Robin Robertson

We went for walks here, as children, listening out for gypsies, timber wolves, the great hinges in the trees. Hours we’d wander its long green halls making swords from branches, gathering stars of elderflower to thread into a chain. Today the forest sends up birds to distract me, deer to turn me from the track, puts out stems and tendrils to trip and catch at my...

after Ovid

Pentheus – man of sorrows, king of Thebes – despised the gods, and had no time for blind old men or their prophecies. ‘You’re a fool, Tiresias, and you belong in the darkness. Now, leave me be!’ ‘You might wish, sire, for my affliction soon enough, if only to save you from witnessing the rites of Dionysus. He is near at hand, I feel it now, and...

for John Burnside

You’d know her house by the drawn blinds – by the cormorants pitched on the boundary wall, the black crosses of their wings hung out to dry. You’d tell it by the quicken and the pine that hid it from the sea and from the brief light of the sun, and by Aonghas the collie, lying at the door where he died: a rack of bones like a sprung trap.

A fork of barnacle...

For Alasdair Roberts

I remember the girl with the hare-lip down by Clachan Bridge, cutting up fish to see how they worked; by morning’s end her nails were black red, her hands all sequined silver. She simplified rabbits to a rickle of bones; dipped into a dormouse for the pip of its heart. She’d open everything, that girl. They say they found wax dolls in her wall, poppets full of...

The sun’s hinge on the burnt horizon has woken the sealed lake, leaving a sleeve of sound. No wind, just curved plates of air re-shaping under the trap-ice, straining to give; the groans and rumbles like someone shifting heavy tables – or something gigantic turning to get comfortable. I snick a stone over the long sprung deck to get the dobro’s glassy note, the crying slide...