Issue 21: Gerrie Fellows
smoke screen fragments
Tarfessock (697m)
from sunlight under upturned layers
through vapour afoot in grass
turned up underfoot
a canister shucked from a rucksack
its shining pin, unloosed a smoke screen
call it grenade, hand
(call it L83A2)
split branches, loosed (agency, human)
in this treeless (call it) training ground
bivouac detritus ditched by squaddies
erratic between granite boulders
ice-carried towards us
call it brae or rig
(call it NX413 888)
a tumbled wall
above the map's last contour
clouded-in 780m on Kirriereoch
call it lost (spot height 786m
a pinpoint in a smoke screen)
the descent, a bearing unsighted
a broken wall fence posts (e)merging
each next (NX414 870) obliterated
where iron disintegrates in pooled lead shot
to blocks of forest a river crossing
(NX388 877) safe over (call it safe
thigh deep in pooling dark)
to take high tea on the high track
(black with seeded rolls) (NX388 881)
rain splintering quartered
by our headtorch beams (call it black
seeded with light as if through driven snow)
to find the road (un-numbered) cloudbound
each next diamond to diamond sign
a lit flare in full beam
Timeline with Found Objects
(Three poems from Harrapool, Skye)
i
First or last conical stacks built upwards
slabs lifted dried turned dried
spring to summer repeated
white peat a flare to fire
half-rotted down to earth
a ground of discoloured stainings
not sienna nor umber
the tonal earths of other places
moisture-laden colour of peat
the blade cuts down through
leaves and roots float of sphagnum
interred anoxic
stacked time
of the peat column's seamless levels
to the treeline
reveals
what it is we were making of this earth
climate tillage cut back to a spark
volcanic ash residues of pollen
the long burn of blue peat
down to clay glaciated rock
what is found there
an acorn's half cup stained dark
knotted bog oak bark
sheen of a twig
debris of the treeline
fallen back in time
forward into our hands
ii
The croft house
a space we occupy
between so many others arriving
week by week year on year
to eat sleep be here and now
and then
(our comings and goings
already in our own past)
we are observers of doorframes
windows on a time (even our own uncertain)
through the longitudinal data of history
back to long strip cultivation
a map survey, 1876
the croft house here, we think
and its ruined original
but the map offers
no knowledge of who it is we look for
as if we could find them in roof space rafters
the shape of a window (the shape
of mouths and of the language forming)
the unverified evidence of our own observation
the language in which we speak of this
a structure both solid and open known and uncertain
but there in its place
framed a small view of
a mountain unchanged
in the scale of vision
shifts ceaselessly
in cloud and sunlight
iii
Why count uncounted shells
or fossil shells or the simpler tally
of beachcombers searching the fossil line
between them time figured in weeks or years
what is carried away what remains
in the soft matrix of siltstone or mudstone
hard enough each in its hard niche
the tidal wash uncovers the friable layers
a time exposure like a camera
(a memory our fossil photographs)
or the human eye blinking open
the movement in this is a shell
without propulsion in a drift of silt without
its soft-bodied creature its tenacious inhabitant
it is only a house a husk
laid down and overlaid
a movement of waves against mud
the push of deep ocean's chargeless turbines
sifting grains physical and minute
compacted beds of fossil oysters
devil's toenails plunged into mud
fanned bivalves scalloplike
prized black spirals and their cupped negatives
a lightness or weight
carried home
to windowsill or boundary wall
my hand lifts and places
Gerrie Fellows is a New Zealand-born poet who has lived most of her adult life in Scotland. Her most recent collection is The Body in Space (Shearsman, 2014). Other work includes several book-length sequences, including Window for a Small Blue Child which explores the technology, imagery and experience of fertility treatment, and a prose and poetry sequence, The Powerlines. A new collection, Uncommon Place, poems about Scotland and the nature of place, is forthcoming from Shearsman in 2019.
Copyright © 2018 by Gerrie Fellows, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
