Compound Time

there will be nights when music is the line
we breathe, the air we curve, the innocence
bereft of logic, learning compound time

or duple. Time is not the issue, not
the incident where theme and time confound:
there will be nights when music is the line

and nights of other eloquence, the flesh
deprived of sleep, of lack of conscious truth,
incensing logic and compounding time.

Years can separate (unknown, unshared)
lovers who have never touched, whose hope
there will be nights when music is the line

must fade unproven, skin regretting skin
and lip and nipple. Lovers, lost in time,
bereaved, endure the logic of the day.

They see, and clearly, how the years expose
each scar, each yearning note: they sing alone
bereft of logic, cast in fractured time,
beleaguering nights when music is the line

Ballad

Oh I made my love
a bright new coat
of cloth of gold
and silver thread
but he only said
That's not for me.
That's not for me
was all he said.

I made my love
another coat,
a coat of velvet
smooth and fine
but That's not mine,
said the stubborn man.
All he said was
That's not mine.

Then I made my love
a fine blue coat
embroidered richly
at the sleeve:
but he took his leave
without the coat
he left the coat
and took his leave

so I made my love
a farmer's smock,
as brown as mud
as plain as me
and he took it, saying
Thank you love,
I'll have that
and I'll have thee!

Look, I said, it's a coat,
that's all

Bessie Corrigall

they should make you an opera
Bessie Corrigall
perhaps they have, perhaps they have

slim young bones dissolving
in floating peat
like the sea, like the sea

angry waves you chose
when love was gone, all gone
sand-combed, peat-browned skin:

how far have you swum
Bessie Corrigall
our soft pretence of stone?

Brambles

stubborn fruit, strong-rooted
snatching at the hems
of wayward pupils dredging
the last mile of towpath

You're choring, sir!
Hedgerow food grown fat
purples your fingers
You're choring!
Not averse to choring if they know

the score, as here they're
ignorant of it, they stare and call
They're poisonous! They'll
kill you, sir. Aye they will!

Taught by demonstration
their fallacy, the brave
tailenders boast blood berries
from the thicket

But no thon black ones. See
they might be off

Flour Sacks

ripped-out flour sacks were sheets and alphabet
to my Deighan grandmother, in her day

denied school's gentler leavening
to knead for younger sisters, older boys.

Her daughter's education too was bolted- fourteen, shipped to Scotland. Imagine

the child, uprooted, fielding book for bus
her father newly dead. No telephones

to dispel loneliness, each sifted line
of husked heart's breaking masked: the hard-won smile

tendered in her letters between waves of coast-road Buckie, Portessie and Findochty

names she used to chant as she conducted
wartime passengers from A to B

^

Biography

Anne Macleod's poetry is known from Cape Breton to Salzburg. She lives on the Black Isle, in the north of Scotland, working as a dermatologist. She has four children. Her first collection, Standing by Thistles (Scottish Cultural Press) was shortlisted for a Saltire Award. Her second, Just the Caravaggio (Poetry Salzburg) won a Scottish International Poetry Competition Diploma. She is interested in poetry and music, poetry as music; loves the ambiguity of simple language.