The Wrecking Light

by Robin Robertson

  of battle order, outrun

  the breath of the damned, his sleeves

  flecked with their spit, his sword with their dung;

  to move beyond the hooks and eyes

  of women, their insinuated blades, to pass

  through the scrim of tissue, through this

  chanonry of blood, to reach a place

  of peace and honour, fresh running water,

  a morning of porcelain and lavender

  combed by light, folded and smoothed over.

  He came instead to a closed silence. Here

  were the attributes and trappings of the hunt:

  flint blades and fishhooks, bone pendants,

  carved figurines of elk, snakes and humans,

  a wild boar's leg-bone whittled and whetted

  into a dagger, bear skulls for bowls, stone flakes

  for arrowheads. A seated woman with a baby

  in her lap, dusted in red ochre, next to a man

  wearing a crown of antlers. Between the two,

  and dead like them, a young child laid down

  into the wing of a swan.

  ALBATROSS IN CO. ANTRIM

  After Baudelaire

  The men would sometimes try to catch one,

  throwing a looped wire at the great white cross

  that tracked their every turn, gliding over their deep

  gulfs and bitter waves: the bright pacific albatross.

  Now, with a cardboard sign around his neck, the king

  of the winds stands there, hobbled: head shorn,

  ashamed; his broken limbs hang down by his side,

  those huge white wings like dragging oars.

  Once beautiful and brave, now tarred, unfeathered,

  this lost traveller is a bad joke; a lord cut down to size.

  One pokes a muzzle in his mouth; another limps past,

  mimicking the skliff, sclaff of a bird that cannot fly.

  The poet is like this prince of the clouds

  who rides the storm of war and scorns the archer;

  exiled on the ground, in all this derision,

  his giant wings prevent his marching.

  THE GREAT MIDWINTER SACRIFICE, UPPSALA

  It seems I came too late.

  The cart-tracks leading

  down the hill to the old town

  are frosting over, already filling with snow.

  If the temple is gold, as they say,

  it's too dark now to tell. I tether my horse

  and walk through the ruins of the marketplace,

  its stalls empty, the tables of the feast

  all cleared; mice among the grain, and dogs,

  but few people anywhere.

  There's ice between the cobblestones

  where drink was spilt — some scraps of bread,

  chicken bones — that's it.

  I had missed the full moon, and the Festival.

  Fires sputter here and there but there is little light

  and the ground beyond the square

  is frozen hard as iron.

  I pass what looks like a well in the darkness

  — the sharpening wind playing over it

  as you would blow on the neck of an empty bottle.

  I hear the creaking of a tree so huge

  it's blotted out the moon; some birds, scuffling;

  a skitter of rats and a dog's low growl.

  As I near the tree I feel the ground soften, start

  to suck at my boot-heels, and I can

  make out shapes in the high branches:

  long, hanging shapes that seem to

  turn slightly in the breeze, which is sweet now

  beyond the frost, and I almost

  sense some drops of rain.

  Moving around it

  and into the moonlight, I see it's as high

  as the temple, fully green, and thick with gifts

  the way the peasants dress their beams with corn,

  at home, at harvest-time. This tree, though,

  is decked simply with the dead.

  At the top, what look like cockerels, rams

  and goats, then dogs and pigs, and hooked

  to the lowest, strongest boughs — their legs

  almost touching the earth — horses and bulls.

  I count nine of each of them, and nine

  that aren't animals but hang there just the same,

  black-faced, bletted, barely

  recognisable as men.

  I look down at the spongy grass

  and my boots are soaking red.

  My name is Adam of Bremen

  and I saw these things

  in The Year of Our Lord 1075.

  WEB

  The wood is hung with silk anchor-

  threads and signal-threads. Draglines

  catch on my hair and hands, stringing

  my face as I move through the trees: strands

  charged and sticky as spun sugar

  cling and stretch and fizzle apart.

  I am ravelled here

  to the live field, in a rig of stress.

  Turned on my new axis to a swathe

  of shriven grey, I remind myself

  of a cork float in a fishing-net spread out

  to dry in the sun, waiting for the fisherman

  — both retiarius and secutor —

  to attend to what is broken and undone.

  I watch now as the spider unknots itself

  slowly, and elbows out of the dark.

  THE HAMMAM

  Under the nineteen stars

  and the ninety-six minor stars

  of the marble heaven,

  he lies crossways

  on the heated stone,

  his laved body evaporating

  upwards to the light.

  His smoke of sweat condenses

  in the dome's stone cupola

  and its slow hot rain

  drops down on him hard

  as annunciation — or nails,

  perhaps, on a sheet of tin,

  pricking out some finial star.

  THE ACT OF DISTRESS

  I let him

  lose himself in me;

  finding a way to sleep,

  to disappear

  out of darkness and in

  to some blue light.

  I hear him

  sobbing as he

  nears the centre, to release

  the flare, send up

  the high maroon, feel it

  flooding the night.

  WHITE

  It wasn't meant to be that way.

  I never expected it to shoot so hard

  it blinded me: I'd wanted to watch

  the way it went. The pumping-out not like

  coming at all, more like emptying

  a bottle: blacking out

  a little more with every pulse.

  I just felt light and very cold at the end,

  astonished at how much red there was

  and my wrist so white.

  III. UNSPOKEN WATER

  THE WOOD OF LOST THINGS

  We went walks here, as children, listening out

  for gypsies, timber wolves, the great

  hinges in the trees. Hours

  we'd wander its long green halls

  making swords from branches,

  gathering stars of elderflower

  to thread into a chain.

  Today the forest sends up birds

  to distract me, deer to turn me from the track,

  puts out stems and tendrils

  to trip and catch at my feet.

  The sudden sun opens a path of flowers:

  snowdrops, crocuses, hyacinths,

  a smoke of bluebells

  in the shade on either side;

  a way of stamens and stigmas: the breathing

  faces of flowers. I look back at the empty trees,

  look up at the green, and I'm walking

  through daisies and honeysuckl
e,

  fireweed, crab apple, burnt-out

  buddleia, a tangle of nettles,

  berberis, bramble-wire;

  the flowers gone,

  just the starred calyx

  and the green ovary

  hardening to seed.

  I take a last look at the yellow trees,

  a last look at the brown, and I hear the sound

  of old leaves under my feet

  and the low noise of water.

  I have found the place I wasn't meant to find.

  The shallow creek, churning

  its red and silver secrets:

  failed salmon, bearded with barbs,

  riding each other down;

  the shore lined with baby pigeons, animals

  birthing, others coming back to die.

  Placenta and bones in the undergrowth,

  in the clearing, in the places of drowning.

  Jellyfish have taken to the woods;

  mussels rope the tree-trunks.

  I watch a fish flip on a thorn

  in a pester of flies, one eye fixed on mine.

  The wood stretched behind me, now full

  of my own kind, those

  who have stepped through my shadow;

  a life's-worth of women in the forest corridor,

  faces turned to the bark. The rows of lovers.

  Mother and sister. Wife. And my daughters,

  walking away into the blue distance,

  turning their heads to look back.

  Hung on a silver birch, my school cap

  and satchel; next to them, the docken suit,

  and next to that, pinned to a branch,

  my lost comforter —

  a piece of blanket worn to the size of my hand.

  My hand as a boy. The forgotten smell of it,

  the smell of myself.

  And something is moving, something

  held down by stones, and one by one

  I see the dead unbury themselves

  and take their places by the seated corpse

  whose face I seem to know.

  He was shivering. It's cold, I said.

  He looked up at me and nodded, It's cold.

  What is this place? What brings you here?

  This is my home, we replied.

  MIDDLE WATCH, HAMMERSMITH

  He switches off the fridge

  just to sit and watch

  the hardness of the iced-up

  ice-box start to drip,

  its white block

  loosening like a tooth.

  LANDFALL

  The fishboxes

  of Fraserburgh, Aberdeen,

  Peterhead, the wood that broke

  on your beach, crates that once held herring,

  freshly dead, now hold distance, nothing but the names

  of the places I came from, years ago;

  and you pull me from the waves,

  drawing me out like a skelf,

  as I would say:

  a splinter.

  CALLING HOME

  after Tomas Tranströmer

  Our phonecall spilled out into the dark

  and glittered between the countryside and the town

  like the mess of a knife-fight.

  Afterwards, all night jittery and spent in the hotel bed,

  I dreamt I was the needle in a compass

  some orienteer bore through the forest with a spinning heart.

  ICTUS

  for Tomas Tranströmer

  I find myself at your side, turning the pages

  for you — haltingly — with my wrong hand,

  while you play those delicate, certain notes

  without effort, sounding a long

  free line through the sea-lanes on the skiff

  of your wrong hand, the left,

  your only moving hand,

  your whole right side snowbound.

  Who would swap the hammer

  for the hammer-blow, the seasons

  for this wintering life, that

  lethal fold in time? No one I know.

  But there are those who can make an art

  of setting a logan-stone rocking

  here in'Södermalm, or learn the perfect

  stress of lines, and ferry-times, by heart.

  I find I can suddenly read the score, know

  when to turn the page: cack-handed,

  my dull heart-tick always indicating left.

  Sunlight squares the room

  and I am snowblind. You slip away

  on the wind. Your grandfather,

  the pilot, stares out over the archipelago

  from his solid wooden frame.

  THE UNWRITTEN LETTER

  after Montale

  Only this? Those shivers at first-light, this succession

  of moments, thread after thin thread — hours, years

  drawn into the curve of a life — is this it? That pair

  of dolphins, circling with their young, do they only

  leap and tumble for a few hours, a few days? No,

  I don't want to hear from you,

  don't want to see your eyes.

  There's more to life than this.

  I can't dive, can't reappear; night's red

  pyrotechnics are running late, the evening drags,

  all prayer is hopeless, the message

  in its bottle hasn't made it through the rocks.

  The empty waves smash open

  on the point at Finisterre.

  BEGINNING TO GREEN

  I find a kind of hope here, in this

  homelessness, in this place

  where no one knows me —

  where I'll be gone, like some

  over-wintering bird,

  before they even notice.

  Healed by distance

  and a landscape opening

  under broken sun, I like this

  mirror-less, flawless world

  with no people in it,

  only birds.

  Unmissed, I can see myself again

  in this great unfurling — the song,

  the fledged leaf, the wing;

  in these strong trees that

  twist from the bud: their grey

  beginning to green.

  DURING DINNER

  for Beatrice Monti della Corte

  I tried to tell the Baronessa

  she shouldn't cut the biancospino

  and certainly never bring it here indoors.

  In my country you fetch

  death into the house with hawthorn, I cried;

  but seeing I hadn't impressed her

  with my folklore, tried again.

  Better to leave it, wild,

  standing like smoke in the olive groves

  or in the hanging valley down below,

  than set it on the dresser

  and give us all bad luck.

  Then, changing tack:

  It was Christ's crown and the faeries' bed,

  I said to my hostess, my poor confessor,

  getting her attention back,

  but 'Ladies' Meat' is another name

  because it smells of sex and it smells of death.

  Then brilliantly I second-guessed her:

  For years I was only able to smell one.

  Now I can only smell the other!

  And with that — heaven bless her —

  she rose, and left the table.

  ARSENIO

  after Montale

  The wind-devils stir up the dust

  and swirl over the roof-tops, waltzing

  down the empty driveways

  of all the grand hotels, where the horses

  stand, hooded and stock-still

  by the blaze of windows,

  noses to the ground.

  You go down the promenade, facing the sea

  on this day of rain, this day of fire,

  when a fusillade of castanets

  shakes out the stitches of this

&
nbsp; tightly woven plot of hour on hour on hour.

  It is the call of another orbit:

  follow it, go down to the horizon,

  impending, overhung

  by a lead-grey waterspout, a twister

  more restless than the waves it spirals over,

  a long salt whirlwind, whirlpooled to the clouds.

  You must go down to where your feet

  squeak on the wet shingle, catch

  in the tangle of seaweed: this

  is the moment, perhaps,

  the long-awaited moment

  that will save you from the end of your journey,

  your days like links in a chain — motionless

  progress, Arsenio, the familiar

  frenzy of paralysis.

  Listen: among the palm-trees

  the tremulous stream of violin music

  drowned, as it begins, by the thunder's

  rolling iron drum.

  The storm is at its sweetest

  when the white eye of the Dog Star

  blinks open in the brief blue

  and the evening seems so distant

  though it's coming soon enough;

  lightning etches the sky, branching sudden

  through the blushing light

  like some tree of precious metal;

  listen: the rumble of the gypsy drums...

  Go down into the hurled, headlong dark

  that's turned this noon into a night of lit globes

  swaying down the shore — and out there, where sky and sea

  are all one shadow, slow fishing boats pulse

  with acetylene —

  till anxious drops

  start from the heavy sky, and the earth

  steams as it drinks it down, and you

  and the world around have rain

  lapping at your ankles; drenched awnings flag

  and flap; you hear nothing but the giant shearing

  hiss of water hitting the ground, the wheeze

  of hundreds of paper lanterns

  crumpling on the street.

  And so, lost among the sodden mats and wickerwork,

  you are a reed that drags its roots behind you;

  they cling so tight you'll never be free;

  trembling with life, you can only stretch out

  to a ringing emptiness of swallowed grief;

  the crest of that old wave rolls you,

  overwhelms you again,

  everything that can reclaim you

  does — street and porch and walls and mirrors — all