The piper coming from far away is you

With a whitewash brush for a sporran

Wobbling round you, a kitchen chair

Upside down on your shoulder, your right arm

Pretending to tuck the bag beneath your elbow,

Your pop-eyes and big cheeks nearly bursting

With laughter, but keeping the drone going on

Interminably, between catches of breath.

*

The whitewash brush. An old blanched skirted thing

On the back of the byre door, biding its time

Until spring airs spelled lime in a work-bucket

And a potstick to mix it in with water.

Those smells brought tears to the eyes, we inhaled

A kind of greeny burning and thought of brimstone.

But the slop of the actual job

Of brushing walls, the watery grey

Being lashed on in broad swatches, then drying out

Whiter and whiter, all that worked like magic.

Where had we come from, what was this kingdom

We knew we’d been restored to? Our shadows

Moved on the wall and a tar border glittered

The full length of the house, a black divide

Like a freshly opened, pungent, reeking trench.

*

Piss at the gable, the dead will congregate.

But separately. The women after dark,

Hunkering there a moment before bedtime,

The only time the soul was let alone,

The only time that face and body calmed

In the eye of heaven.

Buttermilk and urine,

The pantry, the housed beasts, the listening bedroom.

We were all together there in a foretime,

In a knowledge that might not translate beyond

Those wind-heaved midnights we still cannot be sure

Happened or not. It smelled of hill-fort clay

And cattle dung. When the thorn tree was cut down

You broke your arm. I shared the dread

When a strange bird perched for days on the byre roof.

*

That scene, with Macbeth helpless and desperate

In his nightmare – when he meets the hags again

And sees the apparitions in the pot –

I felt at home with that one all right. Hearth,

Steam and ululation, the smoky hair

Curtaining a cheek. ‘Don’t go near bad boys

In that college that you’re bound for. Do you hear me?

Do you hear me speaking to you? Don’t forget!’

And then the potstick quickening the gruel,

The steam crown swirled, everything intimate

And fear-swathed brightening for a moment,

Then going dull and fatal and away.

*