The Wrecking Light by Robin Robertson Read Free Book Online Page A

broken on their beds, limbs thrown out
in the attitudes of death, the shape of soldiers.
The next morning, I look up at my reflection
in the train window: unshaven, with today's paper;
behind me stands a gunman in a hood.
    ***
    The chestnut trees hold out their breaking buds
like lanterns, or wounds, sticky with life. Under the
false-teeth-whistling flight of a wood-pigeon
a thrown wave of starlings rose and sank itself
back into a hedge, in a burst of chatter.
My father in the heart of the hedge, clasping a bible.
    ***
    Rain muscles its way through the gutters
of Selma and Vine. I look north
through the fog at the Hollywood sign,
east to the observatory where tonight,
under a lack of stars,
old men will be fighting with knives.
    ***
    Western Michigan,
on the Pere Marquette
roll-casting for steelhead:
mending my line over a drift of them
stitched into the shadows,
looking for a loophole in the water.
    ***
    Descending a wrought-iron spiral stair, peering
down at the people very far below;
no hand-rail, every
second step rusted away, I'm holding
a suitcase and a full glass of wine,
wearing carpet slippers and a Balenciaga gown.
    ***
    My past stretches from here to there, and back,
leaving me somewhere in the middle
of Shepherd's Bush Green with the winos of '78.
A great year; I remember it well. Hints of petrol,
urine, plane trees; a finish so long you could
sleep out under it. Same faces, different names.
    ***
    Parrots tear out their feathers, whistling Jingle Bells,
cornfields burst into flames, rivers dry
from their source to the sea, snakes sun themselves
as the roads return to tar; puffer fish off the Lizard,
whales in the Thames, the nets heavy
with swordfish, yellowfin, basking shark.
    ***
    Cyclamen under olive trees; sacked tombs, a ruined
moussaka, with chips. Locals on motorbikes
chew pitta bread, stare out at me like sheep,
their wayside shrines to the saints
built better than their houses; at every bend
tin memorials to the crashed dead.
    ***
    I was down here in the playground
with the other adults,
on the roundabouts and swings,
while up on the hill
on the tennis court,
the children were kneeling to be shot.
    ***
    In November, two ring-necked parakeets
eating from apples still hanging
from the apple tree. The dead crow I notice
is just a torn black bin-liner;
at the end of the garden a sand-pit stands up
as a fox, and slopes off.
    ***
    Smoked mackerel, smoked eel, smoked halibut,
smoked reindeer heart, veal pâté, six different kinds
of salmon, Gustav's Sausage, Jansson's Temptation.
Tasting each
ex voto,
I saw the electrodes
in a bucket, the blade, the gaff, the captive bolt,
walking my plate around the stations of the dead.

WONDERLAND
    She said her name was Alice,
that she'd studied with the geisha
in Japan, and was trained and able
in the thousand ways of pleasuring a man.
We'd share some shots of whisky
— her favourite brand,
Black Label
—
then she'd knock them back, and drink me
under the table.

THE TWEED
    Giving a back-rub
to Hugh MacDiarmid
I felt, through the tweed,
so much tension
in that determined
neck, those little
bony shoulders
that, when it was released,
he simply
stood up and fell over.

ABOUT TIME
    In the time it took to hold my breath
and slip under the bathwater
— to hear the blood-thud in the veins,
for me to rise to the surface —
my parents had died,
the house had been sold and now
was being demolished around me,
wall by wall, with a ball and chain.
    I swim one length underwater,
pulling myself up on the other side, gasping,
to find my marriage over,
my daughters grown and settled down,
the skin loosening
from my legs and arms
and this heart going
like there's no tomorrow.

FALL FROM GRACE
    I cannot look into the clear faces
of mirrors. The black glass of a window
shines back at me its shame
    at all the times and all the places
where I pitched my life in shadow,
and couldn't look into the clear faces
    where blame now sits: replacing
love and trust with nothing,