Robin Robertson

I should never have stayed in this cold shieling once the storm passed and the rain had finally eased.

I could make out shapes in here, the occasional sound: a muffled crying which I took for wind in the trees; a wasp, stuttering there at the windowsill. I listened. What looked like a small red coat

was dripping from its wire hanger.

There was a shift and rustle coming from the...

In this bled landscape wind moves through the desert bones, fluting their white notes.

*

Wildfires sweep the hills, jump the highways. Outside town fence-posts are burning.

*

The guns go one way, drugs go the other, over the desert border.

*

There’s crystal meth, coke, PCP, smack; after that Tipp-Ex, gasoline.

*

In Juárez tonight three decapitados hang from the Bridge of Dreams.

*

...

after Ovid

At the world’s centre between earth and sky and sea is a place where every sound can be heard, where everything is seen. Here Rumour lives, making her home on a mountain-top. This house stands open night and day: a dome of apertures and windows set like a million eyes at gaze, steady, unblinking, no doors or shutters anywhere. Her walls have ears. They are...

I

A manor house in ruin. It suits me down to the ground. A tower to write in, three rooms for the family, with a kitchen, and all for fifty crowns a month. Unbelievably filthy, I have to say: everything broken, unfinished, abandoned. In the yard, two floors below, a mongrel half-heartedly mounts a greyhound; blue flies are hatching in the dung. It fits my mood. Wherever you look: neglect,...

They lashed him to old timbers that would barely float, with weights at the feet so only his face was out of the water. Over his mouth and eyes they tied two live mackerel with twine, and pushed him out from the rocks.

They stood, then, smoking cigarettes and watching the sky, waiting for a gannet to read that flex of silver from a hundred feet up, close its wings and...