for thirty years an otter brought fish to Paul the Hermit

yes, well

and neither can I subsist on grasses and spring water

as did Kentigern

another story there, his poor mother

what a place

unwilling to let me expire in their quarter

or in the hope it buys favour

people leave food

I wish they wouldn’t I wish they would

some remember me from when I was a person

their backs to me now, a child’s small frame

or yards of female fabric describing wind direction

Jesus is love, but bank the coals or die

hands wrapped in rags, heaping stones for a cache against

wild pigs and others, light to moderate snow

horizontally north-south

I recognize this rough farm cloth, its provenance

a wife from the hill of daughters

whose husband walked a path as if to shame it

although you did not sit, did not loosen your coatcollar

before first talking to her

I must not soften my blisters with water, she said

and her neighbourhood with druids up to here

The earth may provide for them

but by Christ’s fingernails not what grows from or grazes

upon my own. Dogwalkers, granary robbers,

mannequins, litterers,

Brother, their poetry is truly awful.

her warm kitchen, honey and dry leaf smell of cut barley

spade leaning in a corner representing mortality

Eejits drunk and sunburned by the dyke,

one a stretched rope, one a shrivelled root, another

an angry little spider. You laugh,

but when schoolboys pelt them with rocks, God help me, I understand.

To look at them is to have one leap into your hand.

our talk, the good and lowly vegetables she prepared

memory

I would rather starve now than suffer it

Like Cormac Ua Liatháin, he sought . . .

Like Cormac Ua Liatháin, he sought

his desert in the ocean

if one asks for a sign

must one accept what’s given?

the hazards of catching authority’s eye have been well borne out

May Island on the palm of the horizon, take it away

a proper island, unlike Lindisfarne

gifted to beloved Aidan, who is likeable

and good

but one might long even for Iona in sight of this outrage

this wellhead

thorn in the sea

I wanted an answer, not a choice, it’s too late in life

a task, if not completed, might at least be finished with

now a cipher has fallen from an ancient book

logos, anti-logos, an intellectual violence

crouched on the offing like a word crossed out

blood

when one doesn’t expect blood

see how it draws around itself

the hospital curtain

Hostilities were inevitable among the four peoples . . .

Hostilities were inevitable among the four peoples

clustered around the Forth-Clyde line

kingdoms like these don’t collapse all at once

even in my white martyrdom the wars find me

as far-off fires use the wind, as seeds will

or burrs that travel in the fur

what can I do