Poetry: Loch Etive/New Year/The Blue Nib #41

Two poems published in The Blue Nib Issue 41

Loch Etive

I remember the bad stuff

but today it’s sun 
and seal breath,

green hairstreak butterflies 
mind-blowing on gorse.

 

New Year 

Snowing hard in Aviemore when you met the train
me getting warm on the bench-seat of a Land Rover.
You liking my jumper, all I remember a storm of colour

pulled-over kisses on a blizzardy bend, your Mum and Dad,
their hearts bright in a dark house - her sense of humour 
on-target like yours, that slow-roast wild goose

like nothing I’d tasted before, or since.
I remember a lot of sex, drams, dancing
I remember snow-drifts, trees bending under white weight.

One morning branches let go of snow, sprang up,
your phone rang, I saw you slip    felt you go.

Put myself on the Edinburgh train, full of the cold 
(feistiness I now admire in my younger self)
not waiting for you to come back

from the phone-call outpost
where you blurred 
while I burned.

Trains and east coast consonants,  
Caledonian pines, wild geese, you    the past    
all still get to me when heavy snow’s forecast.