On the Bridge at Druim Suardalain - 1st November 2007
Flood
The cursive sweep of Culag burn recalls
the night’s enthusiasm, RAIN, and presses
on this chain, wire-rope and plank colloquy
dogged wakefulness. It buzzes, anxious,
thrums giddy terror and desires to flee.
Beneath my feet (I walk on water) plundered
straws plumb the flow to deep transparency
and yet I cannot see the peat-dark turmoil
till it bursts A-ha! on rain-spocked smoothness,
impolite as stifled laughter, leaking bitterness.
Moistness assails us. Only the sunk-deep bite
of rolled steel I-beams (Dormand Long and Co.)
fix our bowed contraptions in their place.
The grey rock on the bank mocks all of us.
Figure and ground
(To a Barr’s Irn-Bru can – original & best)
His orange, blue and bob have no place here.
Alien irresponsible pollutant
freebasing on the flow, he surfs seaward
till the bend where corner-boys, Eddy
Twist and Vortex, drag him from the line
into a Pictish knot of inwardness and longing.
He rushes upstream, nodding his alarm,
outlandish, brash. I watch. A useful
mapping of the flood, I think – its muscle, joint,
the circulation of its lymph and ki.
Three times around he went before
the very surface sank, exhausted, sucked him down.
By then I wished him saved.
I cheered him on. He tumbled to the surface, bottom up
and heavy, and I understood,
as the last swirl cast him wide -
we all must take on water to be free.
John Bolland, November 2007