Picture This: Autumn Snow in Glen Clova

Driven east from Perthshire across farmlands, chasing rainbows cartwheeling over the foothills, I turned north, alone, upon Old Jock’s Road. The Angus Glens cleave deep into the Cairngorms Mountains as if rent by Fenrir howling toward imprisonment, and it seems all roads end in Glen Clova where the turgid clouds tear themselves on the icy crowns of Driesh, Mayar, and Ben Tirran. They spill themselves upon the wild wind running circles upon the mountain slopes. A pack of gusts rip the sky, revealing heaven’s blue viscera, and a blade of light carves the hollow beneath the gods of ice.

When will they speak again? We have been alone so long, hewn from the antediluvian darkness when we heard the gods speak with our own tongues. In that lost Elysium they were us, though that knowledge lay beyond comprehension, and somewhen the speaker and listener collapsed into one. And so I lean upon this fence weathered and weary and awestruck, adrift in the evening of our age, waiting for the Hesperides to daub lavender upon my temples and whisper secrets from the mind’s many forgotten cloisters. And when I awake I will cease casting out for unrequited answers, for this view is a mirror of light into those dim, god-filled recesses where we are them.