Excerpt from The Marks on the Map

The Marks on the Map

Brian Johnstone



The Marks on the Map

Other titles by Brian Johsntone

Poetry

Juke Box Jeopardy (Red Squirrel Press, 2018)
Dry Stone Work (Arc Publications, 2014)

The Book of Belongings (Arc Publications, 2009)
Terra Incognita (L’Officina, Vicenza, 2009)
Homing (The Lobby Press, 2004)

Robinson: A Journey (Akros Publications, 2000)
The Lizard Silence (Scottish Cultural Press, 1996)

Memoir

Double Exposure (Saraband, 2017)

As Co-Editor

Scotia Extremis: poems from the extremes
of Scotland’s psyche (Luath Press, 2019)
A Memory of Fields: the poetry of Mark Ogle

(Akros Publications, 2000)
The Golden Goose Hour: the first Shore Poets anthology

(Taranis Books, 1994)

The Marks on the Map

Brian Johnstone

2021

Published by Arc Publications,
Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road

Todmorden OL14 6DA, UK
www.arcpublications.co.uk

Copyright © Brian Johnstone, 2021
Copyright in the present edition © Arc Publications, 2021
The right of Brian Johnstone to be identified as the author
of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with

the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

978 1910345 35 1 (pbk)
978 1910345 36 8 (ebk)

Design by Tony Ward
Printed in the UK by ImprintDigital.com

Upton Pyne, Exeter, Devon

Cover image:
Graffitti, Challons
Photograph by Brian Johnstone

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and
to provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no
reproduction of any part of this book may take place without

the written permission of Arc Publications.

Editor for the UK & Ireland
Tony Ward

for Jean



Contents

A Back Street in Leith, 1911 / 11
Heritance / 12
Policies / 13
Primrose / 14

The Marks on the Map / 15
Wreck to Ruin / 16
Outfield / 18

Restoring the House of Kiria Zoë / 19
A Paved Path / 20
The Weight / 21
Detail / 22
Resistant / 23

The Branded Hand / 24
The Arthur’s Seat Coffins / 25
Mr Stevenson’s Landfall on the Bell Rock / 26
The Last Train from St Fort / 28

Adam on Mingulay / 30
Township / 31
Day of Rest / 32

The Coffin Road / 33
A Lock of Fleece / 34

A Cart Road / 35
Spooked / 36

A Declaration / 37
Kefi / 38

Night’s Take / 39
Footnotes / 40
The Island / 42

Treading the Boards / 43
Brothers / 44

A Highland Favour / 45
British Bulldogs / 46
Old School Maps / 47

The Treasure Island Map / 48

Man of Dust / 49
Coal Tattoo / 50

ATA Girl / 51
Breach / 52

Message Received / 53
Device / 54

A Cabinet of Curiosity / 55
Mrs Delany’s Remarkable Paper Mosaicks / 56
Handel Composes The Harmonious Blacksmith / 57

A Late Gainsborough / 58
John Clare’s Rules / 59
Orcadian Gothic / 60
Kreisler’s Coma / 61

Armstrong’s Arrival in Chicago / 62
Miles Ahead / 63

Weldon Kees in New York / 64
Flying Out of Marco Polo / 66
Three Definitions of Twilight / 67

Wintering / 68
North / 69

Ask & Embla / 70
Doggerland / 71
The Old Straight Track / 72

Meaning / 73

Notes on the Poems / 74
Biographical Note / 77
Acknowledgements / 79

Regular maps have few surprises. More precious,
though, are the unpublished maps we make
ourselves; those maps of our personal
memories, that make the private tapestry
of our lives.

Alexander McCall Smith

One never reaches home, but wherever
friendly paths intersect the whole world

looks like home for a time.

Hermann Hesse



A Back Street in Leith, 1911

In the immediacy of that long forgotten moment the future subsists so
eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it.
Walter Benjamin, A Little History of Photography

The windows are open to air the flat
in this photograph
of over a hundred years back.

Beyond the reflected light, somebody
stares through the glass.
A loose curtain flaps in the wind.

At the foot of the half-raised sash
the fresh breeze of an age
that’s barely past slips over the sill.

Not hard to imagine the notes it carries
– a whiff of horses,
coal smoke, the sea a street away –

slipping almost unseen, but for the sway
of a single drape,
into the depths of a room where

someone we couldn’t have known
dropped by unannounced,
no-one troubling to shut out the draught.

11

Heritance

for my grandmother

I can open your door, if I think myself back
far enough, walk down your dim-lit hallway,
by the grandfather clock that gave me the creeps,
turning not right to the study, its closet of books,
but left, and you’re there. It’s your chair I remember,
straight-backed and chintzed, you sat by the fire
in the back room more easy to heat, its small scale
that echoed your own stooping frame. Don’t
send me away, down to the shops, or next door
to collect the weekly you share; but into the kitchen
to save your old pins, gas on a peep for the soup,
to slice up the loaf you’ve left out on the board
I’m using today, in a kitchen you weren’t to see,
the breadboard as good as ever it was, though
scored from the cutting of each of our knives
and floured with the grains we have lost.

12

Policies

for Harry Barlow

The bungalow you built in ’58 still stands
and all bar one, the trees you planted
for a wood. The only absentee,

an ash, fell victim to a gale you lived to see
but not to hear the chainsaw’s whine
as our neighbour took it out.

All those – the trees, the saplings sprouting
from their seed – you showed me
not a month before you died,

talked me round the policies and named
the ones you’d planted, quite as far
as to your bottom fence,

the boundary you’d never led me to before.
And now, in autumn dusk, I watch
the starlings bank and swirl

waiting for the light to fade, the sun to slip
behind The Law. Their day is done.
As one they swoop

into the branches of the wood you grew
across the way, chitter there together
as the night comes on.

13

Primrose

No road had led to it, and scarce a track, though
obvious in winter – a scrubby lead that headed
straight out of that lone right-angled bend.

We’d seen it marked on maps, the one inch OS
confessing its existence on the slope of Kenly Den,
its name a promise of discovery, or was it spring?

We found the way, grass-grown in early summer,
and crossed the burn to scramble up the slope,
push open half a double door ajar for years.

Who’d lived there hadn’t left a lot, but tinder-dry,
the pantiles keeping out the rain, and dusty
once we’d let in light to pick out all the motes.

New housed ourselves, and wed the year before,
we wondered what the place had left to share,
what archaeology of home we might obtain.

Some floor tiles, red and heavy fired clay, we left
an age ago in a cottage long moved on from,
and this small plaque still with us here today.

A finger plate, it holds the touch of generations,
the shepherd it depicts guiding them like flocks
to lower pastures for the coming autumn days.

14

The Marks on the Map

You number them off on a tramp – the big house,
the lodge, the manse – each good for a cup of tea
in your hand, a piece on jam, some bacon clapped
in a bap. It’s the back door ever, a knock, the wait:
Any odd jobs needing done? Some kindling to chop,
a shoe on a last to tack back to shape, some dreels
to dig over or weed. And, maybe a barn to doss in
if the farmer’s a man with a kindly heart; the back
of a dyke if he’s not. Old coats and jackets: things
that you need, or boots that have seen better days;
the minister’s breeks once, threadbare at the knee,
nothing a needle and yarn couldn’t save. And you
number them off on the map in your head – a flea
in your ear, long stand in the cold, a rare welcome,
that warm by a Rayburn door – each one a species
of kindness or scorn, a foot put in front of another.

15