Applecross
In this orange water I am glowing. My limbs, expanding beneath me, fragmented as through a kaleidoscope, feel more attached than yesterday, a closer knit between my socket joints, holding me firm against the current. The river bed rises up to meet me, pushing my shins into its hard under layer. This space between ground and sky feels warm, shallow and secure. The blue hills to the west breathe in and out a rolling mist, shrouding themselves in silky evasive water, sister to the river I am held by now.
In the warm of the restaurant, we are served whole mackerel on a plate by the boy who caught it, pride creeping from the edges of his mouth, settling rosey in his cheeks, bright sea light emanating from the colour in his eyes. Prosecco bubbles line the inside of my mouth and the glistening hollow of their spheres fills us up. I am full. Mither, family, pockets of places, rowan berry jelly. Birch sap wine, lions teeth, pickled helicopters. Full of this place. I try to fill myself up more, scrunch my eyes tight shut and imagine pulling the low hanging air of this place through my skin, letting it come to rest in between my ribs, burrowing itself in the pockets of my hips. It is still there, stoic, brewing. Storm weather, the clouds over north west scotland may lose their identity. Easy to try and cram this landscape into the frame of my body, compare the rotting oyster log to my body laid flat on the forest floor, compare the small spherical wasps nest, who’s pattern of chewed up spat out wood reminds me of the curve of my ear; it’s contours, easy to Wonder how the sparrow’s rib bone came to sit so contently on the joint of my index finger. Harder to understand things I can’t hold within me.
Dornie
Looking upwards, I imagine a hand pulling a coarse square of sandpaper across the mountains, going back and scratching a whole stick of charcoal into the dents, smudging a finger downwards, settling the black dust into the small craters. The water is still and ripples in semi-circles from the shallow green rocks closest to me, towards swathes of silky dark blue, the depths of the sound made apparent. A heron skims the water with its dangling legs, the wrists of his wings bending sharply as he comes in to land. The hills reach towards me through the water, their reflections wriggle and seem fickle. I concentrate on the sharp outlines of their peaks, trace them and imagine papercuts gliding gently into my index finger. I think of how the ground has shifted over time to finally slip into place and form this topography, think of the pulling from below, hungry fingers scraping out the deep valleys above. Where the light touches the hills here seems to be a choice, a deliberate capturing of place. Holding within its cupped hands it scoops up solid land, lifts it up like water from a stream, raising this little bit of land’s face towards the sky, letting its toes graze the boggy heather below. The shadow of the smokey lavender cloud creeps/slips down the hill, like a curtain coming down, closing the chapter of this segment of the day.
Angus
There’s a cabbage on our kitchen table,
her leaves splayed,
limp,
centre taught, sitting up,
roots cut, indifferent
I think of my body,
limbs languid
trampling through tractor tracks, sharp hollow barley stems pushing into my blonde shins, yesterday dry, they carved little ghost lines into my skin. Today it is wet and mud sprinks up my calves, cooling me from the outside-in.
To the east of me, above, an iron age fort gazes down, eyes heavy with the weight of keeping watch. Her blushed cheeks, foundations of round houses, her solid core, grumbling gently. Heather flowers poised like bronze arrow heads litter her surface. Beneath the flora, her earth is crumpled and giggly, tickled by your feet she jumps, uneven, worse in the craters close to her armpits, and the tight soft skin in the space between her jaw and neck. Temperamental when poked too hard, she pushes you up, your knees meet the ground, palms muddy now, this isn’t a game. You’re invited inwards in this landscape, hand around yours, tight. Elbow locked, keeping you at a distance, tripping you up, moving beneath you.
Look up, look out, the horizon is brimming with tears, sighing; in, out.
Back down here, below, I move from the field to the forest; sodden ground soaking in the sky. A limb of a tree, fallen in the last storm, leans backwards, relaxing now, held by moss. The amber of the socket joint, bright and wet, I can hear the cracking of it falling now, the thud of its landing. I look past, and through the living leaves, a swallow grazes a cow’s wide and heavy back. Doubling back, it crisscrosses the herd, dipping down, following a Fair Isle pattern.
—--
Shrivelling tomatoes coax me from my slumber in the garden where I am born. The frame of my body needs nourishing, I wish it didn’t. I walk to the river where the pink poplar roots remind me of the beetroot in the fridge which I have yet to cook and peel and stain my fingers with.