Where nettle grows, says local custom, so grows the healing dock

whose leaves, broadfaced and not very bright, may initially provide

a cooling sensation, though there’s less to affirm its status as a remedy

than there is the merits of a little self-deception.

Urtica dioica, sting of two houses. To learn this lessens no one’s pain.

The agonies are products, the ancients say. Not voids, or defects.

Once they exist, they will always exist.

Comforts can only lie alongside them.

THE HERMITS

Warmth activates the sugars

and sugars rally

in the gorse, in the flowers

it sees with, the scent

that is its voice,

the non-toxic fragrant wood

good for cutlery, and for burning

though it flares out quickly

unlike smouldering peat. Are they converting

sugars of their loneliness

to conviction? Burning

their sugars on the wicks

of their frailty

one can nearly read by them

as Fillan read by the light

of his broken arm,

one of the horrible miracles

of the times —

St. Fillan, the Human Flashlight,

patron of the mentally ill —

an unenviable between-worlds

position.

Whereas marsh orchids

fully in this one

change their clothes

out in the open, hard candy

in their mouths, the sugars

plump, round, smooth,

unlike seawater’s jagged molecules

which when drunk like anger

will tear through you.

Like bitterness, desiccate you.

To survive, suffering burns

the strength of the afflicted. If,

left in Fillan’s cave,

bonds of the stricken

were loosened by morning

his spirit had intervened to convert

the molecules of their madness

and still later did smugglers stash there

some of those little things

that make life worth living.

The highly edible

sweet gorse flowers

produce a coconut-flavoured wine

if one enjoys the luxury of time

and a tea prescribed in cases

of uncertainty,

for those who appear

to have lost all hope.

CLARITY

In the centre of the path

near the ruined bothy.

Styrofoam maybe,

a sweater, fishing gear.

As I approached, I saw

it was a gannet, how odd.

How long, then,

before I realized it was dead?

When did my sixth receiver

register the hydrostatic pressure

of fluid newly at rest

between subject and object?

Bill beneath its wing,

the head’s saffron

seemed a signal

that should fade, in death.

What killed it

had not been vain

in its signature, allowing

for the vulnerable feet

to be tucked, as is the instinct,

under the quilt of its body.

Cormorants presided

the way they do over the sea’s

many funerals. Rock spoke

through its forms

the eulogy: the smaller

is not the lesser stone.

The day’s warm air had cold

ribboned through it

like a hotel atrium

built around a stream

or the childhood swimming hole

fed by an artesian current

I visualized as darker

than the surrounding water

and more coherent, its integrity

having not yet degraded.

Much of what I feared then

has happened,

though not always

as I’d feared.

And so much more to fear