I can picture it best at night around the Lawnmarket.
The orange glow of the streetlight leaves silent sparkles on wet cobblestones
The mite of the citadel swells behind me, looming.
Its dark towers spew out centuries of ghosts when nobody’s looking
they sift between oblivious couples, down the high street, swirling in and out of bars, and in to the city-night.
Deacon Brodie’s Tavern, alive with starlit conversation. My soul would die if this night would ever end, I used to think.
Don’t stop talking yet, and ask that man wearing the expensive suit and raincoat to never stop laughing.
Everybody, stay.
Towards the university, George 1V Bridge flickers and weaves across the bowels of the Cowgate.
The old town is dense. Small rooms once lit by candle, now machine-glow and bristle in the pre-night.
We will go below, for it is the hour of youth and the night will have its glorious way with us. The spirits are all here, pulling.
Backstage at the Cabaret Voltaire the noises and shapes are loud and fast
Rooms small and confined
corridors tight like the veins of the beast about to exalt.
Friends faces illuminate and fade in the show-lights.
A quiet moment. I held your hand beneath the exit sign that night when something was distracting you.
Over the cliff-edge, I step out on to the sticky black stage where my guitar is waiting.
I can’t see you. You can all see me. Check the mic ‘one’ ‘one two’. Sing.
Something was distracting you, and outside the City Café on Blair Street one summer evening, you told me you were going to India
As we moved in slow-motion outside the art-deco entrance, and as the breeze flurried around the corner from North Bridge, your face perfectly lit, you looked like a movie-star.
I remembered when I met you; you were working in your dad’s deli on Forest Road
Tea for the men who meandered in from the mosque, after prayer
You told me you’d attended George Heriots on a scholarship
I pictured you walking to the deli after school with your friends on a spring day
passed the steel gates overhung by blossom, wearing your grey skirt and blue blazer
Your dad beamed when he saw you.
George Square in Autumn. Black railings shine in flurries of rain.
Peeled paint from gone winters
Bikes all attached, secure.
Towers rise from each side: David Hume, Adam Ferguson; their arteries reanimated by teams of tiny humans sparking like brain-waves.
Noises and shapes remain loud and fast, but there’s no illumination, no show-lights
few quiet moments for even within my own cage the sounds are frantic and debilitating. Panic.
The Blind Poet bar for a drink. Breathe.
Edinburgh is a long way from Chennai, where you are.
Tutorial, up an old wooden staircase with stapled green carpet in a college-house on Buccleuch Street. An overpowering smell of cafetiere style coffee fills the small room where we will discuss ‘Angels of America’.
But I can’t speak
The faces of the other students are all too vivid,
we’re all too close and their voices are too loud.
I’m suffocating and I have to leave.
I walk quickly around the bulk of the massive library, and in to the vast expanse of The Meadows
It’s twilight-coffee stands line the paths and cycle ways.
I need to dull these feelings
This time I go to the Pear Tree bar.
In the following years, I would spend my nights by the sea
undone by the city that sloped upward behind me
its voices fading, giving way to the drips and ripples of the harbor.
You were back in Edinburgh
Well-travelled, engaged, still shining.
At the end of a row of whitewashed cottages, stood the Inn.
Through a bottle-glass window, I see myself.
The bar was made of wood from an old ship,
An open fire behind me warmed my back
Still, I yearned for the night not to end
If you send me out in to that night, at this hour, with these feelings, then I might die, I thought.
I sink in to the green velvet stool for one last scene of certainty
of knowing exactly where and who I am.
Expectations here are few. Time.
Pass by the fishing boats ‘Maria’ ‘Jaybird’ ‘Saint Etienne’ they have secrets in their hold.
Their decks have been kissed by distant waters unknown to me.
Whales have even swum silently beneath their bows, while sailors slept.
This way leads to the forest.
The path is pitch-black; the smell of the harbor subsides and the close-dark is filled with the smell of wet bark and woodchips, and I can hear the great river on its last sprint before it departs its muddy banks and becomes the colossal North Sea
All its black and silver parts bellow and yawp in the night air with excitement
It is almost full-grown.
by J. Brown