The boat that ran.

I was on Mull yesterday and today , and passed again (of course) the boats by Salen which are slowly rotting away. Not so slowly actually - I noticed a big deterioration since I blipped them on the 18th of August last year presumably caused at least in part by the number of violent storms this winter.

And once again they reminded me forcibly of Norman MacCaig's poem "So Many Summers".

Beside one loch, a hind's neat skeleton
Beside another, a boat pulled high and dry:
Two neat geometries drawn in the weather:
Two things already dead and still to die.

I passed them every summer, rod in hand,
Skirting the bright blue or the spitting gray,
And, every summer, saw how the bleached timbers
Gaped wider and the neat ribs fell away.

Time adds one malice to another one -
Now you'd look very close before you knew
If it's the boat that ran, the hind went sailing.
So many summers, and I have lived them too.