There is a sort of sadness, always, to these
glaciated landscapes. The hills lie scoured.
Recent ice, slow-dragged across corries
and cols, dumping debris thus devoured
on drab moraines, leaves a scarred sense,
weaves a slow traumatised song
much attacked by dissonance, dense
like late Beethoven, bleak, deaf-sung.
The Black Cuillins are the Grosse Fuge of the set –
strange, spiky, insistent to the edge of sanity
as to what must be – structure, at its limit,
shatters, leaving movement the only unity –
the theme, jagged, leaping, which redeems
a scoured sadness driven to extremes.
