“Look for the wyvern,” Chris told me. “It’s not on the maps.”
So I set off to find the secret footpath between high walls
snaking through the Grange. Isn’t it bad enough these apps
leave me in dead ends, then drop their signals,
as when I was given a fenced-in graveyard as a shortcut?
The markers were taller than men, and everyone here knows
that stone is unpredictable. Rubble rebels, as in what
closed the Radical Road (“high risk of rockfall”) and whose
“unconforming” nature changed the face of geology.
They sing as they avalanche austerely down the prominence
of their couchant volcano, a former flame. I came to see
this city reared itself out of sandstone—the wyvern’s sibilance.
It’s semiotically rich, a theorist would say: how the volcano
gives rise to the castle, a stronghold on the peak, while en face
across the Royal Mile sits the decorative pile where we know
soft power mounts a charm offensive—a woman’s palace
with a physic garden. It was usurped from the monks
who made their peaceful anchorage in the lee of Arthur’s Seat.
Bloodred rubies of Mary Stuart’s rosary glitter as chunks
of history fall from the Abbey roof. Where the kings eat,
a holy stag set its flaming hoof. And where there’s murder
it’s always in the chambers of the heart: the beds are soft.
Someone should have told Mary to be alerter
to the wyverns. Rocks can be scaled and fealty sloughed.
“Look for the wyvern.” So I go to the poison garden
where the belladonna is kept in cages, though the pollinator
roams freely in it. In fact, shadows, like a pardon,
widen their bee stripes on the path as the time grows later
and hemlock vies with the castor bean’s claim
to importance as assassin versus state executioner.
And now the owls and church bells utter the selfsame
chime, though not on purpose. Nor do the dead, I’m sure,
play chess except as two dates reach a stalemate.
The grammar of romance demands ellipses, perhaps . . .
as “loan” for “lane” gets at the glamour (same root,
in Scots) of a temporary state. It’s not on the maps.