The Wrecking Light
Robin Robertson
Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
I. SILVERED WATER
ALBUM
SIGNS ON A WHITE FIELD
BY CLACHAN BRIDGE
TULIPS
THE PLAGUE YEAR
WONDERLAND
THE TWEED
ABOUT TIME
FALL FROM GRACE
GOING TO GROUND
CAT, FAILING
A GIFT
STRINDBERG IN BERLIN
VENERY
MY GIRLS
TINSEL
LEAVING ST KILDA
II. BROKEN WATER
LAW OF THE ISLAND
KALIGHAT
RELIGION
PENTHEUS AND DIONYSUS
LESSON
THE DAUGHTERS OF MINYAS
AN AMBUSH
ODE TO A LARGE TUNA IN THE MARKET
GRAVE GOODS
ALBATROSS IN CO. ANTRIM
THE GREAT MIDWINTER SACRIFICE, UPPSALA
WEB
THE HAMMAM
THE ACT OF DISTRESS
WHITE
III. UNSPOKEN WATER
THE WOOD OF LOST THINGS
MIDDLE WATCH, HAMMERSMITH
LANDFALL
CALLING HOME
ICTUS
THE UNWRITTEN LETTER
BEGINNING TO GREEN
DURING DINNER
ARSENIO
DRESS REHEARSALS
EASTER, LIGURIA
WIDOW'S WALK
DIVING
ABANDON
AT ROANE HEAD
HAMMERSMITH WINTER
NOTES & ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following:
First U.S. edition
Copyright © 2011 by Robin Robertson
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
www.hmhbooks.com
First published in Great Britain by Picador, 2010
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Robertson, Robin, date.
The wrecking light / Robin Robertson.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-547-48333-7
I. Title.
PR6068.O1925W74 2011
821'.914—dc22
2010052589
Printed in the United States of America
DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
for Janet and John Banville
I dropped it, I dropped it,
and on my way I dropped it
I. SILVERED WATER
ALBUM
I am almost never there, in these
old photographs: a hand
or shoulder, out of focus; a figure
in the background,
stepping from the frame.
I see myself, sometimes, in the restless
blur of a child, that flinch
in the eye, or the way
sun leaks its gold into the print;
or there, in that long white gash
across the face of the glass
on the wall behind. That
smear of light
the sign of me, leaving.
Look closely
at these snapshots, all this
Kodacolor going to blue, and you'll
start to notice. When you finally see me,
you'll see me everywhere: floating
over crocuses, sandcastles,
fallen leaves, on those
melting snowmen, their faces
drawn in coal — among all
the wedding guests,
the dinner guests, the birthday-
party guests — this smoke
in the emulsion, the flaw.
A ghost is there; the ghost gets up to go.
SIGNS ON A WHITE FIELD
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 far below.
I snick a stone over the long sprung deck
to get the dobro's glassy note, the crying
slide of a bottleneck, its
tremulous ululation to the other shore.
The rocks are ice-veined; the trees
swagged with snow.
Here and there, a sudden frost
has caught some turbulence in the water
and made it solid: frozen in its distress
to a scar, or a skin-graft.
Everywhere, frost-heave has jacked up boulders
clear of the surface, and the ice-shove
has piled great slabs on the lake-edge
like luggage tumbled from a carousel.
A racket of jackdaws, the serrated call
of a falcon as I walk out onto the lake.
A living lens of ice; you can hear it bending,
breathing, re-adjusting its weight and light
as the hidden tons of water
swell and stretch underneath,
thickening with cold.
A low grumble, a lingering vibrato, creaks
that seem to echo back and forth for hours;
the lake is talking to itself. A loud
twang in the ice. Twitterings
in the railway lines
from a train about to arrive.
A pencilled-in silence,
hollow and provisional.
And then it comes.
The detonating crack, like a dropped plank,
as if the whole lake has snapped in two
and the world will follow.
But all that happens
is a huge release of sound: a boom
that rolls under the ice for miles,
some fluked leviathan let loose
from centuries of sleep, trying to push through,
shaking the air like sheet metal,
like a muffled giant drum.
I hear the lake all night as a distant war.
In the morning's brightness
I brush the snow off with a glove,
smooth down a porthole in the crust
and find, somehow, the living green beneath.
The green leaf looks back, and sees
a man walking out in this shuddering light
to the sound of air under the ice,
out onto the lake, among sun-cups,
snow penitents: a drowned man, waked
in this weathering ground.
BY CLACHAN BRIDGE
For Alasdair Roberts
I remember the girl
with the hare-lip
down by Clachan Bridge,
cutting up fish
to see how they worked;
by morning's end her nails
were black red, her hands
all sequined silver.
She unpuzzled rabbits
to a rickle of bones;
dipped into a dormouse
for the pip of its heart.
She'd open everything,
that girl.
They say they found
wax dolls in her wall,
poppets full of human hair,
but I'd say they're wrong.
What's true is
that the blacksmith's son,
th
e simpleton,
came down here once
and fathomed her.
Claimed she licked him
clean as a whistle.
I remember the tiny stars
of her hands around her belly
as it grew and grew, and how
after a year, nothing came.
How she said it was still there,
inside her, a stone-baby.
And how I saw her wrists
bangled with scars
and those hands flittering
at her throat,
to the plectrum of bone
she'd hung there.
As to what happened
to the blacksmith's boy,
no one knows
and I'll keep my tongue.
Last thing I heard, the starlings
had started
to mimic her crying,
and she'd found how to fly.
TULIPS
Sifting sand in the Starsign Hotel
on 96th and Madison,
trying not to hear the sirens: the heart's
fist, desire's empty hand.
The room awash with its terrible light;
a sky unable to rain. Cradling a glass
of nothing much at all, it's all
come down to this: the electric fan's
stop-start — the stalled, half-circle twist
of draught over the bed; the sea-spill
of sheets, the head in storm. Look
at what's beached here on the night-stand:
a flipped photograph and a silk scarf, a set
of keys. These tulips, loosening in a vase.
THE PLAGUE YEAR
Great elms gesture in the last of the light. I am dying
so slowly you'd hardly notice. What is there left
to trust but this green world and its god,
always returning to life? I stood
all day in the vanishing point; my place
now taken by a white-tailed deer.
***
I go to check the children, who are done for.
They lie there broken on their beds, limbs thrown out
in the attitudes of death, the shape of soldiers.
The next morning, I look up at my reflection
in the train window: unshaven, with today's paper;
behind me stands a gunman in a hood.
***
The chestnut trees hold out their breaking buds
like lanterns, or wounds, sticky with life. Under the
false-teeth-whistling flight of a wood-pigeon
a thrown wave of starlings rose and sank itself
back into a hedge, in a burst of chatter.
My father in the heart of the hedge, clasping a bible.
***
Rain muscles its way through the gutters
of Selma and Vine. I look north
through the fog at the Hollywood sign,
east to the observatory where tonight,
under a lack of stars,
old men will be fighting with knives.
***
Western Michigan,
on the Pere Marquette
roll-casting for steelhead:
mending my line over a drift of them
stitched into the shadows,
looking for a loophole in the water.
***
Descending a wrought-iron spiral stair, peering
down at the people very far below;
no hand-rail, every
second step rusted away, I'm holding
a suitcase and a full glass of wine,
wearing carpet slippers and a Balenciaga gown.
***
My past stretches from here to there, and back,
leaving me somewhere in the middle
of Shepherd's Bush Green with the winos of '78.
A great year; I remember it well. Hints of petrol,
urine, plane trees; a finish so long you could
sleep out under it. Same faces, different names.
***
Parrots tear out their feathers, whistling Jingle Bells,
cornfields burst into flames, rivers dry
from their source to the sea, snakes sun themselves
as the roads return to tar; puffer fish off the Lizard,
whales in the Thames, the nets heavy
with swordfish, yellowfin, basking shark.
***
Cyclamen under olive trees; sacked tombs, a ruined
moussaka, with chips. Locals on motorbikes
chew pitta bread, stare out at me like sheep,
their wayside shrines to the saints
built better than their houses; at every bend
tin memorials to the crashed dead.
***
I was down here in the playground
with the other adults,
on the roundabouts and swings,
while up on the hill
on the tennis court,
the children were kneeling to be shot.
***
In November, two ring-necked parakeets
eating from apples still hanging
from the apple tree. The dead crow I notice
is just a torn black bin-liner;
at the end of the garden a sand-pit stands up
as a fox, and slopes off.
***
Smoked mackerel, smoked eel, smoked halibut,
smoked reindeer heart, veal pâté, six different kinds
of salmon, Gustav's Sausage, Jansson's Temptation.
Tasting eachex voto,I saw the electrodes
in a bucket, the blade, the gaff, the captive bolt,
walking my plate around the stations of the dead.
WONDERLAND
She said her name was Alice,
that she'd studied with the geisha
in Japan, and was trained and able
in the thousand ways of pleasuring a man.
We'd share some shots of whisky
— her favourite brand,Black Label—
then she'd knock them back, and drink me
under the table.
THE TWEED
Giving a back-rub
to Hugh MacDiarmid
I felt, through the tweed,
so much tension
in that determined
neck, those little
bony shoulders
that, when it was released,
he simply
stood up and fell over.
ABOUT TIME
In the time it took to hold my breath
and slip under the bathwater
— to hear the blood-thud in the veins,
for me to rise to the surface —
my parents had died,
the house had been sold and now
was being demolished around me,
wall by wall, with a ball and chain.
I swim one length underwater,
pulling myself up on the other side, gasping,
to find my marriage over,
my daughters grown and settled down,
the skin loosening
from my legs and arms
and this heart going
like there's no tomorrow.
FALL FROM GRACE
I cannot look into the clear faces
of mirrors. The black glass of a window
shines back at me its shame
at all the times and all the places
where I pitched my life in shadow,
and couldn't look into the clear faces
where blame now sits: replacing
love and trust with nothing, no
light shining back at me, just shame.
My head's in flames. My mind races
and I try to shut it down. Sometimes, though,
I can't even look into the faces
of flowers: all beauty carries traces
of what I seeded, then buried in this snow
that now shines back at me in sh
ame.
My life a mix of dull disgraces
and watery acclaim, my daughters know I
cannot look into their clear faces;
what shines back at me is shame.
GOING TO GROUND
That smell of over-cooked vegetables
under the cupboard
was a dead mouse; so small a body
it would soon be gone, I said,
dousing the boards with
our daughter's cheap perfume.
Later, you remembered
where you'd smelt that smell before
— that last sweetness, that old
double-act of death and vanity —
a hospital room
where your Trinity friend
was dying of AIDS,
his toes and fingers
starting to rot and go brown,
how he'd sprayed the bed
and his nails
with eau de cologne.
CAT, FAILING
A figment, a thumbed
maquette of a cat, some
ditched plaything, something
brought in from outside:
his white fur stiff and grey,
coming apart at the seams.
I study the muzzle
of perished rubber, one ear
eaten away, his sour body
lumped like a bean-bag
leaking thinly
into grim towel I sit
and watch the light
degrade in his eyes.
He tries and fails
to climb to his chair, shirks
in one corner of the kitchen,
cowed, denatured, ceasing to be
anything like a cat,
and there's a new look
in those eyes
that refuse to meet mine
and it's the shame of being
found out. Just that.
And with that
loss of face
his face, I see,
has turned human.
A GIFT
She came to me in a dress
of true-love and blue rocket,
with fairy-thimbles of foxglove
at the neck and wrist,
in her hair she wore a garland
of cherry laurel, herb bennet,
dwayberries and yew-berries,
twined with stems of clematis,
and at her throat she'd threaded
twists of bryony stalk, seeds
of meadow saffron and laburnum,
linked simply in a necklace,
and she was holding out
a philtre of water lovage,
red chamomile and ladies' seal
in a cup, for me to drink.