

the coming and going under the palm tree

at Timnah and corewood still felt the essential

pain of being bush in a world thinking itself

divine. Latewood allowed a final

sparrow to take its last blood red berry.

Then they shrugged and began to concentrate

on cell length, wall thickness, cellulose crystallinity.

Between them they wove their own myths

about moisture and fire, never took earth for granted.

David Kinloch is from Glasgow and is the author of five books of poetry including the recent Finger of a Frenchman (Carcanet, 2011). He is currently Reader in Poetry at the University of Strathclyde where he teaches Creative Writing and Scottish Literature. A past recipient of the Robert Louis Stevenson Memorial Award, he co-founded and co-edited Verse for many years, established the Edwin Morgan International Poetry Competition and has been instrumental in setting up the new Scottish Writers’ Centre.