Robin Robertson

meet me where the sun goes down meet me in the cave, under the battleground meet me on the broken branch meet me in the shade, below the avalanche meet me under the witch’s spell meet me tonight, in the wishing well meet me on the famine lawn meet me in the eye of the firestorm meet me in your best shoes and your favourite dress meet me on your own, in the wilderness meet me as my...

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...

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...