Robin Robertson Poems

It is always the same:
she is standing over me
...

Still sleepwalking through her life,
I wrap her up
and we go through the snow that fell all night
...

A figment, a thumbed
maquette of a cat, some
...

The slow-grained slide to embed the blade
of the key is a sheathing,
a gliding on graphite, pushing inside
to find the ribs of the lock.
...

after Nonnus

I

Her only home was here in this forest, among the high rocks,
sending her long arrows in flight through the standing pines
...

Under the gritted lid of winter
each ice-puddle's broken plate
cracked to a star. The morning
assembling itself into black and white, the slow dawn
...

Only a blue string tethers him to the present.
The small black goat; the stone enclosure;
the forked wooden altar washed in coconut
milk, hung with orange and yellow marigolds;
...

for Don Paterson

A flight of loose stairs off the street into a high succession
of empty rooms, prolapsed chairs and a memory of women
perfumed with hand-oil and Artemisia absinthium:
...

When the day-birds have settled
in their creaking trees,
the doors of the forest open
for the flitting
...

I should never have stayed here
in this cold shieling
once the storm passed
and the rain had finally eased.
...