Robin Robertson

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...

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.

...

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 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...

Still as a battlefield, the strewn citygoes under, slips into silhouette.Some threads of smoke,the lift and fall of flags in orange light.The glinting windows go out one by one.

Low over the Firth, a fork of geesecomes pulling past, straight-necked:creaking like rowlocksover the frozen hill.On the Parthenon below, querulous gullsscreel and skraik and peel away,bickering,...