that falls to the soil, becomes the soil, the pathogen

our conditions were right for.

Pittenweem, place of the cave, the cell.

Pretty Pittenweem, its wynds to the harbour.

It was as though, once we’d killed her there

lights went up at last orders of a fucked-up session, and we read

on neighbours’ faces our own expressions.

Ugly, greedy, wasted.

We’d had plans for Nicolas Lawson

but called time.

Something did not want the best for us, and hid itself

in our confusion. Hidden, it lived

in everything. That we were superstitious, easily led,

afraid of the unfamiliar in familiar ways

could all be true. Still

to those who believe we knew no better

I’d say, we knew.

WHITE STRANGERS

under the yardlight

the yard an island

walking out of the dark

like wading ashore

I answered

when they knocked

you have to in this cold

and that Weiser lock

a ten-year-old could force

their truck died

in the field they said

phones too

where they were hunting

drinking

and couldn’t leave the rifles

as no doubt I would agree

I am alone here

why is that

blizzard a sea

breaking through the windbreak

two men with guns

what could I do

I let them in

ORIGIN STORY

Pregnant by rape, deception,

or in defiance, accounts vary,

Thaney was thrown from the 25th-floor balcony

of Traprain Law by her father, Loth,

a pride-based thinker

consumed by a tyrant’s bloody melancholy.

Maybe she loved him.

It doesn’t seem possible

but that’s never stopped anybody.

As happens in these stories, she survived,

offending the Bass Rock gannets

who thought they’d seen everything

and Loth, who, in his executive hatred

of surprises, set her adrift

in a coracle without oars,

said, Then let the firth’s dogs have her.

*

To make our own the righteous anger

that keeps some people alive

feels like doing something

so grief and fear don’t stir

under their blanket, don’t open their eyes.

So survival does not seem merely accidental

to the indecision when to lay down

the earthly burdens, the way a quality is accidental

to a substance —

No, not like that,

she may have thought,

drifting toward the rock that would be named for her,

clutching at its hair, the fish curious

though emotionally disinterested, as fish are.

They crowded these waters for centuries

in case something like this ever happened again.

Until recently. Not many fish now.

*

The extremities numb first,

her body closing the wings of its mansion

to warm a small inner apartment —

a stove, a bulb on a cord.

All night she clung to the hide

of the greenstone, until the tide took her, at dawn

when walls between worlds

are thin as a motel’s.

Don’t stir, don’t open your eyes, not yet.

Thaney, astronaut

of an inhospitable element

like that between units of time

which, overflowing, extinguishes time.

Please can I lay them down.