lest they settle into categories whose opera

is bad infinity.

Isolation. The odd auditory hallucination.

The meagre profile of a widow’s cabbagerow

corresponds to needs must,

but also to its architect’s state of mind

at the time. Why do I not move on? Why

hang around here while grass

grows up my chimney?

Every choice is a refusal. For Christ’s sake.

I am guarding the walls. Like punctuation

it could make all the difference.

TENTSMUIR FOREST

The sign denoting a negative quantity indicates,

also, subtraction. The symbol for equivalence

means also alike. The deadliest mushroom is

among the most delicious. Distinct

in their intensities of purpose. Her children found her

on the kitchen floor, plate on the table,

pan on the stove. A life foraging in these woods,

she should have known. But to pour out

is not to spill. To spill is not to lay oneself down.

A MISCALCULATION

Like a king from a promontory

the kestrel presides from an updraft, an array

of barely perceptible movements sustaining

balance and attention, and the woodmouse,

the shrew, the secondary characters,

know whose watch they’re under. There are no

bystanders among them. The razorbill’s piety

winters at sea, secular and medium-sized,

black above, white below; while

frontloaded with military tech

gannets send tones of the aquatic scale

straight to the emotional signature clusters,

though we human proprietors of emotion

are to them as circumstantial

as the shadow I cast over a vole’s workday,

my presence too general for relevance.

It was November. I made these notes,

then in absentminded self-disgust

set out on the path from Crail

and by sunset, at 4, could neither return

nor make Kingsbarns before dark.

Though no one knew where I was, real danger

lay elsewhere. No cows even. Just sleepless

fields staring skyward and the firth prowling

the forest of itself, what’s hidden as well as

what hides it. To turn back would have made sense

but I chose otherwise, a lamp post

at what I assumed was the golf course

a fixed point I couldn’t seem to advance on

like a misinterpretation pursued because now

it is your life. Proportion vanished. A creature

scratching at a stone dyke was big as the North

Atlantic, and my body, not as old as when visible

became, not one with mind, but indistinguishable —

consciousness feeling with the blunt toe of its boot

as its footprints fill with groundwater.

THE SPIES

Where two convene, a third is always present.

This makes the world seem small

and satisfies our need

to be observed and understood.

Polishing a cup behind the bar. In the background

weighing grain. Hovering over us

a few paces behind, or racing ahead, innocently

buzzing like a toy, like the boy

who bags your pheasants then

reports you to the king.

The scenery interprets us

and we are also the hyper-vigilant scenery

sanguine in our right to own the frontiers

in our photographs, drop