Robin Robertson

The sun’s hinge on the burnt horizon has woken the sealed lake, leaving a sleeve of sound. No wind, just curved plates of air re-shaping under the trap-ice, straining to give; the groans and rumbles like someone shifting heavy tables – or something gigantic turning to get comfortable. I snick a stone over the long sprung deck to get the dobro’s glassy note, the crying slide...

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 Porker: 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...

after Tranströmer

1.

Late autumn labyrinth. A discarded bottle lies at the entrance to the wood. Walk in. The forest in this season is a silent palace of abandoned rooms. Only a few, precise sounds: as if someone were lifting twigs with tweezers; as if, inside each tree-trunk, a hinge was creaking quietly. Frost has breathed on the mushrooms and they’ve shrivelled up; they are like...

Try to reconstruct me from the heraldry of the flesh, the thick blur of scar tissue, shreds of clothing, that burst vessel in the eye like a twist in a marble, those frost-feather wrinkles at the side of the mouth, the sagittal crest, the arteries’ complicated reds, flakes of semen, the blonde hair at the nape of the neck of either of my daughters, that cipher of birthmarks,...

for John Banville

Hello Hello Hello Hellowhat shall we do today? Hello Today.

They come in procession: clown, princess, scarecrow, ghost, a drift of the overgrown: women in their institutional white socks and black shoes, winter coats over nighties, sheets, sack-dresses, party hats, paper-bag masks with eye-holes and straw, hard plastic masks with white elastic: cat, devil, crone. They...