Fat rainbow sitting above a yawl, ghost of a herring silver beneath infra and ultra angular stacks and cliffs of Caithness the sun turns corners on calm days, rides over the tops when North and East are big in the sky; stone chat, grey wagtail corvids cloaked patrol the edges where thrift and cropped grass hold tight with rooted toes. In the sea tall wing giants wave their circular greetings caught in the downwards slant of an afternoon sun that burns through the speeding clouds.

Badly bitten on the hand finger and bone cut through - sailing into Stromness on the Hamnavoe turned savage, door jaws snapping shut. St. John’s Head glowered over, grey glittering eyes under brow beaten cliffs. Stitched in the Balfour to hold things,bring things together, put them in place. Fear runs back and forth along the balcony of vertiginous imaginings, the future a precipice. Where is the way down? Alongside, above the Black Craig a fulmar lifts up in a nascent Westerly gale, rising beside me on the cliff top. Flight a joy, ascent a living thrill, descent a cascading magic. So could my heart fly, if I release it from the fences and enclosures of expectation and doubt. Silver pools of light are painting grey blue the seas, the horizon curves, the sky is mackerelled, I am beside myself.

How long can a wall stand for, and what? A separation and dividing, the outside from the in. I built a wall forty years ago to keep the weather off my flowers, break the wind so what is the separation there? My skin perhaps, or years that could be seen to intervene, when really it has been my absence that was note worthy, the stones unpolished by my gaze are glazed by lichen and salt spray, stroked, bars and beams of light escaping from the horizon, casting low in reds and ochres paint the stones and bring stone shadows hiding slaters and periwigs where they bide, mandibles cutting through the roots of sedum and salix planted with optimism and ebullience by my fingers, releasing them into the cycles of tidal decay and the slow arrival of the sea at my door.

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