Robin Robertson

after Ovid

for James Lasdun

The midday sun finds a way down into a deep cleft in the mountain meshed with cypresses and pine, to flare on a distant speck of glass: the sacred pool where twenty Amnisian nymphs attend their queen, huntress and protectress of this place, these woods and hills. As she steps forward, they take her clothes and stand aside, while the deftest folds the locks of hair...

The prominent headland at Tynemouth in Northumberland was the site of an Anglian monastery before the Benedictine priory was established early in the 11th century. Because of the area’s strategic importance, the monastic life coexisted with a military one, and the priory developed within a castle enclosure. These fortifications remained in use after the Dissolution, the coastal battery...

nec enim praesentior illo est deus Asterion, his name is, King of Stars. Some joke of his father’s, who now stables him here in these spiralled halls, this walled-up palace, where shame cries itself to sleep.

Where is my mother? Whyhas she left me here alone?This is a house of many cornersbut only one room, made of stone.I live inside this stone.

See how he prowls and paces, my beast of...

A lift in the weather: a clemency I cling to like the legend

of myself: self-exiled, world-wounded, god

of evenings like this, eighty degrees and half a world away.

*

All night, the industry of erasure, effacement,

our one mouth working itself dry.

*

But even a god can’t stop the light that finds us, annealed,

fruitless, two strangers broken on the field of day.

In the...

I hadn’t been back in twenty years and he was still here, by the fire, at the far end of the longest counter in Aberdeen – some say Scotland. Not many in, and my favourite time: the dog-watch; the city still working, its tortoiseshell light just legible in the smoked windows, and through the slow delay of glass the flutter of the streetlights batting into life.

The...