MacGillivray

from PACE 1

SUIT OF THE GAELIC GARDEN OF THE DEAD

‘The divination by the taghairm was once a noted superstition among the Gaels of Scotland. When any important question concerning futurity arose and of which a solution was, by all means, desirable, some shrewder person than his neighbours was pitched upon to perform the part of a prophet. This person was wrapped in the warm smoking hide of a newly-slain stag or ox and laid at full length in the wildest recess of some lonely waterfall. The question was then put to him and the oracle was left in solitude to consider it. Here he lay for some hours with his cloak of knowledge around him and over his head, no doubt, to see the better into futurity; deafened by the incessant roaring of the torrent; every sense assailed; his body steaming; his fancy in a ferment; and whatever notion had found its way into his mind from so many sources of prophecy, it was firmly believed to have been communicated by invisible beings who were supposed to haunt such solitudes.’ – Dwelly’s Scottish Gaelic Dictionary (1911)

I

In the Gaelic Garden of the Dead I am lying passionless, water-spent,

whose dream-traiked crystal, water-stolen, falls –

obdure, you rustic mirror of shades, whose high wall is breathing

grim, water-scryed intent.

With water cells shrunk about the waist I walk,

                                                    paths of cinnamon at my feet,

where vultures fang bone on the sandalwood trail,

fang leaky meat from the old gang dule,

skulk the dusted dream-thief pile.

My shade is spiked with flowers

                  gently lifting in my shadow,

whose parched fire grew garden dreams, dire dule-trees,

row on row, sparkling in the mud.

Shriver-grief shrunk too late, in dream deteriorate:

the pause, my tears, the suffix,

parched hand-strewn, leaking.

Coaxing the woods,

saltire of fire

                   gags the derangement mouth:

Coaxing wood from my swollen eyes –

crawling about their cinder pile,

wood densely compressed with unfelled tears

my lids now rust around stoppered drops

I pause to coax their harrow-juice –

                                                 Unkindled eyes!

                                    Unkindled breath! Unkindled throat!

                                       My lustral tongue, my lustral tear.

II

I was young on hope and en-wildening expectation,

in the colour bitterness of this Gaelic garden.

Such star expulsion, canker-witted and rotten,

gave fumigation to souring dreams, furnishing the loss

of new rubbed leaves, ones stun-crushed by disbelief

into freshly perfumed poison.

Witless and stark they rustled; the darkling sedge

bloomed the last of its bud-punctured petals,

searing through tightness like nettle wands

brandished in whipping tips when the next season brightened.

What canticle of water-star root, hereditary dip-water,

flea-water chosen; that bright-hipped, blushed black

when the fires were scrying and I wept in the sod-dark

of vegetation weakened with flame.

The hedge-lip of stars and dereliction,

water that stains the grief of its own tremendous gestation;

nothing being taken without thoroughly knowing

the symptoms of its undertaking.

And simmered young, mummies thrum,

paste of sugar-fly, paste of polywater tree

and soldered to my eyes plaster-stars moult

flakes of preservation.

In youth I walked that fire-addled garden

the concubine of rusting trees, now filled with lumbering bees

and no-one to siphon off their sweetness,

while the wild glen raged with the last of the roses –

filaments of ashen compression

like the ashen faces each lyant morning,

ashen in the weak crease of dream,

compressed to the early ingredients of diamond.

Stakes   9

Pace 1: Suit of the Gaelic Garden of the Dead   9

Pace 2: Suit of the Plaster Cast Nervous System   19

Pace 3: Surroial Mordant Suit   27

Pace 4: Suit of the Electrostatic Riverbed   37

Pace 5: Suit of the Rustit Kaleidoscope   45

Pace 6: Suit of the Furta Sacra of Robs and Waifs   53

Pace 7: Suit of the Fairy Crois Taireadh   57

Pace 8: Colour Bitter Suit   65

Pace 9: Suit of the Diamond Scratched Pane   71

Postscript   79

Notes   83

Acknowledgements   93

MacGillivray   94

‘There are not many books of poetry that can be classified as genuinely original and large in scope; even among the disputed ground of “innovative writing” there is little that is truly groundbreaking. Reading The Last Wolf of Scotland, however, I feel that I may have found just that sort of book.’ – Steven Waling, Magma