Two poems

By Matt Haw

AT THE STONE CABIN KNOWN AS TINDASLOTTET 

i. 

With the warm drystack 

of refuge at my back I watch 

two roll-on / roll-off ferries 

pass in the summer dusk 

distant clusters of lights 

on the sea’s unified field 

simple in their forms 

as a child might draw them 

each going one of two ways 

both of those leaving— 

I have lived long in that departing 

believing it saves the world 

from dull love 

but apart with the form 

of the mountain 

the gap tooth stones of its peak 

& slipshod bog cottons 

where constant winds play 

their world-shaping songs 

some part of me feels arrived 

from everywhere 

& momentarily content 

to be anywhere but home 

this least of me will remain 

ii. 

It’s not a dream 

I have sent you here again 

so late in December 

to inhabit this silence 

as good a night as any place 

to witness the grasses 

fold over themselves 

to listen should the stones 

have anything to say 

to see if the wind can name 

every one of your bones 

for your eyes 

to let light in 

on this blindfolded hemisphere 

a mountain hut within stilled 

by the blustering world without 

for none of it 

to make you think 

of any kind of god 

just hang your song 

with the others on the hook 

behind the door— 

iii. 

for which there is no key 

a wooden bolt lathed by use 

slides home into its hollow 

the soul of any unlocked door says 

let others come 

to stone-bunk succour 

the bothy atop 

this whisker-still coastal peak 

let them believe as I do 

that this is for them alone— 

kindling 

water purifiers tobacco in a zip-lock 

marked cairns & snipe 

launching from heather 

so they will know they are arrived 

now to sleep 

on the shadow side of the island 

PRE-CELTIC 

Trespassing at the alignments 

the granite walls of the dolmen we ducked into 

were an envoy of shelter 

sharp rain & wind off Biscay 

but in the lee of the oat-grey rock 

of the underworld 

we found carved images of axes 

hand ploughs & where we crouched— 

a kraken deity 

whose many-limbed largesse extends 

it seems as through millennia 

to keep us from the June storm 

all that rock

weathered to a map that leads 

back to days when hands scratched more 

than a name learned 

dear primitive complex as we’ll ever be 

we know as well as you what outlasts 

but here arrive at some wish 

to be ploughed under 

in one of Europe’s ordinary fields 

only coastal grasses & wild fennel 

to mark where knuckles dragged to accept 

such solipsism that grows 

slow as lichen on megaliths 

until the leaching of minerals 

becomes a truth to be faced up to 

like the past & how long to linger there 

seduced by pictograms that bear 

so lightly on now 

the thick scent of damp earth 

& from elsewhere it seems salt 

Matt Haw is a poet. His work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in Long Poem Magazine, Stand, TriQuarterly and Zócalo Public Square. His most recent pamphlet Boudicca (Templar, 2021) was the recipient of an East Anglia Book Award.