Don Paterson

This is what we’ve come to, this damn lift, this blackout, this airlock, this voiceless stop, this empty set, this storm cave, this dead drop, this deaf nut, this dumb waiter, this blind drift, this Necker cube, this coalshed, this Swiss bank, this iron lung, this hide, this diving bell, this pseudocoma, priesthole, holding cell, this meatlocker, this isolation tank, this,...

What would you want with that? They said, and fairly, when the auctioneer’s van dumped it in the drive. It was far worse than they knew. One absent bidder had ruined me for the thing, the quartz was cracked

and I’d lied about it being a prototype; none survived, thanks to the famous flaw that left them on the seabed with their pilots smeared all over their one wall. No matter.

This...

Far-conquering man . . . You’ve written, since you first turned hunter, many a level new death-rule of trap or net. Though I know the strip of sail they hung into the caverns of the Karst,

so softly, like the flag of peace, or ceasefire . . . Then, from the cave-mouth, a boy gave it a jerk and tumbling dayward out of the cave-dark came a handful of pale...

Imagining the worst is no talisman against it.

*

My time here has afforded me no enlightenment; though my night-vision has improved enormously. In fact it seems to have evolved as if it were certain of its future indispensability.

*

Ego-surfing again, four months since I last dared: the hit-count tripled, nearly all of them namechecks by brand-new enemies, or new recruits to the army of...

By the time he met his death I’d counted off twelve years and in the crossed and harrowed path could read my whole career

the nights of circling alone in corridors of earth the days like paler nights, my lodestone dying to the north

while I lived by what uncertain meat left from his repast and what rainwater and bitter light could worm in through the crust

And in that time my...