MacGillivray

I

The sea is a wet fire in four grades of heat,

a salt ash field, salamandrine diminishment

of leached wood-ash slumbering, copse of fallen plaster snow, syphoned

from death's vein, O Nile,

                              finds your waters quitting, now

night has poured out lunar ash,

where this scrubland sticks like a tear-stiff eyelash, resistant

to your river's flesh

where, along your banks, among the reeds, you

can just perceive

escorticati down on their knees

vigorously rubbing their natron wounds –– O Nile ––

                                                        must I be one of these?

Whose waters broil in putrid stock; oil

of lavender, turpentine, vermilion, burnt

sugar paste and saliva western ––

whose nilometer marks

the subtle quibble of gentle persuasion ––

Egyptian fawn-light greets them,

hand fed by a tiny speck of darkness,

stranded where the tide deceases and sits back,

                                        to watch the ravening.

Excerpted from The Nine of Diamonds: Surroial Mordantless (Bloodaxe, 2016), a neo-Surrealist work which plays back the infamous Duke of Cumberland, or 'Butcher of Culloden', who wrote on the back of a nine of diamonds playing card that the Highlanders be 'given no quarter' after the Battle of Culloden. Influenced by Mallarmé and Hunterian embalming techniques evolved from Ancient Egypt, here the Highlanders are fauns and the River Ness equivalent to the River Nile.

33

I dreamed of a sawdust chandelier
whose crystals were drops of driftwood dredged
from all the world’s shipwrecks: god’s figurehead,
and it swung, as I dreamt, ever closer to my fear,
softly releasing sweet incense into the clear,
black night air, as that great barge carries the dead,
but instead of my death, it passaged my dread
and the water it ploughed comprised of one tear.

Great smouldering barque, your figurehead sings
into the dark, the death song of queens, of kings,
over sea birds that circle like faint rings of smoke,
your floating lamp burns, as a lighthouse brings
death to itself: you are moth and flame both ––
so lamp lights my dread of shade, performs two killings.

Taken from The Gaelic Garden of the Dead by MacGillivray (Bloodaxe Books, 2019) and selected for the Scottish Poetry Library's Best Scottish Poems, 33 is part of a series of thirty-five death sonnets to Mary Queen of Scots. It was composed on the thirty-third step of the reconstructed staircase of Fotheringhay Castle at Oundle Inn, which Mary Queen of Scots descended on her way to execution.

X

Celestial Metre: Wounded Angel Tetrameter

Ἀετός

**| **| ***| **

Run and douse the flame, I pant, pausing within woods whose bonfire softens in deep snow, blurred as the skin of the flame bends to my light, whose beam alights on burning marigold. . .

*

As gentled fire’s own soft inflection,
in blood-bewildered sticks, star-flickered
illusion, dream this bonfire’s riddle:
I am an air-injured illusion,
unevenly light-fired in shadow.

Rebellious, sleep-filled flames die down:
reversals too slow for contagion.
The picture will not yield: its pattern
untouched by time lies underscored, yet
a manifold sight burns – enraptured.

Reveal the hop-flared angel, circling
a scrying fields’ shuddering smoke-line.
Images: dust, coins, bees, all haloed
against the low, black slope’s chiasma:
occluded torsion stuns the shadow.

Emotion of old worship, echo-
less, hangs inert. . . dumbfounds the bell-tongue
that once rang bones from tombs to scavenge
belief’s desire in fire’s insistence. . .
astonished fire, still cold, still distant.

Excerpted from Norwegian-Shetlandic poet Kristján Norge's lost manuscript of celestial metre, collated and edited by MacGillivray and published in Ravage: An Astonishment of Fire (Bloodaxe Books, 2023). Norge vanished from the Hebridean Eilean a' Bhàis in 1961, convinced he had become a demon.