They Will Sew the Blue Sail

after Ian Hamilton Finlay

Yesterday I walked along the Water of Leith to the gallery of modern art. It’s called something else now, modern one or two and because I can never remember which way round it goes and because I don’t like change, I call it what I used to. This is a walk I used to do when I was 19 and newly arrived in the city; relocated and disjointed. Walking helped. Now it’s a strange fraught thing, sometimes good to walk along there. Sometimes not. I read recently that time’s a spiral, you return to things until you learn what it is you need to. Sometimes, I am done with learning. I would like a clean break. A fresh new line. None of these repeating circles. But I did this walk I’ve done so many times before. The wild garlic tired now. Sprouted too long, the leaves too thick to be of much use. White flowers dropping. And the weir, as loud as it ever was. I love this gallery for its architecture; austere and very Edinburgh and how it must’ve scared the orphan children it housed in its more charitable days. I love the Eduardo Paolozzi studio so much that sometimes I dream of sleeping there. A deserted gallery, many ghosts, and me. I hate how it’s curated though. Too many things in the one room, nothing can breathe and especially not me and especially not yesterday. This is a long way of saying that yesterday I went to the Ian Hamilton Finlay exhibition in Edinburgh and I think he’d be raging at the curator too. I read some of his letters, he was not an easy man. Lately, I’ve discovered that many people think difficult a personality flaw; an insult to fling around. I don’t know, I prefer it to the alternative. He’d be raging and typing his barbed little letters, but when you have a mind that good, you should be forgiven your difficult nature. It was this I have been thinking with since: ‘I feel I have come to the end of poems that are about, and want to do poems that just are. It suddenly seems very strange to write about things. I mean, to describe them’. I think I want to write things that just are sometimes, just for the are-ness of them rather than the thing-ness. After, when I walked back along the Water of Leith, I thought about my family long ago, up in the fishing villages of Fife, where they made fishing nets. So many knots, always so much thread and fibres and fabric. All of it conspired to make this tiny thing below:

They Will Sew the Blue Sail

A morning shrouded in mist and you stitching a sail for the wind to blow them home with, material of such a blue to fuse the horizon, sky to sea

later, after waves and haar, we will lay it flat to wrap their bodies in, stitch them tight as babies swaddled against the long dark

and the light fails as down the harbour he sits knotting nets, his knuckles swollen and sore, never knowing what it is they might catch.