Black Combe
Shaun Castle 25 June 2007
Black Combe from Millom, early 20th century postcard.
The air clarifies. Rain
Has clocked off for the day.
The wind scolds in from Sligo,
Ripping the calico-grey from a pale sky.
Black Combe holds tight
To its tuft of cloud, but over the three-legged island
All the west is shining.
An hour goes by,
And now the starched collars of the eastern pikes
Streak up into a rinse of blue. Every
Inland fell is glinting;
Black Combe alone still hides
Its bold, bleak forehead, balaclava’d out of sight.
Slick fingers of wind
Tease and fidget at wool-end and wisp,
Picking the mist to bits.
Strings and whiskers
Fray off from the cleft hill’s
Bilberried brow, disintegrate, dissolve
Into blue liquidity -
Only a matter of time
Before the white is wholly worried away
And Black Combe starts to earn its name again.
But where, in the west, a tide
Of moist and clear-as-a-vacuum air is piling
High on the corried slopes, a light
Fret and haar of hazy whiteness
Sweats off the cold rock; in a cloudless sky
A cloud emulsifies,
Junkets on sill and dyke.
Wool-end and wisp materialize
Like ectoplasm, are twined
And crocheted to an off-white,
Over-the-lughole hug-me-tight;
And Black Combe’s ram’s-head, butting at the bright
Turfed and brackeny brine,
Gathers its own wool, plucks shadow out of shine.
What the wind blows away
The wind blows back again.
Cloud on Black Combe by Norman Nicholson
From Sea to the West (1981)
Norman Nicholson. Selected Poems 1940-1982, Faber and Faber.
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