Birks of Aberfeldy
A poem
From deep beech woods she steps down
into a dry stream bed, white tufa rock
poisoned with ore, crusted with orange,
porous, ragged like a parched sponge.
She treads carefully, confident,
away from the wild brown hares,
into salamander territory.
She can see the magic lizard at
a hundred paces, how it sits starfished,
unmoved by threat of forest fire,
painted by the jaundiced sun and
the coaly, moonless night.
At ten paces it will snap its head
like a mousetrap, then loathing her danger
sprint off into another dead gill.
She observes.
This is a skill she learned back in Inverness
at her daughter’s house, in the fortnight
where she half-explained that daddy was gone.
When she spent whole evenings charting
the silvery spit of a slug, the darting
commute of a damselfly, the relentless
pursuit of darkness chasing daylight
deep into beech woods.
The early weeks of grief are like a salamander,
hiding from the sun, motionless
until you reach close towards it.
Then, at the moment where you might
touch and understand, stroke its sunspots,
it scatters unconquered, to be found
by someone else, at another time,
on a different rock.
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