I've been amusing myself over the past five or six
years writing a series of invented Scottish folk
narratives.
And these share some common thematic ground
with the Celtic folk tradition.
Which is to say that they're everyday stories of murder,
rape, madness, congenital malformation, and monsters.
And the favorite monster I have, many of you
will know the story of the selkie, this mythical creature
who, in the ocean is a seal, but is
able to walk up onto the beach, shed its skin,
and become human.
And then later reverse that process.
Anyway, this is the first of a couple of these
that I'll read tonight.
This is "By Clachan Bridge."
"I remember the girl with the hare lip
down by Clachan Bridge, cutting up fish to see how they worked.
By morning's end, her nails were black red,
her hands all sequined silver.
She unpuzzled rabbits to a rickle
of bones, dipped into a dormouse for the pip of its heart.
She'd open everything, that girl.
They say they found wax dolls in her wall,
poppets full of human hair.
But I'd say they're wrong.
What's true is that the blacksmith's son,
the simpleton, came down here once
and fathomed her, claimed she licked him clean as a whistle.
I remember the tiny stars of her hands
around her belly as it grew and grew and how after a year,
nothing came.
How she said it was still there inside her, a stone baby.
And how I saw her wrists bangled with scars and those hands
fluttering at her throat to the plectrum of bone
she'd hung there.
As to what happened to the blacksmith's boy,
no one knows, and I'll keep my tongue.
Last thing I heard the starlings had
started to mimic her crying, and she'd found how to fly."