Loch Coire an Lochain
The path dies by the yard,
spurned by hare & hind.
The corrie now, its broken cliffs –
how many green men & green women
did it take
to not build a road here?
Like one fallen boulder,
a tent by the lochan
domes me:
the air's pure
and sounds are purer still.
A bird can tweet
without a tree to sit in –
you don't need belongings
and you don't need selves
and as for those of you
with giant flatscreens
I'm sure it's all very moving.
Here it's all one
whether I freeze
or fossilize,
until a half-moon rises
high with cirrus
hair
and one dozen water-beetles
skate so sudden there –
sensing her,
or me,
moving with the lochan's waves
lapping on the scree.
In PN Review ed. Michael Schmidt
March/April 2024
...and on one toils, into the mountain...
Black scatter of rock, pieces large as a house, pieces edged like a grater. A tough bit of going. And there at last is the loch, held tight back against the precipice.
Yet as I turned, that September day, and looked back through the clear air, I could see straight out to ranges of distant hills. And that astonished me. To be so open and yet so secret! Its anonymity – Loch of the Corrie of the Loch, that is all – seems to guard this surprising secrecy. Other lochs, Avon, Morlich and the rest, have their distinctive names. One expects of them an idiosyncrasy. But Loch of the Corrie of the Loch, what could there be there? A tarn like any other. And then to find this distillation of loveliness!
I put my fingers in the water and found it cold. I listened to the waterfall until I no longer heard it. I let my eyes travel over the surface, slowly, from shore to shore, beginning at my feet and ending against the precipice. There is no way like that for savouring the extent of a water surface. This changing of focus of the eye, moving the eye itself when looking at things that do not move, deepens one's sense of outer reality. Then static things may be caught in the very act of becoming. By so simple a matter, too, as altering the position of one's head, a different kind of world may be made to appear. Lay the head down, or better still, face away from what you look at, and bend with straddled legs till you see your world upside down. How new it has become!
From the close-by sprigs of heather to the most distant fold of the land, each detail stands erect in its own validity. In no other way have I seen of my own unaided sight that the earth is round. As I watch, it arches its back, and each layer of landscape bristles – though bristles is a word of too much commotion for it. Details are no longer part of a grouping in a picture of which I am the focal point, the focal point is everywhere. Nothing has reference to me, the looker. This is how the earth must see itself.
So I looked slowly across the Coire Loch, and began to understand that haste can do nothing with these hills. I knew when I had looked for a long time that I had hardly begun to see.
From The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd
Aberdeen University Press, 1977