Cover

Title page

Dedication page

For Michael, Linda, Beth, and Stan

PREFACE

ACKNOWLEDGED AS A site of pilgrimage from antiquity, the Caiplie Caves, on the coast of Scotland’s East Neuk of Fife, are most consistently associated with the hermit Ethernan. The village and church of Kilrenny, which means “church of Ethernan,” are not far away, overlooking the sea. But despite the distribution of Ethernan’s name on carved stones and in dedications, where he appears in the accounts he is often sketched only briefly, in passing. Upon returning from study in Ireland, he may have become the first bishop of Rathin in Buchan. Sometimes conflated with Adrian of May, murdered with his fellow monks during a Viking raid on May Island in 875, Ethernan is also supposed to have been the “Itarnan” who “died amongst the Picts” in 669, as entered in the Annals of Ulster. Though some sources imagine him travelling the Great Glen from Iona to Fife in the 640s, or the popular route from Iona east towards Lindisfarne, his link with Iona cannot be confirmed. A number suggest he was an Irish missionary to Scotland who withdrew to the Caves in the mid-7th century in order to decide whether to commit to a hermit’s solitude or establish a priory on May Island. This choice, between life as a “contemplative” or as an “active,” was not an unusual one to take up among his cohort.

Inconsistencies are not surprising. What is surprising is Ethernan’s poverty of supernatural accomplishments. Fantastic tales of early medieval saints, hermits and martyrs in Britain — their feats of strength, endurance, and clairvoyance, their animal associates, meteorological interventions, and divinely assisted acts of revenge — are enthusiastic and plentiful. Ethernan, meanwhile, is said to have survived for a very long time on bread and water.

Ethernan’s story still wanders outside the archive, resists a final resting place in the ever-expanding facility of the past. And neither are the Caves the past. As John Berger writes, “The past is not for living in,” and the Caves — known locally as the Coves — are very much lived in. Unlike Fillan’s Cave in Pittenweem, no interpretive or preservational infrastructure attends them; there is no key to be acquired at a nearby café. Nor is there even a commemorative plaque, such as the one marking Constantine’s Cave north on the Coastal Path below the Balcomie Links golf club. People still build fires in the caves at Caiplie, drink, and camp there. Alongside crosses carved over centuries, they record their own symbols and advice, political statements, declarations of uncertainty and love.

Epigraph page

It is reason and wisdom which take away cares, not places affording wide views over the sea.

— Horace, Epistles I, vi, 25–26

“In this foggy, dispute-ridden landscape”

in this foggy, dispute-ridden landscape

thus begins my apprenticeship to cowardice

no leeks sprang where I walked

no stags bore beams for my house

neither am I that type of acute person who leads others into battle

or inspires love

all creatures are in exile, says Augustine, but my defeats feel more literal

and fault-based

will my fulfilment be the fulfilment of an error?

an error at the foundation of my life, an error burning in its stove

and this fear to which, as to a bureaucracy

I am repeatedly referred

it is a weak place to meet oneself

grassed roof, dirt for a bed

I don’t need to tell you what I thought

I

THE NORTH

Where should we find consolation,

dwelling in the north? Amid the stunted

desperate plant life clinging

to its edges, thriving on atmospheric

vengeance or neglect? Of two moods,

fragile and invasive, it gazes out to sea

as its character bends inland.

And why defend our poignant attempts

at agriculture, the gall

of our entrepreneurs? The defining

mid-winter pageants performed

in a somnolent rage? The leisure class

commends the virtues of hard work

above all else, and we labour under

frost-cramped statutes, the black

letters of legislation, in hog-reek

and land-driven slag, middle-aged

from birth and, given our devotion

to slandering this place, illogically

xenophobic. We could as soon move

south as rise above it. Are sympathies

inseparable from what one does

to stay alive? What is a self

but that which fights the cold?

SAUCHOPE LINKS CARAVAN PARK

Gulls up at dawn with swords and shields,

if dawn only in low season, in the week

we can afford. My love, who negotiated with a Silk Cut

in his wheel hand the unfamiliar roundabout

to the A915 at Kirkcaldy, sweeps droppings

from the paved deck like an owner, with his whole heart.

He grew old not thinking about himself.

So it follows our vacation home is not ours, but let

by the company on certain conditions, for certain uses

pertaining to a quiet enjoyment of sea views

beyond the lower lots, signed-for with the understanding

our initiative shall likewise be applied

at the company’s discretion.

The dogs we don’t have must be leashed, our wireless

fee charged daily. Here is the rent reminding

tenants they don’t own, interest confirming

for the borrower to whom the principal belongs.

Here is the insurance to tell us we’re not

safe, and here is the loophole which allows it

to not pay. The week he’s scraped together is now his.

My old man, who raises his spirit like a lamp,

collects Stella cans tossed from the raceway

down the hill overwritten with gorse and cow parsley;

and who, discovering the bulb beside the door

burnt out, will, cursing happily, replace it with the spare

I laughed at him for stowing in the glove box.

CRAIL AUTUMN

In a stone village on a stone coast

I tried to convince the storage heaters

to take our relationship to the next level,

spend some of what they’d put away

on me, the rented flat, its walls

three feet thick, stone, and 200 years

older than Canada. What I was

doing there was not to be confused

with doing something. But neither was it

nothing, exactly, and felt necessary,

though hardly a necessity, and so settled

the soot of the subjective over

everything. Objects of my attention

made more of me. The sedimentary shore

broke, like the day, into simple shapes,

which are the most difficult

to explain. In daylight I’d walk, unless

it rained, then hit the Co-op at 4,

before the working people. Suppers were

less simple than negligent, and under

the duvet I’d ruined with ink, the evening’s

plan turned to Ativan. Panel shows.

A PLENITUDE

Appearing as though they originate in spiritual rather

than material seed, as proof

we don’t know how to properly celebrate

or mourn — bindweed and ox-eye daisy, cranesbill, harebell,

hare’s-foot clover, whose ideology is fragrant

and sticky, the underside of reflection blooming

across centuries. Arguments for and against belief

volunteering in equal profusion.

My many regrets have become the great passion of my life.

One may also grow fond of what there isn’t

much of. Grass of Parnassus —

and when you finally find it, it’s just okay.

But look for lies and you will see them everywhere

like the melancholy thistle, erect spineless herb

of the sunflower family. That the eradication of desire

promotes peace and lengthens life

is time-honoured counsel. Still, you can’t simply wait until

you feel like it. The beauty of the campions,

bladder and sea, the tough little sea rocket,

is their effort in spite of, I want to say, everything

though they know nothing of what we mean

when we say everything; it is a sentiment referring only

to itself. Purple toadflax, common mouse ear,

orchids, trefoils, buttercup, self-heal,

the Adoxa moschatellina it’s too late in the year for,

I can hardly stand to look at them.

And all identified after the fact

but for the banks of wild roses, the poppies you loved

parked like an ambulance by the barley field.

NO 59981 05825; 56.24324° N, 2.64731° W

Landward, the cave mouth conspicuously dark.

Halfway between Anstruther and Crail,

singular in the vicinity. Prominent

calcareous sandstone outcrop on a raised beach

level, short lengths of passage

and as spectacularly weathered as the coexistence

of good and evil, the earth pigments.

Anchor in five metres, taking care to avoid

the numerous creel markers. At half-tide

a dinghy may be hauled out where the reef buffers

flat rocks, though they are sharp

and landing delicate, if land you must.

Wind may complicate return to the boat. Any visit

is a lesson in how quickly conditions change.

Having abandoned his mission . . .

Having abandoned his mission,
Ethernan finds the Fife coast
crowded with solitaries

terrible to see, worse to be anywhere near, these vagrants

in search of a hermitage

men and women, mostly men

in rags overworn with larger rags

no one on whom to practice themselves

poisoned by their personalities, speaking pain

without opening the mouth

like vegetable life, but less reliable, huddled in the light

of the blind upstairs, and those are not the lingering odours of Paradise

yet they do seem free from a townie fear

of unfit, unkind, unmarked places, the undistracted measure

my fellow peregrini in self-exile, the form

of ascetic renunciation most available to Irishmen

Efforts are made to dissuade him . . .

Efforts are made to dissuade him
from his retreat

dress codes, character disorders

abecedarian hymns of praise

laws

he who does not cut his hair in the Roman manner, must

she who leaves hers uncovered, must not

no consort with pagans, no believing in vampires

no changing your mind, no wandering

can a person be trusted whose principles forbid despair?

I spot the cleric from a distance by his wide sleeves

his minor build’s angle of progress

he looks like someone who sleeps for pleasure

that iron bell a tiresome associate, a bit much

and I will soon be in earshot of his sentences

which exude an ugliness arising in nature

as a mix of banality and abundance

Evidence of his own cult in Pictland . . .

Evidence of his own cult in Pictland exists

in the distribution of carved stones

bearing his name

I can’t be sure now there ever was humility in it

burning the self as though it were a city

believing the past might be destroyed

and remade

we Companions of God appeared, even to ourselves

to experience our visions as actual contests

confronting dragons as did the Child Jesus

conversing with the irritable waters of the Albus Fons

improving on Servanus’ arguments with the devil while striding broad tracts of land

in satisfaction and in duty to the people

to whom we offered evidence of those who lived and died

contrary to nature’s precedents

those blessed by the artifacts claimed special talents

certainly, they seemed to get a lot more done

but the veneration of relics became a trade in relics eventually suggesting

our dear saints possessed, in addition to divine attributes

more than the usual number of working parts

to whom belonged all the blood-soaked cloth?

the surfeit of St. Pancras?

corpses piled up until the whole world was a tomb

death lost its autonomy, strange to say, it sickened

the boundary between place and no-place

no longer firm

it reduced our ability to think metaphorically

we believed the things we said because we said them

and as my colleagues grew incapable

of speaking off-brand, in the middle voice

the temper of my own voice drained away

“Ethernan” likely derived from the Latin . . .

“Ethernan” likely derived

from the Latin “aeternus,”

or “eternal”

until, finally, all was noise

rage and shame of creatures domesticated by brutality

uncanny beings mechanized under the influence

of austerity’s single truth

and the amphetamine of perpetual conflict

in a region of caves with a hermit in each like worms in cabbages

a vacancy

deep, vibrant compartments, chimney announced by a draft

that spat on the back of my neck

silence its content, its disposition, and generative

as language is generative

no one word reigns

I was shy, as we are before the original and self-evident

it immediately duplicated itself inside me, more than can be used in a lifetime

my first fire ingling in the recesses, I saw the scars

from its many tenants

THE DESERT FATHERS

With or without a bindle of crystal meth

they made their anchorage in Egypt’s

Wadi El Natrun, or the dismantled

Marine Corps training base of Slab City, California,

hard skills in transition, taking losses

and burning, if not with a sensible fire,

in the pride of specialized knowledge.

Snakeman relocates the red diamond rattlesnake

and northern Mojave rattlesnake

from residents’ trailers to his own to live

alongside him with the scorpions and guard dogs;

it’s tough to have riches and not love them.

St. Anthony sold his land, gave the money to

the poor, yet in his Outer Mountain sanctuary cried

I desire peace, but these bad thoughts

will not leave me. All burned in body,

in contemplation, as the lonely burn,

a musical state. The brethren assemble

for a meal, or, from the last free place in America

watch the Navy at war games bombing

the Chocolate Mountains,

but Snakeman prefers to exercise his hobbies —

salvaging undetonated shells, pointing

guns at people, antagonizing snowbirds

and short-term RVers communally parked

near the East Jesus Sculpture Garden

and preaching the ethics of solitude.

By vocation or necessity the future transforms

in the heat of the impartial desert.

Tourists and scholars of human interest

from villages along the Nile, or funnelled

through Niland, which the census

grudgingly designates “a place,” seek insight

but wish someone would do something about the trash.

Leonard Knight’s Salvation Mountain beckons

in three-storey robes of multicoloured latex.

He clocked in with a half-bag of cement and some paint

and kept at it for 26 years. But just as Anthony

decamped to his Inner Mountain

so Leonard did to the Eldorado care home,

and even the tattooed hermit of the Isle of Skye

took up a flat in Broadford. A cell

can teach you everything. All it asks is

you give it your mind. Snakeman wars against

the body that would destroy his spirit.

Someday, he says, I will be all flame.

“WHEN SOLITUDE WAS A PROBLEM, I HAD NO SOLITUDE”

Experience teaches, but its lessons

may be useless. I could have done without a few

whose only byproduct is grief;

which, as waste, in its final form,

isn’t good for anything.

A helicopter beating all night above the firth,

a druid shouting astrology outside

the off-licence, will eventually

put the Ambien in ambience.

Our culture is best described as heroic.

Courageous in self-promotion, noble

in the circulation of others’ disgrace,

its preoccupation with death in a context of immortal glory

truly epic, and the task becomes to keep

the particulars in motion

lest they settle into categories whose opera

is bad infinity.

Isolation. The odd auditory hallucination.

The meagre profile of a widow’s cabbagerow

corresponds to needs must,

but also to its architect’s state of mind

at the time. Why do I not move on? Why

hang around here while grass

grows up my chimney?

Every choice is a refusal. For Christ’s sake.

I am guarding the walls. Like punctuation

it could make all the difference.

TENTSMUIR FOREST

The sign denoting a negative quantity indicates,

also, subtraction. The symbol for equivalence

means also alike. The deadliest mushroom is

among the most delicious. Distinct

in their intensities of purpose. Her children found her

on the kitchen floor, plate on the table,

pan on the stove. A life foraging in these woods,

she should have known. But to pour out

is not to spill. To spill is not to lay oneself down.

A MISCALCULATION

Like a king from a promontory

the kestrel presides from an updraft, an array

of barely perceptible movements sustaining

balance and attention, and the woodmouse,

the shrew, the secondary characters,

know whose watch they’re under. There are no

bystanders among them. The razorbill’s piety

winters at sea, secular and medium-sized,

black above, white below; while

frontloaded with military tech

gannets send tones of the aquatic scale

straight to the emotional signature clusters,

though we human proprietors of emotion

are to them as circumstantial

as the shadow I cast over a vole’s workday,

my presence too general for relevance.

It was November. I made these notes,

then in absentminded self-disgust

set out on the path from Crail

and by sunset, at 4, could neither return

nor make Kingsbarns before dark.

Though no one knew where I was, real danger

lay elsewhere. No cows even. Just sleepless

fields staring skyward and the firth prowling

the forest of itself, what’s hidden as well as

what hides it. To turn back would have made sense

but I chose otherwise, a lamp post

at what I assumed was the golf course

a fixed point I couldn’t seem to advance on

like a misinterpretation pursued because now

it is your life. Proportion vanished. A creature

scratching at a stone dyke was big as the North

Atlantic, and my body, not as old as when visible

became, not one with mind, but indistinguishable —

consciousness feeling with the blunt toe of its boot

as its footprints fill with groundwater.

THE SPIES

Where two convene, a third is always present.

This makes the world seem small

and satisfies our need

to be observed and understood.

Polishing a cup behind the bar. In the background

weighing grain. Hovering over us

a few paces behind, or racing ahead, innocently

buzzing like a toy, like the boy

who bags your pheasants then

reports you to the king.

The scenery interprets us

and we are also the hyper-vigilant scenery

sanguine in our right to own the frontiers

in our photographs, drop

some payload, linger at neighbours’ windows

with trauma sensors all lit up,

to rat each other out

with the assistance of an airborne scrap

of the 21st-century unconscious

beside which the old machines of delivery appear

inefficient, comical, overlarge, like a Quaalude,

quaint as any former bond between

the watcher and the watched.

Laws of causality and continuity reside in

the vertical din. For over such forms as my heart

is wont to range, did my eyes then range . . .

MERCENARIES KNOW THERE’S ALWAYS ROOM FOR SPECIALISTS IN THE MARKET

“Security contractor” is the term preferred

by a growing industry of private actors who,

at the sharp end of operations,

aren’t kidding ourselves about the economy.

Money is a country I can take with me.

I walk through the battlefield

as through my home town, self-actuated,

valued for my talents. In this territory

also known as Fuck You. Your home town

is now my home town.

These abstract northern wastes

are even more so when you’re in them

fighting alongside those you’ve fought against.

The Picts, fortunately, are unmistakable

in their fondness for nudity and tattoos,

in their grim, barbaric language

whose struggle to remain alive is bold

and clearly futile. Homer, in Smyrna, blackwater

of the Meles flowing through him,

knew some individuals are born in combat

and others ruined, frantic with belief in meaning

as a thing outside them

they can’t find. All saved, nonetheless,

from poverty, dishonour, boredom, irrelevance.

A durable disorder is in our best interest

to sustain, and loyalty to a paycheque purer

than to a man, or god, and more flexible.

Non-linear. Mission-based.

If the plan does not fit the game you see,

call a few audibles, and change it.

THE MERIDIAN

Fishers, who mapped Kilrenny steeple

as a marker to direct them at sea, call it St. Irnie

to this day. I can’t bring you back.

My imagination’s not enough. Or maybe

it was lost with you offshore among the rigs,

between domestic and foreign sectors, its beacon

unattended. A loved thing shared and doubled

is in solitude never whole again.

The harbour’s full of sightsee daycruisers,

private recreational vessels, a few trawlers left

to cross swords for Talisman Energy’s odd jobs

on their bellies in the mud. When the sea,

even knowing what it knows, dares flood back in here

with whom will I watch flat fish rummaging

in the sediment, the Canadian sport fisherman

in new gear, baiting his hook with a fillet?

WHOSE DEATHS WERE RECORDED OFFICIALLY AS CASUALTIES OF “THE BATTLE OF MAY ISLAND”

1918, last of January, not late, but dark for hours

Sliding under the Forth Bridge toward the North Sea

Cruisers, battleships, destroyers, and the K-boats

Big, steam-driven pigs

Wallowing in the troughs and undulations

Under radio silence, and no lights

Pursuant to worthless intel

To opinions more plausible in formation than they might otherwise appear

En masse, you can’t see past them

Is he still a boy

Sailing under the flag of error

And, as it happens, low cloud cover

On a collision course with the unforeseen minesweepers

On board K-11, or K-17, turning hard to port

If not exactly on a dime

Or K-14, whose rudder jams full right, K-22 who slams into it

Then is run over by the oncoming HMS Inflexible

Who hears his name called, as if in twilight sleep

A second flotilla, led by HMS Fearless

Unaware the ships of the first have turned around

Increases speed to 21 knots

They meet head-on east of May Island, which barely looks up from its desk

Intuition breaks in two and heads for the bottom

Along with the wreck of the K-17

Whose crew is in the water

Feeling the warmth of the self against cold abstraction

No group of people has more in common

More fear in their blood than oxygen at this point

Unstable land, unswimmable water, air needing light

As it was in the chaos at the beginning of creation

Behind Fearless, and to avoid HMS Australia

K-6 rams K-4, which sinks with all hands

Remaining capital ships and destroyers of the 5th Battle Squadron

Bear down on the scene

On the men in the water

Whose eyesight has never been clearer, how cruel

I saw not it, but the place where it dwells

Chains of the wake around their ankles

Propellers tearing through them

Seven stars of the plough obscured by weather

Badly discordant atoms in the one place night seems to be pouring out of

Whose grandfather was a shepherd

How can he sleep in such cold

Face up or face down

In sheets of fuel

The unbreathable aftermath

104 killed, a conservative estimate

No enemy engaged but error

In the historical present, a modest commemorative monument

With its back to the sea

SONG

Ships arrived to harvest souls // I saw stones become a church //

I saw the church filled with gold // and the pit with souls who harvest gold //

I saw more fields cut from the forest // I no longer saw the forest dwellers //

As an egg to a bird, tree to a stone // I saw trees turn into ships, and sail away //

II

NO 59981 05825; 56.24324° N, 2.64731° W

Make your preparations. Supplement a lack

of expertise with curiosity undeterred

by the vandalized interior, histoplasmotic

pigeon shit, trash of its pilgrims who’ve written

on its forehead and eyelids their symbols

of blessing and protection: Pictish z-rod

(indeterminate), crosses Latin and Greek,

Mairi + Ian, Saor Alba. Iron and magnesium,

the contemplative oxides. Axis of

the main cave, NW-SE. You will see,

among spirits of the exhumed, the holdfasts,

will know the place by its local name

and your readiness repaid. Another landmark

fixed in the mind of the navigator.

He remembers a friend . . .

He remembers a friend

from his travels

dispersed atoms sullenly reconciled, I woke

to a human noise conceived outside me, for once

and a bundle over to which I hauled my body’s carbons

a griskin

hard bread

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