This is the animal that never was. Not knowing that, they loved it anyway; its bearing, its stride, its high, clear whinny, right down to the still light of its gaze.

It never was. And yet such was their love the beast arose, where they had cleared the space; and in the stable of its nothingness it shook its white mane out and stamped its hoof.

And so they fed it, not with hay or corn but with the chance that it might come to pass. All this gave the creature such a power

its brow put out a horn; one single horn. It grew inside a young girl’s looking glass, then one day walked out and passed into her.

Don Paterson was all over the pages of the Guardian recently, getting a standing ovation from Mark Doty for his versions of Rilke's "Sonnets to Orpheus". While there is little of his poetry to be had for eating in cyber-ia, the ones I found read like those written by a more edgy Philip Larkin; not a bad comparison given that Larkin was an jazz critic and Paterson made his living as a jazz musician before he rumbled into the British poetry scene.