by Ron Butlin
THE MAGICIANS
OF SCOTLAND
Praise for Ron Butlin
‘When I’m asked for a recommendation of a great Scottish novel, [The Sound of My Voice] is my number one choice … and his poetry is exceptional’
ALISTAIR BRAIDWOOD in Scots Whay Hae!
‘Remarkable … [Ghost Moon] is one of the most powerful and compelling pieces to emerge from the pen of this superb writer’
ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH
‘[Belonging] is a genuine page-turner, unpredictable and devoid of cliché. I read it in a single sitting … The writing is of a rare order’
EDDIE MUELLER in the San Francisco Chronicle
‘One of the great post-war Scottish novels … a genius piece of fiction’
IRVINE WELSH
‘Butlin’s novel deserves to be talked about in the same breath as Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day’
Metro
‘An extraordinarily powerful and redemptive work … Butlin’s only precursor is Kafka’
Time Out
‘[Butlin] stands as a reminder that a good deal of world-class contemporary poetry and fiction goes largely unnoticed. There are few contemporary British writers whose works are as ripe for, and as thoroughly deserving of rediscovery’
BRIAN HOYLE in British Writers, Supplement XVI
(Scribner’s Sons, USA)
Also by Ron Butlin
FICTION
The Sound of My Voice
Night Visits
The Tilting Room
Vivaldi and the Number 3
Belonging
No More Angels
Ghost Moon
POETRY
The Wonnerfu Warld o John Milton
Stretto
Creatures Tamed by Cruelty
The Exquisite Instrument
Ragtime in Unfamiliar Bars
Histories of Desire
Without a Backward Glance
The Magicians of Edinburgh
DRAMA
We’ve Been Had
Blending In
Sweet Dreams
OPERA LIBRETTI
Markheim
Dark Kingdom
Faraway Pictures
Good Angel, Bad Angel
The Perfect Woman
The Money Man
Wedlock
First published in Great Britain in 2015
by Polygon,
an imprint of Birlinn Ltd
West Newington House
10 Newington Road
Edinburgh
EH9 1QS
www.polygonbooks.co.uk
ISBN 9780857908919
Poems copyright © Ron Butlin 2015
The right of Ron Butlin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patent Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library.
Book design and drawings © James Hutcheson
Typeset in 10/14pt Veridgris MVB
Printed and bound by Bell & Bain Ltd, Glasgow
Contents
Acknowledgements
MAGIC PLACES
The Electric City of Heck
Disposable Buildings Are Made for Disposable Lives
Edinburgh Doesn’t Scan That Easy
Rehearsals for The End of Time
Stations of The Rush Hour
What the Well-Dressed City Wears
The Roman Invasion of Scotland
The Commonwealth Games:
1 Starting the Race
2 Africa
3 Running the Race
4 India (Raga)
5 Caribbean
6 Australia (Dream Time)
7 Glasgow
Near Linton Burnfoot
MAGIC PEOPLE
The Loch Ness Monster’s Post-Referendum Curse
Frédéric Chopin Texts from the Edinburgh Hogmanay Party
Professor Higgs Throws the Biggest Party …
Sir James Simpson Sets Foot on a New Planet
James Hutton Learns to Read the Hieroglyphics of the Earth
Tony Blair’s Butterfly Effect
The Kinder Artist
Remembering a Good Friend
A Gaitherin o Scottish Men
My Grandfather Dreams Twice of Flanders
Robert Burns’ First Poem for More Than 200 Years
Prophet Peden Rattles the Prison Bars of the 21St Century
Wilfred Owen Reads Between the Lines
All That We Have
MAGIC FOR ALL
Trident Mantra
A History of the Glass Kingdom
The Composer’s Cat
Darien II
Our Plea to the Balmoral Clock
Whatever Next?
Wee Referendum Burd
An Opera to Last a Lifetime
How to Save the World
Scottish Cat and Scottish Mouse
God Gives the Universe a Second Shove
Scottish Independence as Seen from above Edinburgh Castle
Prayer
Acknowledgements
Grateful thanks are due to the editors of the following publications where some of the poems first appeared: The Stinging Fly (Eire), World Literature Today (USA), Herald, Scottish Review of Books, Gutter, Atlanta Review (USA), Perspectives, Scotsman, Neu! Reekie! #UntitledOne. Some were contained in Without a Backward Glance (Barzan Publishing) or broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and 5. Several of the poems have been jazzed up by Dick Lee for Edinburgh Science, Edinburgh Magic, A Very Edinburgh Celebration and Edinburgh Lily on the Edinburgh Fringe 2013-15. Also for The Games which was first performed by the jazz ensemble Dr Lee’s Prescription, at the Glasgow Commonwealth Games in 2014.
The author appreciates the commissioning of some poems by the Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature, City of Edinburgh Council, Authors Reading Festival, Look Up Edinburgh (Freight Publications), Scottish Opera, Authors’ Licensing and Collection Society. In company with many other Scottish writers, he would like to acknowledge the unfailing kindness and support of the late Gavin Wallace.
Ron Butlin would like to thank Creative Scotland for a Professional Development grant which allowed him to complete The Magicians of Scotland.
Dedication
To my wife Regi, Dick Lee and Anne Evans
– magicians all!
MAGIC PLACES
Though brought up in a very small Borders village, I have lived mostly in cities here and abroad. Like much of modern life, my longing to return to village life is untested, and fairly suspect.
The Electric City of Heck
Cattle stumbling their way down to the shallows.
The water’s coolness rising
To meet them. Their hooves dry and hard
Against a clatter of loose stones etc. …
Having rusted not quite closed,
The sluice gate’s cast-iron lip runs
With several downward streaks
Of wet sunlight etc. …
Brushstrokes painted on a long-ago afternoon,
And erased –
The strands of current drift midstream,
Their several interlocking patterns describe …
Etc. etc. etc. …
*
Isn’t it time I trashed such childhood fancies?
After all, I live in the electric city
and the electric city lives in me.
&n
bsp; My pulse is the traffic’s stop-and-go.
What I know of love and friendship
naming the only streets I care for.
So …?
How come I keep helter-skeltering back to – where?
And for what?
To give the supermarket checkout,
aisles and shelves a pastoral makeover –
smothering them in flowers, weeds
and a purple sway of willow herb?
Scythe down a field of business magnates,
bankers and politicians (row upon sleek row
baled and stacked, ready
to be recycled into something useful)?
Hardly. And yet …
Almost overnight, our city’s been digitised,
uploaded to an encrypted site / its inhabitants
given new user names,
new passwords.
Our histories deleted at a mouse-click
everyone’s now making up the truth.
Beneath a touchscreen sky of low-watt
urban stars we continue our separate journeys
from the very centre of the universe
(where all our journeys start from, especially
the most personal).
We share nothing. The name for our loneliness
is self. We live for moments of recognition,
for brief communion.
*
Accelerating away from the Lockerbie bombing –
Staying a decade and more clear of the Twin Towers –
Keeping the next atrocity always
a few days ahead –
Gaza, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and all the rest
are parked in a layby for the time being
(with luck, a tow-truck might be
on its way).
Same road, same destination.
Still en route to where we’re always making for –
you, me and the memories we rely on
like outdated maps …
*
Or else, should I return to that summer’s afternoon?
Rebrand it: The Electric City of Heck.
#solidground.
Upgrade its farm and half-dozen cottages (built mostly
from the rubble of nearby Lochmaben Castle).
Reformat it for the 21st century into:
• A glass cathedral that promises unlimited FaceTime between Man and his God of choice
• A glacier’s permafrost to slow the seasons’ meltdown
• An ocean, cleansed to offer us all a second chance
Then, if all else fails –
Taking the best of what we have and the best
of what we are, let’s reconfigure:
a streamlined rush of swifts that eat, sleep
and mate on the wing,
never touching the Earth from here
to Africa.
Not angels, but our guides into
a trackless future –
our guides, our inspiration.
Skara Brae in Orkney is the oldest known settlement in Britain. A visit there can be a truly moving experience, especially if the weather is at its rawest. It was hidden under sand dunes until a storm cleared these away in 1850.
Disposable Buildings Are Made For Disposable Lives
It seems the likes of you and me will always fail
to keep to IKEA’s clearly-arrowed pathways,
ending up homeless among glassware,
candles, pin boards, towels,
closely-planted wardrobes.
When we come to a lake of stranded beds,
we know we’re lost. And so –
it’s back to the kitchens that cannot cook,
to the playrooms whose primary-coloured brightness
hurts us with remembrance.
Passing through unnoticed, we leave no trace.
When did our weatherless, windowless,
prefabricated hours become
whole days, whole months,
whole years?
When did we mislay the lives we meant to lead?
Settling, instead, for flat-packed dreams, for hopes
more easily expressed as trends
in bathroom furniture?
*
500 years before we built the Great Pyramid of Cheops,
5,000 years before we built IKEA,
Orkney men, women and children
carried back-breaking weights
of stone. They split them,
trimmed them to exact size, chiselled
to confirm a perfect fit,
then placed them.
The scouring wind showed where.
Skara Brae, the Knap of Howar.
*
IKEA bricks and breeze blocks will soon
come tumbling down. That deepest blue
industrial-scale sheeting
(what we’ve learned to call ‘sky’),
will drift elsewhere.
One day, our line of sight will clear.
It always does. To show us:
Winter 1850. Bay of Skaill.
The worst storm in living memory –
Arctic winds batter sea and shore, hacking
at Orkney machair and dunes until
the weighted veil of several
thousand years’ sand is
finally lifted …
Revealing –
This stone-slabbed dresser, this bed, this hearth.
Eight dwellings in all, a network
of connecting passages.
This human warren.
Home.
I had the honour to be Edinburgh’s Makar / Poet Laureate from 2008-14. Sadly, all good things must come to an end.
Edinburgh Doesn’t Scan That Easy
Six years I tried to turn our city into rhyme –
I listened to its heartbeat, pulse …
and time after time after time
my too-poetic stress was out of sync.
Edinburgh doesn’t scan that easy. You think.
You plan. Pen, paper, make a start –
but our city’s all-too-wayward heart
just batters on, no matter what you say.
Thanks to high finance, the homeless in the malls,
the pubs, drugs, the tourists, and festivals
running night and day –
our streets have learned to stray.
Buildings never stay where they’ve been put,
tram tracks come and go, ditto
banks and parliaments. Consultants who compute
our futures always get them wrong.
And so …
As one, the public clocks will whirr and chime,
bursting into song!
Rush-hour men and women heel-kick, dance –
they finger-click the city beat,
its commerce and romance
from Leith to Arthur’s Seat!
I stand on North Bridge gazing east and west –
the distant Forth, the Gardens, galleries, the sky.
A train comes rumbling out of Waverley …
This I take on trust, and all the rest.
*
The laurel crown, the Council Makar cape and quill
are each invisible,
likewise the laureate whose term is done.
Time to take my leave, time to hand them on …
Leuchars railway station, on the line between Edinburgh and Dundee, is a place where time often seems to have stopped. Forever.
Rehearsals for The End Of Time
Room heaters switched off, and all lights.
Doors locked, steel shutters pulled down,
benches removed. Arctic winds and
North Sea sleet scour every surface
of its history.
No pyramids, no Renaissance,
no rise and fall of mighty empires –
not now. Not ever.
Only this battened-down brickwork. Only me
going nowhere.
I�
�m sure it was a summer’s day when I came across
the metal footbridge. I remember sunlight.
Mid-January now by the feel of it,
and the clock’s hands stuck
at a quarter-past ten …
(Once upon a time I lived in the warm hills
above Barcelona,
I’d stroll each evening beneath shower upon
shower of falling stars. So many wishes to make,
so many lifetimes to look forward to …)
These are Scottish stars hammered
into east coast darkness,
right up to the hilt.
Bringing the Cosmic Wheel to a standstill.
An RAF jet hangs silent and motionless 100ft or so
above platform 2 –
had it been planning to liberate someone,
somewhere? Was it en route to yet another country
to help them become
just like us?
No train in sight, nor hope of any.
Rehearsals for the End of Time
take place, it seems,
here at Leuchars station.
As a small boy, I was taken to see Edinburgh’s last tram trundle its final journey along Princes Street before being scrapped. The rails were tarmacked over. Less than fifty years later, the pollution and traffic jams had become so bad it was proposed to re-lay the tracks. These poems can be seen on the timetable for each stop.
Stations of the Rush Hour
YORK PLACE
First stop on the line, or the last?
Into the future, or out of the past?
We get on, we get off – that’s all we can know
for our journey started long, long ago.
ST ANDREW ’S SQUARE
Scotland, too, is a green island. Here
we’re hemmed in by cliffs of sheerest glass
and heavy-duty stonework.
Time to make waves
as we sail this Tarmac-Black Sea!
PRINCES STREET
WARNING – the budget allowed for one stop only
along the entire length of our capital’s main street.
Make the most of it!
WEST END
If there’s time before your tram, enjoy this pause
in the city’s hustle-bustle, push-and-press.
Let the sky, the trees and the pleasing
curve of Atholl Crescent soothe
your downtown stress …
HAYMARKET
Nearby, five roads meet and snarl and clash (traffic-tangles, red lights, criss-cross lanes and criss-cross drivers), while we go two-rail smoothly
gliding past.
MURR AYFIELD
Even when the pitch and seats are empty,
a hushed roar fills the stadium –
Let’s hear it loud enough for Scotland!
BALGREEN
Beware that nearby block of bricked-up darkness,
