Ken Cockburn
Ken Cockburn is an Edinburgh-based poet, translator, editor and writing tutor. He was actively involved with Shore Poets from 1995 to 2004. Recent publications include Reading the Streets and wide waves small circles (both 2010). Click on www.kencockburn.co.uk for further information.
Departures entail the handing back of keys
you only ever borrowed, even if
the place was nominally yours. Return,
you’ll have to buzz, announce yourself, convince
the keyholder you’re not a threat, your voice
flattened by the intercom’s electrics,
belonging to another world, another stranger.
Oh, keys entail responsibilities.
At one time I had half a dozen bunches –
complications moving home and office –
they weighed me down, me worrying I’d left
the one I needed. No, better when, in transit,
I carried none at all, dependent on
acquaintances, on friends of friends, to open doors.
Stac Pollaidh, Wester Ross
Once you leave the A-road
the pelting rain starts to ease.
Patches of, at first,
the palest blue
spread and intensify.
Still, you assume it won’t last,
pull on the serious waterproofs which,
barely into the ascent
and far too hot, you discard.
You climb until shades of meaning
(grasses and the vivid purples
of late summer flowers) pass
and there is only the fissured,
slowly collapsing rock. This
is as high as you’re going to get,
though cliffs rise above you; here
you’re still mobile and need
no specialist equipment.
You look on moor, loch, sea,
a single-track road snaking west
and your eye picks out a car
making for the coast
which might, it’s hard to tell,
be blue; and a shrine, though maybe
you just imagine this,
dedicated to
St Rita, patron saint
of the impossible,
set against the tumbling
pebbles of the long Atlantic.
Vo—lare, oh—oh,
Cantare, oh-oh-oh-oh…
Reception, despite the mountains,
is clear, and if the vehicle
shimmers through the birches’
uncertainty, the sky
is unambiguous.
