Robin Robertson

nec quicquam nisi vulnus erat (Ovid, Metamorphoses, VI, 388)

I

A bright clearing. Sun among the leaves, sifting down to dapple the soft ground, and rest a gilded bar against the muted flanks of trees. In the flittering green light the glade listens in and breathes.

A wooden pail; some pegs, a coil of wire; a bundle of steel flensing knives.

Spreadeagled between two pines, hooked at each hoof...

In the greatness of the flame he gave up the ghost

Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, XI

The poplars are emptied at dusk like blown matches. A gust frees and scatters the leaves in their last blaze: the bronze husks catch and cartwheel round and down the street to the park in the smoke of a dark autumn, from the thin, extinguished trees.

In the small lake, what had once been water now was...

You sleep as I stumble room to room, unhelmed, heavy-greaved; coming to you through gorse-light and the fallen trees: heraldic, blessed with wounds. Red-handed at the key I was stock-still, gazing back at deer-slots in the snow: flushed, quick from the kill, carrying my shot, my sadness like a stone. In the quarry-hole of your bed you’re sleeping still.

What...

Edinburgh burns below us, this blazing day where flame’s invisible, a dark wave lapping at the petrol’s grain, as the fire-eaters assuage their thirst. The fanned embers of the city rustle like the wrappers of sweets; heat tinkering in the coal. Sitting under the colonnade, we are so close we almost touch.

Tumblers flip and flex, desultory on the dry grass; gulls channer in the...

Still as a battlefield, the strewn citygoes under, slips into silhouette.Some threads of smoke,the lift and fall of flags in orange light.The glinting windows go out one by one.

Low over the Firth, a fork of geesecomes pulling past, straight-necked:creaking like rowlocksover the frozen hill.On the Parthenon below, querulous gullsscreel and skraik and peel away,bickering,...