We drove through a cloud

on the way to Oban

passing by Loch Lomond

the peripatetic wind

slapped the rain sideways

then up the other side

a thorough baptism  

from every end

This is July!  we marvel

 

Mother died in May

she taught us to distrust

each other

Why aren’t you more like him?

she’d say to me, and to him

Your brother does it better

Did she think we would gang up,

united, and drive her from the house?

We might have, had we thought of it 

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Her funeral was all St. Daniel:

Angel Brother, dead at five

a tragedy.  We miss him.  Yet—

sympathy suffocates and compassion corrodes

at the foot of a cross

We are still here, we cry

Won’t you join us?

Her tears were accusations;

friendship, our rebellion

 

At her wake, over whisky, a dawning

To Bertha, we say, may she find peace

Clink.  cinis cinerem

Scottish blood is a mystery

(if you have some, you know it)

Let us go and seek the source,

we say, and toast the life  

of this teetotaler  

in the amber of our ancestry 

 

A lark!  Yet here we are.

You are a bad driver.  Even sober,

even driving on the right

so it is I, driving drunk,  

on the wrong bloody side

as we fight through clouds to Inverness

(for a tiny place, it goes forever)

a shaft of sun chokes out over Loch Ness

stalked by gloom  

​

The valleys wail, green and barren

lichen and gorse and granite

bluebells rattle desperately

clinging to whipped soil

Can we really have sprung

From a place so fierce?  we say

ferocity is a foreign drug

but we feel it pulse in our DNA

and, embarrassed, look away

 

I never liked you, you know.

I know.  I loved you but

I never trusted you.

Clink.  in cupam veritas

We understand it better, now t

hat we’ve seen this lonely, lovely place

the silence inside and the vastness without

and the fierce little bluebells  

raging against the rain 

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