Andrew McNeillie - In Mortal Memory

I lie awake for more than half the night, like a northern summer, my mind suffused with light, though its deep winter still and long days are a dream thats yet to come when short nights keep a bonfire never quite gone out. I call this hope, if you will.

An oystercatcher on a roof-ridge pipes night ashore and day aboard in light like wreaths of smoke; and, even from this far, I can hear the tide crunch packed air, quarrying the bay for white sand. What is it that I cannot say, to you? Its not that I dislike the cold air: rain turned to sleet and flakes no longer hesitant blinding the headland with light, like a poke in the eye with a sprung twig, and metaphor stranded for the duration out in the wilderness of frozen pipes. The world as it is I can take if it exists, as appearances, and commonsense, insist. But they always insist too much, the facts and certainties their own undoing, for life is all becoming, and this winter night I lie here wide awake because of you.

This morning in January jumps at the woodside, and the world rocks as if hungry for the vernal equinox. Headlong we go.

Nothing damps our appetite for change. Time ticks too slow. Who can abide it hanging so? What once was valid is no longer. Who doesnt know? Sheared branches fly, and ivied limbs break under the weight of air, blocking the road. Pensive or vacant, we queue, out of sight, and into mind. The view explodes and tugs, as at heart strings.

And beyond our fish-tank staring-out it hurls ahead, reckless of destiny. As, just to think of you, my heart hurls me.

Winter has nothing to offer but itself. It is the years last resort, though holly come into berry and mistletoe offer relief to deciduous life and the ancient sky. Winter will do for me, the thing itself. It wasnt snowing and it wasnt going to snow.

Snow had become a thing I used to know, a metaphor whited out of every latitude I knew. So when it crossed my mind, I thought of you. So winter might have looked to its laurels, no longer variegated, no longer what it was. And the blackbird stranded in its branches looked the shadow of a blackbird too.

This wood-and-leafmeal air, dank and frosted, deadens and scours the earth, as if for signs of life. Theyre somewhere, I tell myself, wired to the weather.

Disturb my heart? I am already wrecked beyond belief, whichever direction you turn me. O wood! would I were ever as certain of rebirth from such wreckage, as you are. Those who would put a Stoic face on it, I number well, their wood for trees. Im of their timber, but I know their belief isnt all that it appears.

It was a false evening very like a dawn. I heard a songthrush singing from an empty thorn.

Something in the light encouraged it to sing and as it sang so I have sung and been as wrong.

Autumn leaves, packs its bags, and winter inherits empty trees. Metaphor as symbol begs to embark again on violent seas. What put the no in November wont be gainsaid. No more I, though I remember mal de mer and wishing to be dead. No more I, whatever that might mean, before the seas ego.

Everything and its season gone before you know.

Winter trims the gas under the Michaelmas daisies and purple turns to ash. Once ripe with promise, October fails and sinks into Novembers darkness. I knew you in my guilty innocence when autumn was no corruption. Then even winter fell to earth to rise again in frosted brilliance. The prototype of spring and resurrection promised like seed-time in its first green season.

But, in inverse proportion now, eavesdropping on an Oxford evensong and prayers of repentance, I step into the dark content to be brought to nothing.

In the long nights I began as if setting out for spring. Making preparations for the bride. Laying all bare. I lingered bitterly through Easter, then gave up the ghost, on the weathers cross. What might have been cannot be written off, as being without meaning.

Id lived for something more but will make do with loss.

These are long days now, though winter days are short, prey to frost, and even snow, or uneven, migrant north, rare as winter lightning used to be, chasing death. Like a blood clot in the thinning light, thickening up, vestige after-glow, with angioplastic blackbird scolding through, memory false and true, to free the heart from where it cannot go.

If forgetting were an option what would you choose to purge? Did anyone ever put such a question, the offer you can only refuse? Here, now, where evening thickens into night, I cling to light at its diurnal death.