Robin Robertson

The impatience for summer is desire: ritual, imbedded hard as a hinge in the earth’s mesh. From the papery bulb, the spurred, flesh-green horn pushes, straining for air; flexes its distended, perfect, cleft muscle out and up through the crust.

Then the deeper sleep of August, ninety degrees of hanging fire: the yellow lawns, the blighted flowerless trees, the malformed leaves sticky...

The estate at dawn hangs like smoke; the forest

drawn in grainy bands of smeared, cross-hatched,

illegible trees: a botched photocopy of itself.

Swamp maple, sugar maple, red and white oak; first light lifts

the pale yellow flare of a beech tree’s papery leaves.

Where are you going?What on earth’s the time?

A salting of snow, blown across the white table of the lake:

thrown leaves...

The sides of the hill are stubbed with fire-pits. The sky is paraffin blue.

A pigeon’s heart swings here on the kissing-gate, withered, stuck through with pins,

while out on the estuary, beaks of birds needle to the wind’s compass,

the sky’s protocol. Swans go singing out to sea; the weather is changing cold.

...

I hadn’t been back in twenty years and he was still here, by the fire, at the far end of the longest counter in Aberdeen – some say Scotland. Not many in, and my favourite time: the dog-watch; the city still working, its tortoiseshell light just legible in the smoked windows, and through the slow delay of glass the flutter of the streetlights batting into life.

The...

A lift in the weather: a clemency I cling to like the legend

of myself: self-exiled, world-wounded, god

of evenings like this, eighty degrees and half a world away.

*

All night, the industry of erasure, effacement,

our one mouth working itself dry.

*

But even a god can’t stop the light that finds us, annealed,

fruitless, two strangers broken on the field of day.

In the...