Yvonne Reddick

The Flower that Breaks Rocks


He introduced his daughters to Ben Nevis.
‘You take the bearing. Line up the arrow,’

pointing to Moonlight Gully Buttress,
Minus One Gully. We didn’t care

until Dad found us a saxifrage. Its blooms
were spokes of the North Star.

‘Saxifraga means rock-breaker.’
Nivalis: snow-saxifrage.

Dainty Alpinist, chinking her roots into fissures
and fractures, like crampons in toeholds.

But I see now what he could only glimpse.
That she and the other Alpines – roseroots

and pearlworts – are scrambling skywards
until all that remains for them is cloud.


*


Madness Lake


Not even when we scaled
the ice-scoured Dalle
did I think it was possible

that he, like a glacier, could change state
from solid to intangible
in the pause between my heartbeats.

Grinning and mopping his sunburnt brow,
my father seemed imperishable
as the snow-hooded Pointe overhead.

When we reached the lake
the glacier calved with a gunshot,
jostled its floating bergs –

its snout already retreating.
Twenty years to the day
since we last trekked this crisscross path

to Lac de Folly: Madness Lake.
The sign still reads ‘Caution: year-round snow’
but the floes are meltwater –

my grief now ten months deep.


*


Frankincense


My mother sounded Earth’s deep architecture,
listening for the fossil ocean’s echo.

(This was five years before the ultrasound
showed me on a grainy screen in Glasgow.)

She saw the thirsty shrub by a dry well
in a desert burnt white, the salt city’s hinterland.

Oilfields reek of tar, but Omani frankincense
is the world’s most fragrant: a scent that suggests

the Magi, trekking the desert from Persia
to offer the tree’s tears to a small god.

‘Women in Salalah use it to perfume their linen,’
she told me. ‘But it looked like a gorse bush,

you know, the ones you see here on the Common.
Its twigs were barren, as if burnt.

In winter, leaves break from the stems
and flowers unfurl.’


*


Translating Mountains from the Gaelic


A pebble on the tongue
and a chockstone in the throat:

Beinn Laoghail becomes Ben Loyal,
Beinn Uais eroded to Ben Wyvis,

Bod an Deamhain
turns from Demon’s Penis to Devil’s Point,

my voice a stream-gorge
where quartz chunks clatter.


Last summer, I shouldered my red rucksack,
a water-flask, and a vial of his ash.

A deerfly, its eyes peridot ringstones
hovered to steal my blood,
my language a trespasser.

I poured his English dust
to feed the roots of the hill’s oldest pine.

Let the rain seep through him,
Schiehallion transforming him to earth.
<

*


Imagines


            That garden of émigrés and locals: sacred
fig, date palm. I was sent to clip the shockhead
orange tree, and dropped the shears when I saw
I’d committed murder: an inch-worm, halved.

            Chubby infant pythons, its four siblings
cowered under leaves. My sister and I salvaged them,
provisioned them with lime-twig offcuts, camouflaged
from sparrows and the boys who dismembered
soldier-ants in Science.

            Seven years since the swarm of Nighthawks
burst the sound-barrier, each bearing its high-
explosive clutch, zeroing on Baghdad. Shots
imaged the troops, mantis-eyed in gas-masks.

            They shredded leaves to veins for a fortnight
then inverted their skins, like the werewolves
that stalked my Grimms’ Tales. Armoured
chrysalids folded their flight.

            North of the border, the local dictator unleashed
nerve-gas trialled on insects. Birds fell to earth
from nests, dogs choked on bloody foam; finally,
people hacked up their lungs. That memory still
stung behind the eyelids. When Tornados howled
overhead, their sonic boom detonated the night-
terrors of my sister.

            We watched their eclosion – damp wing-rags
unscrolling like hibiscus petals, the oil-sheen
shot with lemon. I couldn’t say whether their checked
dappling was the likeness of a silk prayer-rug, or
a stained-glass icon.

    Four chequered swallowtails, flexing
symmetrical wings. We watched each
dart through the doorway,
into the flowering season.

 

    11     Muirburn
    12     The Flower that Breaks Rocks
    13     In Oils
    16     He set off…
    17     Esther in the Asylum Garden
    18     The Gift
    19     November
    20     Fire-seed
    22     The Frontier of Water
    24     Madness Lake
    25     Fired Earth
    26     Superb Lyrebird
    27     December
    28     At the Corrie of the Birds
    29     On the Alaskan Peak We Never Climbed
    30     Loyal, Munro, Schiehallion…
    31     Storm Petrel
    36     January
    37     Coal Measures
    41     I watch the city through oil…
    42     Frankincense
    43     Cristaux de Roche
    45     Translating Mountains from the Gaelic
    46     Shadowtime
    48     Of the Flesh
    49     Spikenard
    50     Firesetter
    51     Kindling
    52     February
    53     Fossil Record
    56     Ptarmigan
    57     Rime
    58     Hare at Haslingfield
    59     March
    60     Imagines
    62     Burning Season
    64     Waterland