Heather Rope

My father, Ian William Angus

clan Donald

from the isle of Sleat,

descendant of the Thane of Argyle, 1135

and Effrica,

daughter of Olave the Swarthy

once told me how it was made.

It took two people, with patience:

one to feed the heather

to the other who would then walk backwards

twisting the strands clockwise on a stick.

The rope was used for tying up boats

and gathering kelp,

sometimes to fashion shutters.

My father knew nothing of DNA,

the twists and turns of inheritance

just how heather was stronger than straw

and stronger still if taken from the same hill.

Not long before he died, my father developed

a single knot in the white of each eye.

The gnarled burls of Pinguecula.

All those years dwelling

on clan alliances and betrayals

—Richard II and James I. The treasonable treaty

of Lord of the Isles

with the King of England in 1462—

convinced his mind’s eye that his body was a boat

built to carry the stories.

His windows on the only world he knew

began to weave old cares from another hemisphere

into a heather rope

eventually twisting his eyelids closed,

then tugging his hull-full of ghosts

home to history.

Judy Johnson