'Mony a quirk'

Kirkwall from the Cathedral spire

I've been stone-skipping thoughts across the water, and managed to get a run of three that seemed to cover a good distance: Robert Rendall's "I' the Kirk Laft" (brought to mind by a visit to the upper regions of St Magnus cathedral with Laura and Anton, under the excellent guidance of Ross Flett); Norman MacCaig's "Also" (because an anniversary always dovetails love with hurt), and, as a much weaker final skip, "Parsing my dead daughter".

I' the Kirk Laft
Here i' the sooth laft's neuks sae dim,

Twa aald-time relics - Haad thee wits!

A hangman's ladder twa could clim',

A widden pulpit, geen tae bits.

Whaur ither should they than in kirk

O' guid and evil mind us a'.

Time plays, hooever, mony a quirk:

Prelate and tief are baith awa.


Also
You try to help, and what happens?
You hurt also.

You hoist a sail on a boat
and one day, gusted sideways,
the boat is scattered in timbers
round a slavering rock.
You put violets in water, and what happens?
They lose all their scent.

And you give absence and loneliness and fear
when you give love - that full sail,
that sweet water.


Parsing my dead daughter
In dreams, you're never dead, or even centre-
stage - we're just together, muddling along
as usual, like last night when the revolver
had to be hidden in your gym bag among
an assortment of soft toys, yes, our lives 
depended on it (I'd been reading Primo Levi's
If Not Now, When), and your being there alive
never came into it. How many cuddlies
we could take and still reach the further shore
was the issue until, that is, the whole thing
suddenly seemd odd - the dream's normality - 
and then, just before reaching full lucidity,
I told myself sharply: throw the gun into the wings
along with the dead and hold onto my daughter.

I've always loved the way in which Rendall manages to collapse the whole great edifice of our value-system with the seemingly throwaway phrase 'mony a quirk'. Contingency comes into MacCaig's poem too, yet much as I love "Also", for a long while I thought the last line, 'that sweet water', was a bit far-fetched: the scent of cut violets does not drain into the water they're placed in, surely? But this last fortnight of swimming and musing about water, especially in the countdown to Adelina's anniversary, has led me to understand that I was being too literal minded. The water is not necessarily sweet with flower fragrance, but because it sustains them (however briefly), and us. And what sustains us most sweetly, is what we choose to draw from our experiences, hence my reparsing. Hence my swimming too.