Colin Will, Scottish poet

Samples of poetry

Page updated: January 3, 2009

Thin (first published in The Eildon Tree)

We lie separately together,
not touching, in case a casual contact
leads to misunderstanding.

I know you no longer desire me.
You told me, after a bottle and a half
of good red wine. In the undesired

something shrivelled from that moment,
becoming bitter, certain, shallowing,
a leaf reduced to dried veins, fragile,

skeletal. And love was not enough
for resurrection. At the end of everything
the sweetness of bodies

was all, or the foundation
of all. Love no longer made
no longer mattered.

Day Tripper (first published in Envoi)

Today it’s Ischia, blue water pools,
rectangular and cool at the foot
then hotter ascending, the top one
circular and 38˚.

We wear yellow robes, drink limoncello –
as you have to – a lazy whitebait lunch,
and then a warming plunge.
It’s just seawater heated by a volcano
we can’t see, but it feels thicker,
like swimming uphill.

Water-wrinkled feet feel each grain of grit
in the concrete steps.

The tidal range is small by home standards,
so houses stop mere metres from the Med,
and the dark grey sand is soft, colourfast.

Some, more each year, die younger than I am,
and I sometimes think, not to dwell on, just
to wonder, how long? How many more
little tides will lap?

Across the bay, Naples sprawls
under Vesuvius’ green slopes,
the long dark scar from 1944
less livid each passing year.

Singing, we return to Sorrento. The question
has no meaning: too many variables,
but some day it will blow.

Copyright © Colin Will, 2008

Manoeuvres (first published in Broadside)

A lippy Tornado blinks over the house
across the road. It’s over mine and gone
before the sound hits. A rasping roar
I hear terrified the poor of Belgrade,
the leaky armies of Iraq – twice –
and the hot population of Herat.

It has the power to scare me – two big engines
and reheat – but it doesn’t, the way nobody bothered
about the drone of Dorniers bumbling off
to bomb Coventry, if you were on that side
of the conflict.

A laser aligns on nothing,
a featureless co-ordinate on the surface of the sea,
a point with meaning only to a distant Controller
and a targeting computer. Maybe a porpoise
is charmed by this brief damned spot;
maybe a livid squid tries and fails
to mimic neodymium’s ruby glow. More likely
even plankton are indifferent.

Somewhere, between Brunt Hill and the May Island,
a mission is accomplished, switches click, plane tips,
turns on a wing, streaks back over the Debateable Lands,
follows valley twists and speed-bump hills, to smear rubber
on some Southern tarmac.

Nobody dies here, no-one is threatened, locals don’t look up.
Even sheep nibble on, and nervous horses show more fear
of a smoky two-stroke. We’re all in training, knowing
stoic apathy’s what we’re good at; a survival trait essential
when the enemy’s undefined, and can’t be bombed away.

Siccar Point (first published in The Eildon Tree)

Down step after step,
many of them stretching over-long,
red earth punctuates the tussocks,
places where other boots
sought purchase and a brief stance
on this steep green staircase.
I use these uncut treads,
braced by finger grip
on taut wire, between barbs.

I’m halfway down the cliff
when the first primroses peep,
a pale contrast to celandine’s sulphur.

At the base is where
time was first found;
well, maybe not the second,
the lazy minute, absorbing hour,
or orbital year, but deep time,
the time it takes ‘til all the seas gang dry’.

And this is where it happened,
where the curious Doctor dipped
into thought so new it had no name.

Given: Oceans beget waves,
waves beget beaches, and, maybe,
beaches beget sandstones, and, I guess,
sandstones form mountains under heat
and pressure from below,
and water wears down hills, and then…

The gap, which was as long as he could think
and as many times doubled as two centuries
of discovery needs, the gap closes
with a rush of water-worn stones and mud,
and then…

That sludge too turns to rock, over ages,
sitting prettily on the upturned edges
of a slaty stack, and then…

Our friend sees it all exposed, not knowing
the size of time, but guessing it vaster,
endless, ‘no vestige of a beginning,
no prospect of an end’.

This is the place he sketched,
the angle between strata as near ninety
as makes no difference, the time between
beyond any human counting, but now
a thing to be measured. Hutton’s Unconformity,
far off the beaten track, and not signposted,
but known in places he would never see.

I touch the planed remains of folded mountains
formed from dried ocean’s ooze, a docked strip
overlain by flash floods from a desert Scotland.
I try to remember
Silurian-Devonian timescales,
but it doesn’t matter; I recognise
a Hutton-sized hiatus
when I see it.

Talking of Michelangelo (first published in Poetry Scotland)

I’m thinking about Michelangelo
while observing a Calder mobile
in the garden of the Reina Sofia.

A spiderling floats by
all eight legs tightly clenched
on its personal air line.

This is the season for them -
remember how many
bannered out from the power lines
at St Abb’s Head?

But I digress: M. would not
have calculated moments,
points of balance
about a central point.

The main focus, for him,
was a body’s centre of gravity,
the line the weight takes
from hair on head
to pillar limbs,
and each arch of the foot
a bow pulled for stand or leap.

A flung arm shifts, opposing
a trunk muscle;
an effort of will springs
and unconscious tensions
stabilise the body’s poise.

Would he have dismissed this thing
of foils and nerveless steel?
A child’s toy, maybe,
the easy virtues of a metal fulcrum
and welded bars. What’s harder
is to uncover from Carrara block
the body parts and attitudes
that mimic, in waxy stone,
the flesh and intent
of human form,
stilled.

The Lost Valley (first published zed₂o)

Walk down a steep slope to a stream
in a deep-cut gorge, crossed
by wooden footbridge. Look down,
see brown water gleam transparent
gliding over submerged stones,
plunging down short falls
spitting frothy bubbles.

The track turns sharp up on the other side,
twists between granite guardians.
Then comes a boulder-ballet
on the coggly crown of a giant rockfall.
The last obstacle’s a narrow ledge,
with no net below.

Suddenly here’s the hidden glen,
flat-floored with river gravel
too wide for this wee burn
to have laid it. A rowan grows
out of a house-sized boulder,
heather patterns and purples
the slopes, sparse grass tussocks
enough for wiry sheep.

All round, a ring of peaks
show their shadow sides
picked out by summer snowpatch.
Home is where you are
when you are most
yourself.

Copyright © Colin Will 2006

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