“…and so history issues from geography in the same way
that water issues from a spring: unpredictably but site-specifically.”
-Robert MacFarlane (The Old Ways)
I go to the Outer Hebrides on the west coast of Scotland.
I am a tourist in the land of my ancient ancestors.
Everything here is new, yet familiar.
Must be genetic memory that this place seems
so familiar and so much like home.
Even the language, so poetic and yet so foreign
comes to me as something I’ve known.
From the mainland in a lug-rigged open boat
with a Scottish larch, I go to Isle of Lewis and then to Uist
on old sea roads that turn to topographies of self
on land when lubbed I go out to wander where footfall is
borrow-danced and print-trails become foot-notes that
my feet sing in mnemonic song on my wonder-voyage
on isthmus roads across this island of happiness
up and down fells and across wind-rivers
through swathes and snooker-baize where rifts and
holloways are biddable and wayfaring at route
along chalk downs that makes me a back-to-the-soiler
amongst meadowsweet, blings and bindleshiffs and
where in the sky are shoals of starlings in my place-learning
and path-following pedipulation.
Across ice-pilots and along desire-lines and ogee in the world of wildlings
and whaleback hills, I hip-sway through holloways of oolite, cornbrash
and jabberwocky sprawl. In a zigzag swathe of beech hangers
in the downlands at route amongst mudstones and millstone grit
I get the heebie-jeebies beneath cloud caul and quiffs where greebes
make their uroboros-like bathyspheric descent into a glen of cairns where gillies
do a chiasmic dance and pibroch in the wadi footplinths of the past.
Where two chameleons are making love in a fig tree and yabber
like hoodoos or aerosolcan rattles shaking in the nacreous wind.
Here, I am a walker-writer, a fingerpost of history, a filigree, a hooley
of lettersets, who writes his wrack-lines of words like screeds of
jabbly toponyms with atavistic intentions as if they were hexes for
fug-like reavers in the verges among shielings and old crofts
hiding from chiasmic heirophany and the law.
In a glade of avocets and samphire and a hardstanding byre of holm oak
on a ridge of whalebacks, across a brindled moor I can see an old croft
near a large gout of water that is like a quadrille of aligned scatters of
corries in the sea. Dodging the peripli of plunge-pots and grippy lug-
rigged larch laid out across the dendrite under what now is a curd-yellow moon
with ink-flicks of stars, I continue and cross-jag the mirageous moor
with mucky-banked gelid, hoil, hachures and skerries and come to the lunulae
landing of mafic glass, sated by winter hawser and a helix of after-glow
before the water and waves moshed and milked in the gnomon of night
and the soughing and sedulous pearlescence of storm-light that is candle-blacking
what looks to be a weather-war on the ashen horizon. I wade through
the fireweed and the chrism of sluiced declivity along the shore that
is home for volutes and corels, gullies, seracs and great white bolls that
macerate the sand in shielings and swithered shells, becoming dhows
of former footprints that go underwater to ancient seabeds and old coracles
swallowed by the sea in ice-ages that gave us runnels that fed our crops
and watered our thirst for something dreamed of and maybe more than
we deserved, but wanted nonetheless against the nothing of not knowing
and the rain.
—
Thomas Rain Crowe is an internationally-published and recognized author, editor and translator of more than thirty books, including the multi-award winning nonfiction nature memoir Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods (2005); an internationally acclaimed anthology of contemporary Celtic language poets entitled Writing the Wind: A Celtic Resurgence (The New Celtic Poetry); his collection of poetry The Laugharne Poems written at the Dylan Thomas boathouse in Laugharne, Wales in 1993 and 1995. He has translated three volumes of Sufi-related poetry including the poet Hafiz (Drunk On the Wine of the Beloved) and the poet Kabir (Painting from the Palette of Love) both published by Shambhala Publications. He has been an editor of major literary and cultural journals and anthologies. He lived in San Francisco during the 1970s as an editor of Beatitude magazine and working alongside all the people cited in his most recent book Starting From San Francisco: Beats, Baby Beats & The 1970s San Francisco Renaissance. He lives in the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina.
