Robin Robertson Poems

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
...

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
...

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

He opens his eyes to a hard frost,
the morning's soft amnesia of snow.

The thorned stems of gorse
are starred crystal; each bud
...

for John Burnside

You'd know her house by the drawn blinds -
by the cormorants pitched on the boundary wall,
...

That moment, when the sun ignites the valley and picks out
every bud that's greened that afternoon; when birds
spill from the trees like shaken sheets; that sudden loosening
into beauty; the want in her eyes, her eyes' fleet blue;
...

after Fra Angelico


He has come from the garden, leaving
no shadow, no footprint in the dew.
...

after Chardin


These rooms of wood, of tongue-and-groove, open out
on a garden of white-washed walls and a maple tree,
...