Pluscarden

57° 36' 1'' N, 3° 26' 14'' W

by Zoë Green

For we remember this sound
caught in the creaking oars,
the hoarse shearing of gulls;
songs of men as foreign to me
as my father yesterday – who  
when I tell of being here –
says he remembers the place just barely.
Funny-bone-hurt in my throat,
that I have embalmed his past,
a saint’s heart cotton-wooled in a casket.

I am staring at the tracery.
I have spent my life
tracing his, sending postcards home
from places he lived before I was:
Milan, Venice, Rome, Pluscarden.

In a damp-behind-the-knees
wild-garlic-summer,
a lay nun with burning hair
and skin cool as a creamery
laid my father before this altar.
People say we have the same eyes,
so I try squinting through
the same stained glass he did,
collapse back in time –

where I am staring at the rubble freshly mortared,
staring at the copse of pews creaking
like old knees genuflecting,
at men in dusk-white robes whose passing
gives the feeling of wings brushing
my cheeks in the woods at night.

This pew is a seeking galleon
setting sail for foreign shores,
carrying cargo of plainsong, psalters, rosaries.
Iona, Lindisfarne, Melrose, Waverley.
Visitors in anoraks, we look for signs
to stand, sit, say. All here adrift
look sideways at each other,
help sewn in behind our lips.
And silently we pray.