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

no
light shining back at me, just shame.
    My head's in flames. My mind races
and I try to shut it down. Sometimes, though,
I can't even look into the faces
    of flowers: all beauty carries traces
of what I seeded, then buried in this snow
that now shines back at me in shame.
    My life a mix of dull disgraces
and watery acclaim, my daughters know I
cannot look into their clear faces;
what shines back at me is shame.

GOING TO GROUND
    That smell of over-cooked vegetables
under the cupboard
was a dead mouse; so small a body
it would soon be gone, I said,
dousing the boards with
our daughter's cheap perfume.
    Later, you remembered
where you'd smelt that smell before
— that last sweetness, that old
double-act of death and vanity —
a hospital room
where your Trinity friend
was dying of AIDS,
his toes and fingers
starting to rot and go brown,
how he'd sprayed the bed
and his nails
with eau de cologne.

CAT, FAILING
    A figment, a thumbed
maquette of a cat, some
ditched plaything, something
brought in from outside:
his white fur stiff and grey,
coming apart at the seams.
I study the muzzle
of perished rubber, one ear
eaten away, his sour body
lumped like a bean-bag
leaking thinly
into grim towel I sit
and watch the light
degrade in his eyes.
    He tries and fails
to climb to his chair, shirks
in one corner of the kitchen,
cowed, denatured, ceasing to be
anything like a cat,
and there's a new look
in those eyes
that refuse to meet mine
and it's the shame of being
found out. Just that.
And with that
loss of face
his face, I see,
has turned human.

A GIFT
    She came to me in a dress
of true-love and blue rocket,
with fairy-thimbles of foxglove
at the neck and wrist,
in her hair she wore a garland
of cherry laurel, herb bennet,
dwayberries and yew-berries,
twined with stems of clematis,
and at her throat she'd threaded
twists of bryony stalk, seeds
of meadow saffron and laburnum,
linked simply in a necklace,
and she was holding out
a philtre of water lovage,
red chamomile and ladies' seal
in a cup, for me to drink.

STRINDBERG IN BERLIN
    All the wrong turnings
that have brought me here —
debts, divorce, a court trial, and now
a forced exile in this city and this drinking cell,
Zum schwarzen Ferkel,
The Black Piglet:
neither home nor hiding-place, just
another indignity,
just a different make of hell.
    Outside, a world of people queuing
to stand in my light, and that sound
far in the distance, of my life
labouring to catch up.
I've now pulled out
every good tooth
in search of the one that was making me mad.
I squint at the flasks and alembics,
head like a wasps' nest,
and pour myself
three fingers and a fresh start.
A glass of
aqua vitae,
a straightener,
stiffener, a universal tincture — same again —
the great purifier, clarifier,
a steadying hand on the dancing hand,
— one more, if you wouldn't mind —
bringer of spirit and the spirit of love;
the cleansing fire, turning lead
to gold, the dead back into life.
    The Pole at the piano, of course;
Munch opposite me, his face
like a shirt done up wrong.
My fiancée in one corner, my lover in another,
merging, turning, as all women turn,
back into my daughters,
and I am swimming naked at night,
off the island, in the witch-fire of
mareld
light,
listening to the silence of the stars,
with my children beside me,
my beautiful lost children, in the swell
of the night, swimming beside me.
And back, to the bright salts and acids,
the spill and clamour of the bar,
the elixirs, the women:
my wife-to-be, my young lover —
one banked hearth, one unattended fire.
Christ. The hot accelerant of drink.
The rot of desire.
And out, out into the swinging dark,
a moon of mercury, lines of vitriol trees
and the loose earth that rises up,
drops on me, burying me,
night after night after night.

VENERY
    What is he to think now,
the white scut
of her bottom
disappearing
down the half-flight
carpet stair
to the bathroom?
What is he to do
with this masted image?
He put all his