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The child in the field is splitting stalks with her thumbnail and threading flowers through the slits she’s made
like the girl five hundred years before her, singing dayseye, dayseye as she loops the string around her neck
in exactly the same way as the girl, a thousand years earlier who’s running home through a white-speckled field
letting the name her mother taught her dæges eage, dæges eage, thrum in her head.
*
The bees go right inside these speckled flowers and so do her fingers, fitting perfectly into the tips
just like the paws of the redbrown fox, creeping out at night, wearing his purple foxes glofa.
*
Here in the cow pasture, she finds the yellow flowers that grow by the slops, cusloppe, cusloppe
and clutches a bunch of them, round as the sun and the girl a few centuries after her
gathers dozens of them, ties the stalks together and makes them into balls to play with or to give away.
Fields fertilised, hedgerows grubbed up: this child will never find or name one cowslip, cowslip, cowslip…
This keepsake, your sketchbook of Orkney, has pencil drawings of the sea annotated with soft, northern tones: ‘steel grey’, ‘light blue’, ‘pale mauve’.
If I could have brought you something back from Canada, it would have been the memory of the colours of the lakes and rivers there, the words for them, ‘deep turquoise’, ‘milky green’.
This would have been your gift. Instead, a sense of something missing, like water lifted from its element, and running through my fingers, colourless.
It is a place of bones.
Catherine’s herself like safely fleshless shrined in a blue box in her own chapel.
Martyred in the desert, a monastery grew round her skeleton, dry bones sprouting a place of pilgrimage, a place of cypresses and olives green in the wafer-dry peninsula that holds out its thirsty tongue to lap the salt of the Red Sea.
For a thousand years monks have been here: Greek-speaking, black-clad drawn by some divining rod of vocation to this source of water in the desert.
In this whitewashed room are heaped the skulls of a millennium of them: lining the walls, filling the cupboards, lying in mounds on the floor, each one exhumed and here exhibited, anonymous, having lost below earth that skin that was the colour of rock at sunrise and the eye brown as a fresh date, the black ringlet threaded with a silk of white hair the crinkle which the smile carved.
It is a place where bones are causally shown, where they become as normal as the scant rockiness of landscape that is all the eye has to look upon.
It is the monastery’s grapefruit tree, it is the fact of pilgrims sill arriving or of one of the monks offering cups of sweet tea and biscuits flavoured with herbs which in this strip of earth is rarity, is miracle.
The memory of this has been distilled until all that’s left is whiteness – the bleached wood of the stool with the fingerhole to lift it, the enamel surface of the table, his cotton vest as he stands by the sink, face in the mirror bearded with shaving soap, the warm milk keeping on the stove.
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