Elemental
My cousin was burned in the corner of his garage, fooling around with matches near the gas can when he was 8. It happened the same year when another cousin on the other side of the family died in a garage fire at their Florida home. That boy was a baby. The news crackled over telephone wires. Scars those fires left behind merged with other fire scars. Dave’s thigh became a map. Auntie Carol’s heart turned to ash. My Father wept and left cigarette butts smoking in coffee cups.
Sparks ignite through every generation. Somewhere back the ancestral line we were routed with torches chased down rutted Boreraig ways, run off our potato farms raining rivulets down the mountainside. They put out to sea in ships to a new world for the same old labors. Farmer Fathers dug rocks. Miner Fathers dug coal, my Millwork Papap shoveled it into a blast furnace, his life forged along a mighty river in oceans of anger & grief & unending regret.
Go inside the Iona stone, plucked from a thousand stones at St. Columba’s Bay—a 21st century relic worn smooth. Imagine McKinnon—ancestor adventurer with the great 6th century saint— How they waded ashore clutching boulders, stepped off the last great rock into liminal air. Their intentions were pure. The possibilities -profound. This stone is that step. It fits in the palm of my hand now, charcoal granite zippered with white. There’s a breathing story within. The way jagged things smooth out over time, grow smaller, hard, but never silent. This stone seeks the spirit of Scotsmen chased by fire, it fills their empty homes with a dark laughter. The earth they scratched til it bled burns us over and again. I carry their blood in my feet. I trace a map of their scars. Tendered and toughened by water. By rock. By flame.
Early Morning Poems 