Through the Struan Door

Robin Robertson

There is the story of a boy, fetched from the water.

He was set to work, feeding the cauldron of the she-witch —

a whole year, stirring the herbs that would magic

wisdom and future-sight to her two children,

before he made the mistake.

Licking some spilt juice from his hand, his mind turned;

he knew then what would happen next.

Raging that he'd swallowed the cream

of her enchantment, the glamourie,

the witch went after him.

            Gifted with knowledge now,

                            he changed to the ways of a mountain hare

so she made the form of a hunting hound,

                            he turned to a mackerel

            slipping under the waves,

so she swam into the shape of a sea-otter bitch,

                            he flew up with the wings of a starling

so she stopped from the sky as a hawk,

                            and then he knew it was almost done

            so he lost himself in a field, as an ear of corn,

and she made herself back to a huge brown rat and ate him down.

But he did not die. He just set seed, inside. The witch waited,

and nine months later she was ready with her knife.

Re-born, he was so beautiful she couldn't cut his throat —

so she tied him inside a leather-skin bag, dropped it

into a coracle, and sent him out to sea.

But he did not die, and was found alive

on another coast, after weeks on the ocean,

and he grew to become a bard, they say,

singing forever of her greed and cruelty.

How being strong is being many.

*

My doors swing open. In the looking-glass

the hair on the side of my head pricks up, 

coarsening, going from red to grey, each ear

twisting outwards into a cup; my chin

lengthens to beard, the forehead nubs

grow heavy, hardening to horn,

a new shape becoming visible;

then the eyes roll back into white

and starts to spin like a drum

through all the changes, settling with a soft click

into goat:

each fat, black, horizontal bar of pupil

a floating letter-box.

What have I ushered in now: already

streaming over this threshold?

A body in flux — a man or a beast or a god —

a kind of Christ, perhaps: busy at his endless resurrections.

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Struan: anglicisation of srùthán (Gaelic) meaning 'place of streams'

story of a boy: a version of the Welsh legend of Taliesin