Poetry - Ten Minutes of Weather Away

published in Northwords Now, Issue 36, Autumn 2018

 

TEN MINUTES OF WEATHER AWAY

 

In your writing shed an off-white wooden sill

dimpled with fly shit and burnt matches

balances a window pane, a jar, an eagle

 

feather as wide as your fist

that a man from twenty-four years ago

gave you just the other day

 

early sunshine takes all that in

 

though spiders’ webs

turned crystalline with time, yet

if you brush them with the back of your hand they’ll disappear

 

you know that because you did it just the other day

on that other wooden sill, in that bothy

ten minutes of weather away from here

 

and they resolved to nothing, absolutely nothing

 

around a cassette tape -

Bob Dylan’s Freewheelin

that hadn’t been played in decades.

 

This morning, out beyond the feather and fly-shit

you see something akin to cloud-shadow

move across Ben Cruachan, graceful as a Goldie

 

and you have the human-most luxury

of wondering

how time might dissolve on the tongue.