Ten

Highlands

The glimmer has gone from the cotton as I cast through this cold and lonely place. We are in the Highlands, where else? Where else do the blue skies blur the distinctions of the heart, or the deep dark hills draw out the despair and the dissimilarities that swim in the soul. Where else will you find a landscape with a face that has just cried? Here you find yourself swollen, woolen, damp and aching alongside the green hurt hills.
I move with solemn echoes, I fall into the crying cwyms and wait with the cold where Polar bears once slept. These are the Highlands. This is where the land was torn apart, once, by sheets of ice.

I have come to the cwyms, bringing my bruised depression, to fly like a kite, in the black-and-blue sky. I let it fill with darkness and doubt, I let the cold gusts rip at my ears. I find that the sun cannot thaw the cold from my toes or from my lips. I can hear the roaring of the ancient flocks who roamed here. I can see their boots, and kilts, running over the mountainsides.

And I see you, through all this fabric, I see you in the back of the bus. I see tears, like jewels, roll over your cheeks. I touch the tears, with my invisible hands, and wonder what good are jewels, or even tears. The dead have no use for them. The only thing that matters is your memories. What will your memories be of me? Will you forget, even the face of your mother?

You know, the castles on these hills, their giant facades, loom over the towns below. Like this one at Stirling. It is like a mood that hangs over the village, that all ignore.
Is it like an oppression from afar, these memories of me?
Will you always toil against the weather of the world?

I can smell the whiskey in the vaults. I can see the heather brush the long silky hair of the Cairngorm winds. I can only imagine the voices, the echoes, of the long dead heroes that fell here. I can only guess which dark haired ghost breathed poison into your ears. I watch the living walk, puffing the fog over their roads, pointing their fingers at glass or at signs. I watch your eyes turn to mercury, and your mouth, to a cold and quivering horizon.

Here you are. I touch your hair, where the light burns gold. The rubbery seats squeak as you hold your aching to your self. Your eyes fill with tears, the last tears you will ever cry. It is beautiful to watch, but also, it makes the cotton that attaches me to heaven, it makes it crack with the weight of it. If I linger any longer, it will snap, and I will be vanquished by your grief. Will you open your hands and let it go. Will you open your heart and let me be? Will you find your way here, or be forever there? Where are you when you are always there? I can only be here. It’s the only place that exists. It is cold, like a fiery hearth. It’s where life blasts its way into the world, and the dead linger here. But this is not where you are. You are far, far away, in place where only you can be beside yourself.

What is in the samsonite suitcase? Why do you go to Stirling? Do you have a penny or a pound?

You are on a bus, moving across a field where polar bears once stood. Your poverty and emptiness is a deception.
What are the values of stolen wealth, what does a penny matter, what is wealth, when it is plundered, or the lover of the lover of these?
Why does it matter if a penny goes to someone called Sam or some other sham?

I leave you to your sorrows, and climb back into my cwym. I ebb along a crag, move along the muirs and flow deep into the beds. I intrude along volcanic chimneys, up the strata, into the veins and cracks until I burst and thaw and spread over the snowflakes of the summit. I spread my shackled ghost over the snowy dome. Beyond me, Autumn peaks quiver in the last of the sun’s gold.
I am surrounded by my solitude, but it is better than yours. My solitude is alive with light. God’s paintbrush dabs orange and pink, red and purple.
Then, through the wispy sky, stars unwrap their tinfoil upon the hard and folded fields.
They begin to fall asleep around me.

Note: cwym is pronounced cwoom