Distance is dead. At Gatwick, at Heathrow
the loud spoor, the grinding tremor,
manglings, accelerated trade routes
in reverse: the flyblown exotic place,
the heathen shrine exposed. A generation
saw it happen: the big-eyed, spindling
overleapers of the old slow silk route
shiver in terylene at Euston, grimed
caravansary of dispersal, where a lone
pigeon circles underneath the girders,
trapped in the breaking blur of sound wave-
sa woman’s sourceless voice interminably
counting off the terminals, a sibyl’s
lapful of uncertainties. There’s trouble
to the north, the trains are late: from
knotted queues the latest émigrés
of a spent Commonwealth look up: so many,
drawn toward what prospect, from what
point of origin? Bound for Iona in
the Western Isles, doleful, unlulled
by British Rail, lying awake I listen
to the clicking metronome as time
runs out, feeling the old assumptions,
aired, worm-tunneled, crumble,
thinking of the collapse of distance:
Proust’s paradise of the unvisited,
of fool’s-gold El Dorado. At Glasgow
there’s still trouble, but the train
to Oban’s running. Rain seeps in;
past the streaked, streaming pane,
a fir-fringed, sodden glimpse, the
verberation of a name: Loch Lomond.
“Really?” The callow traveler opposite
looks up, goes back to reading-yes,
it really is Thucydides: hubris,
brazen entitlements, forepangs of
letting go, all that. At Oban, a wet
trek to the ferry landing, where a
nun, or the daft counterfeit of one
(time runs out, the meek grow jaded,
shibboleths of piety no guarantee):
veil and wimple above dank waterproof,
nun-blue pantsuit protruding—lugs
half a dozen satchels (“tinned things
you can’t get up here”), has misplaced
her ticket, is so fecklessly egregious
it can’t (or could it, after all?) be
contraband. From Craignure, Isle of Mull,
a bus jolts westward, traversing, and
it’s still no picnic, the slow route
Keats slogged through on that wet
walking tour: a backward-looking
homage, not a setting forth, as for
his brother George, into the future:
drowned Lycidas, whether beyond the
stormy . . . And of course it rained,
the way it’s doing as I skitter up
the cleated iron of the gangway at
Fionnphort; Iona, an indecipherable
blur, a slosh of boots and oilskins,
once landed on, is even wetter.
Not that it always rains: tomorrow
everything will be diaphanous
as the penumbra of a jellyfish:
I’ll ride to Staffa over tourmaline
and amethyst without a wrinkle;
will stand sun-warmed above the bay
where St. Columba made his pious landfall,
the purple, ankle-deep, hung like a mantle
on the starved shoulder of the moor.
Heather! I’d thought, the year I first
set foot, in Maine, among blueberries’
belled, pallid scurf; then-But there’s
no heather here. Right to begin with:
botanically, they’re all one family.
I saw that pallor, then, as an attenuation
in the west: the pioneers, the children’s
children of the pioneers, look up from
the interior’s plowed-under grassland,
the one homeland they know no homeland
but a taken-over turf: no sanction, no cover
but the raveled sleeve of empire: and yearn
for the pristine, the named, the fabulous,
the holy places. But from this island
its nibbled turf, sheep trails, rabbit
droppings, harebells, mosses’ brass-
starred, sodden firmament, the plink
of plover on that looped, perennial,
vast circumnavigation: at ground level
an incessant whimpering as everything,
however minuscule, joins the resistance
to the omnipresent wind–the prospect
is to the west. Here at the raw edge
of Europe-limpet tenacities, the tidal
combings, purplings of kelp and dulse,
the wrack, the blur, the breakup
of every prospect but turmoil, of
upheaval in the west-the retrospect
is once again toward the interior:
backward-looking, child of the child
of pioneers, forward-slogging with
their hooded caravels, their cattle,
and the fierce covered coal of doctrine
from what beleaguered hearth-fire of
the Name, they could not speculate,
such was the rigor of the Decalogue’s
Thou Shalt Not-I now discover that
what looked, still looks, like revelation
was not hell-fire, no air-splintering
phosphorus of injunction, no Power,
no force whatever, but an opening
at the water’s edge: a little lake,
world’s eye, the mind’s counterpart,
an eyeblink of reflection wrung from
the unreflecting seethe and chirr and
whimper of the prairie, the wind-
stirred grass, incognizant incognito
(all flesh being grass) of the mind’s
resistence to the omnipresence of what
moves but has no, cannot say its name.
There at the brim of an illumination
that can’t be entered, can’t be lived in-
you’d either founder, a castaway, or drown-
a well, a source that comprehends, that
supersedes all doctrine: what surety,
what reprieve from drowning, is there,
other than in names? The prairie eyeblink,
stirred, grows murmurous—a murderous
a monstrous world rimmed by the driftwood
of embarkations, landings, dooms, conquests
missionary journeys, memorials: Columba
in the skin-covered wicker of that coracle,
lofting these stonily decrepit preaching
posts above the heathen purple; in their
chiseled gnarls, dimmed by the weatherings
of a millennium and more, the braided syntax
of a zeal ignited somewhere to the east,
concealed in hovels, quarreled over,
portaged westward: a basket weave, a
fishing net, a weir to catch, to salvage
some tenet, some common intimation for
all flesh, to hold on somehow till
the last millennium: as though the routes,
the ribbonings and redoublings, the
attenuations, spent supply lines, frayed-
out gradual of the retreat from empire, all
its castaways, might still bear witness.
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