Something

A letter from the wilds.

It is an odd sort of a week, isn’t it?

Ghosts and Saints alike have been knocking upon the heaving door to my heart,

And I’ve decided to heed at least one of them.

One that I’ve come to trust.

I’ve scheduled this brief incantation to publish of its own accord.

By the time it reaches you, I’m afraid the ink will already be dry.

And I will be two days fasted.

Alone in that wild tangle of starlit jungle that is always dancing in my periphery.

She and I have a bit of catching up to do.

Timely too, as the tradition of Lent has decided to take me up this year.

---

I would offer you a poem this week.

Though I am admittedly lacking in a formal learning of the traditions of stanza and verse,

I know it to be a poem because of the way it felt when it was coming out of me.

It felt nothing like a song,

And nothing like a story.

And it spoke a tongue that is far more difficult to impersonate than either one of those.

---

This poem is the result of a six-month tenure on the Isle of Mull,

And a strange romance that ensued there.

To receive it as it was intended,

I do suggest pausing to polish your heart before proceeding.

And listening the audio voiceover might be especially suggested today.

With that,

---

Something

I am, for the very first time, on Mull

Here, years apart and miles away

I am at last sat in that dim cottage without clocks

Eating a thing warm and heavy

And being remade in its likeness

You are there too

For without you, there is no dim cottage

Nor hidden isle, nor cold wind, nor hot meal

There is only my toiled hammering at those hopeless layers of frost

While the wind and the rain and the sea all conspire to devour us

Us.

That was where it changed

They wanted to devour us now

And that meant that we were something

I’d never been something

That loyal drying rack overburdened with socks of two different sizes

Meant that we were something

A pair of bicycles slumped against the wall at night

Proclaimed “Something lives here”

“This is the home of Something”

Our own eyes and flesh pierced and gripped at one another

Electrified with the suspicious heat of Something

Something, darling, Something was busying himself with us

And beneath our silent dinner table

Where Something did not yet know to look:

Frightened green shoots

The candles kept our secret

And we kept it from each other.

By day, you would become a creature so small

That that you could perch on the high windowsill

And engage in mute dialogue with Something

And as I’d return up the drive with my satchel of sea bleached stinging nettles and broken things

I would crane and squint

Eyes groping for your porcelain silhouette

My eagerness growing with such a patient humility

That I did not yet know I was falling in love

The stories, they’d never spoken of this part

Of the hidden garden that waters itself

No, the stories, it turned out, had all been biographies of Something

And spoke only of him and his trappings

At night, on our bed, we trained for our impending rebellion

Something would not have us

In daring to converse with the wind and the rain

We found that they too had long sought to overthrow Something

Even the sea began to submerge us in his salted memories

Of that holy place before Something’s conquest

And, fertilized by the grotesque waste

Of our desperate experiments

A thin and eternal texture began to greet us in dream

We spoke openly of Hope

Having at last received her invitation

Do you remember your first glimpse of that brimming barrel?

And how we, smitten fools, emptied it to carry it with us?

It grew up out of the floor of that cottage, and there it remains

Fastened to Mercy

And we do not.

Something remains.

But we do not.

Carried endlessly across stone bridges and through seaside villages

Something is tending a garden

Feeble and undying

I’ve grown to admire Something

He lies, but perhaps it is a noble lie

I groan to confess such a thing might exist

But if man refuses perfection when it is given him

Then Something ought to be done about it.

---

Now, I’ll be back soon.

Do be gentle with yourselves.

And let us continue the discipline of polishing our hearts.

Lest their eyes grow blurred.

With love,

J

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Artwork: A wee painting by my Aunt, Marie Quinlan, of a Mull-esque landscape

Music: Tristan and Isolde, Richard Wagner