“Distance is dead. At Gatwick, at Heathrow | the loud spoor, the grinding tremor, | manglings, accelerated trade routes | in reverse: the flyblown exotic place, | the heathen shrine exposed. A generation | saw it happen: the big-eyed, spindling | overleapers of the old slow silk route | shiver in terylene at Euston, grimed | caravansary of dispersal, where a lone | pigeon circles underneath the girders, | trapped in the breaking blur of sound waves— | a woman’s sourceless voice interminably | counting off the terminals, a sibyl’s | lapful of uncertainties. There’s trouble | to the north, the trains are late: from | knotted queues the latest émigrés | of a spent Commonwealth look up: so many, | drawn toward what prospect, from what | point of origin? Bound for Iona in | the Western Isles, doleful, unlulled | by British Rail, lying awake I listen | to the clicking metronome as time | runs out, feeling the old assumptions, | aired, worm-tunneled, crumble, | thinking of the collapse of distance: | Proust’s paradise of the unvisited, | of fool’s-gold El Dorado. At Glasgow | there’s still trouble, but the train | to Oban’s running. Rain seeps in; | past the streaked, streaming pane, | a fir-fringed, sodden glimpse, the | verberation of a name: Loch Lomond. | “Really?” The callow traveler opposite | looks up, goes back to reading—yes, | it really is Thucydides: hubris, | brazen entitlements, forepangs of | letting go, all that. At Oban, a wet | trek to the ferry landing, where a | nun, or the daft counterfeit of one | (time runs out, the meek grow jaded, | shibboleths of piety no guarantee): | veil and wimple above dank waterproof, | nun-blue pantsuit protruding—lugs | half a dozen satchels (“tinned things | you can’t get up here”), has misplaced | her ticket, is so fecklessly egregious | it can’t (or could it, after all?) be | contraband. From Craignure, Isle of Mull, | a bus jolts westward, traversing, and | it’s still no picnic, the slow route | Keats slogged through on that wet | walking tour: a backward-looking | homage, not a setting forth, as for | his brother George, into the future: | drowned Lycidas, whether beyond the | stormy … And of course it rained, | the way it’s doing as I skitter up | the cleated iron of the gangway at | Fionnphort; Iona, an indecipherable | blur, a slosh of boots and oilskins, | once landed on, is even wetter. | Not that it always rains: tomorrow | everything will be diaphanous | as the penumbra of a jellyfish: | I’ll ride to Staffa over tourmaline | and amethyst without a wrinkle; | will stand sun-warmed above the bay | where St. Columba made his pious landfall, | the purple, ankle-deep, hung like a mantle | on the starved shoulder of the moor. | Heather! I’d thought, the year I first | set foot, in Maine, among blueberries’ | belled, pallid scurf; then—But there’s | no heather here. Right to begin with: | botanically, they’re all one family. | I saw that pallor, then, as an attenuation | in the west: the pioneers, the children’s | children of the pioneers, look up from | the interior’s plowed-under grassland, | the one homeland they know no homeland | but a taken-over turf: no sanction, no cover | but the raveled sleeve of empire: and yearn | for the pristine, the named, the fabulous, | the holy places. But from this island— | its nibbled turf, sheep trails, rabbit | droppings, harebells, mosses’ brass- | starred, sodden firmament, the plink | of plover on that looped, perennial, | vast circumnavigation: at ground level | an incessant whimpering as everything, | however minuscule, joins the resistance | to the omnipresent wind—the prospect | is to the west. Here at the raw edge | of Europe—limpet tenacities, the tidal | combings, purplings of kelp and dulse, | the wrack, the blur, the breakup | of every prospect but turmoil, of | upheaval in the west—the retrospect | is once again toward the interior: | backward-looking, child of the child | of pioneers, forward-slogging with | their hooded caravels, their cattle, | and the fierce covered coal of doctrine | from what beleaguered hearth-fire of | the Name, they could not speculate, | such was the rigor of the Decalogue’s | Thou Shalt Not—I now discover that | what looked, still looks, like revelation | was not hell-fire, no air-splintering | phosphorus of injunction, no Power, | no force whatever, but an opening | at the water’s edge: a little lake, | world’s eye, the mind’s counterpart, | an eyeblink of reflection wrung from | the unreflecting seethe and chirr and | whimper of the prairie, the wind- | stirred grass, incognizant incognito | (all flesh being grass) of the mind’s | resistance to the omnipresence of what | moves but has no, cannot say its name. | There at the brim of an illumination | that can’t be entered, can’t be lived in— | you’d either founder, a castaway, or drown— | a well, a source that comprehends, that | supersedes all doctrine: what surety, | what reprieve from drowning, is there, | other than in names? The prairie eyeblink, | stirred, grows murmurous—a murderous, | a monstrous world rimmed by the driftwood | of embarkations, landings, dooms, conquests, | missionary journeys, memorials: Columba | in the skin-covered wicker of that coracle, | lofting these stonily decrepit preaching | posts above the heathen purple; in their | chiseled gnarls, dimmed by the weatherings | of a millennium and more, the braided syntax | of a zeal ignited somewhere to the east, | concealed in hovels, quarreled over, | portaged westward: a basket weave, a | fishing net, a weir to catch, to salvage | some tenet, some common intimation for | all flesh, to hold on somehow till | the last millennium: as though the routes, | the ribbonings and redoublings, the | attenuations, spent supply lines, frayed- | out gradual of the retreat from empire, all | its castaways, might still bear witness.