poetry
A Painted Field Slow Air Swithering The Wrecking Light Hill of Doors Sailing the Forest: Selected Poems
limited editions
Camera Obscura Actaeon: The Early Years
translation
The Deleted World Medea Bacchae
as editor
32 Counties Mortification Love Poet, Carpenter
music
Hirta Songs (with Alasdair Roberts)
Copyright © 2018 Robin Robertson
Published in Canada in 2018 by House of Anansi Press Inc.www.houseofanansi.com
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Robertson, Robin, 1955-, author The long take : a noir narrative / Robin Robertson.
A poem. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-1-4870-0624-2 (softcover).—ISBN 978-1-4870-0625-9 (EPUB).—ISBN 978-1-4870-0663-1 (Kindle)
I. Title.
PR6068.O1925L66 2019 821'.914 C2018-905329-1
C2018-905330-5
We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada.
In memory of
Alistair MacLeod
Jason Molina
Jean Stein
cos cheum nach gabh tilleadh
Contents
1946
1948
1951
1953
Credits
1946
And there it was: the swell
and glitter of it like a standing wave –
the fabled, smoking ruin, the new towers rising
through the blue,
the ranked array of ivory and gold, the glint,
the glamour of buried light
as the world turned round it
very slowly
this autumn morning, all amazed.
And it stayed there, watching,
as they made toward it,
the truck-driver and the young man,
under pylons, wires, utility poles,
past warehouses, container parks,
deserted lots, between the long
oily marshes, landfill sites and swamps,
before slipping down
under the Hudson, and coming up
on the other side
to find a black wetness
of streets trashed and empty
and the city gone.
‘Try the docks. They can always use men.’
*
It was in me, burning like a coal-seam fire. The road.
Back there in Broad Cove, on the island, it was just working the mines or the boats. Taking on the habit of the old ones – the long stare out to sea – becoming like a thorn tree, twisted hard to the shape of the wind, its grain following the grain of the weather; cloth caps and tweed, ruddy, raw-boned faces, wet eyes, silences that lasted weeks; the women wringing red hands or dishcloths or the necks of chickens just to make more silence.
*
He walks. That is his name and nature.
Rows of buildings, all alike,
doors and windows, people going in, looking out;
inside – halls and stairs, halls and stairs,
and more doors, opening and closing.
Street after street of buildings, all the same.
People, all the same.
The clutter and color: everything
moving on the street, and across it, straight lines
and diagonals. Drug-stores, grocery stores,
snack joints, diners. Missions. Bars.
Blocks. Corners. Intersections.
A dropped crate or a child’s shout, or car
backfiring, and he’s in France again,
that taste in his mouth. Coins. Cordite. Blood.
So loud. And bright. No place to ease the eyes. To hide. So this is what happens between one night and the next: this is day. A never-ending rehearsal with a cast that changes all the time but never gets it right. Dropping things. Walking into each other. Tripping on the curb. Every door, every window, opening and closing, automobiles sliding past, the calls of the vendors, shrieks of children, horses and carts, trolley-cars and delivery trucks. People in a hurry, in every direction, wired to some kind of a grid. Maybe from up high you could see a plan for it all, like a model-train layout. Not down here though. Everything’s going too fast and there are too many people and cars and I’m holding on to this stop-sign because I’m frightened and I know I’m going to die.
A hard migraine of color-clash, daggering light,
and sun laid out everywhere in white flags.
Not a shadow in this world.
*
The road invisible under heavy snow: a clean and softened land, fluent and dazzling down to the ocean’s slate. The only color is the lichen clinging to twigs, bright as pollen, and back at the house, the berries of the rowan tree, one arm across the door.
*
Night.
The city’s gone.
In its place, this gray stone maze, this
locked geometry of shadows, blind and black,
and angles hurt into the sky, symmetries breaking
and snapping back into line.
The green Zs of fire-escapes; wires criss-
crossing what’s left of the light
to a tight mesh.
The buildings close
around a dead-end, then
spring open to the new future: repetition,
back-tracking, error, loss.
*
Father just stood at the door. ‘The war was one thing, but this is another. You’re the first of us to leave in a hundred and seventy years.’
*
He wanted to see this country, so he did:
the benches of Hanover Square at dawn,Fanelli’s, the Spot, the White Horse,
the parks, the pawn shops, the 15-cent diners,
the Green Door, the Marathon, the Garden Bar,
a Beekman Street archway with a drink after dark.
He’d surprise his reflection in a store window:
see the curly-haired boy with his fishing pole;
the skinny white soldier with blank eyes,
getting thinner.
He walks among ghosts.
Never sees the same face twice.
He navigated by the sun
when he could find it between the buildings, the canyons.
The subways are rivers, underground,
flash-flooding every five minutes
in a pulse of people.
People from all over, all colors, a hundred languages:
Italian, Polish, Russian, German, Yiddish,
Spanish from the Mexicans, the Puerto Ricans,
that Chinese – like a tape running backward, at speed.
People; just like him.
Having given up the country for the city,
boredom for fear, the faces
gather here in these streets
like spectators in a dream.
They wanted to be anonymous
not swallowed whole, not to disappear.
Now they spend their days on South Street
or down at the Battery, their nights
in the Bowery flophouses, the cage-hotels,
tight packed like herrings in a creel.
*
Cold as Candlemas. A skin of ice
on the water-glass by the bed
is the only thing that doesn’t shake under the rails
of the 3rd Avenue El overhead.
Through the gray net curtain,
above the tenements outside, the sky
jitters awake like a loose connection;
lightning glows behind the walls of cloud.
Somewhere, up north of here,
is the Chrysler, and the Empire State.
Somewhere south there’s Liberty.
*
Going down into the subway by the same metaled stairs
as that troop ship in Southampton: the hot churn
and thundering of the machine,
riveted corridors and halls, darkness, sudden light, dead air,
the clattering echo of footsteps on steel.
The white, unseeing eyes.
*
It was all about timing. Waiting to jump from the scramble net down the side of the merchant ship to the LCA below. Trying to find the rhythm of it: the swell of the water, the boats colliding. Your best chance was just before the landing craft slammed against the ship’s hull. Mistiming the jump meant drowning or crushing. You got it right. Picked yourself up. The steel deck slippery with vomit.
*
Up on the El, trying to keep warm
near the old pot-bellied stove
by the change-booth and turnstiles,
he liked to lean over,
watch the people seething below:
a river of hats
following a current, streaming round obstacles
then re-forming: gray and brown and black.
It came to him then.
You can never step into the same city twice.
That was it.
Living here was like trying to cross a river in spate
and he’d just found his footing,
or at least a way of looking at it – from a distance.
Close up, nothing here was beautiful,
and so much now was a close-up shot.
He needed to re-calibrate, focus on all this
new geometry, light and shadow, black and white:
take the long view. Like staring out to sea.
*
Sea-sick from the gridded streets,
the brick towers and mirrors and
black-drop canyons
he fixed, queasily,
on the steady line of Brooklyn Bridge.
He found a room, a fifth-floor walk-up on Water Street
for six dollars a week, and no down-payment needed
for the de-mobbed
with his veteran pin.
He got hired the next day in the shape-up;
found himself a box-hook and a job on the docks.
Ice webbed the wooden pilings,
the ice-spill opaque and raised
and slippery-smooth like dried glue.
Back home, the sea would be chipped granite,
shale, anthracite blue; terns sipping the waves,
cheeping low over a run of mackerel
before the whelming breach of a humpback, or a pilot whale.
*
The smell of stewed tea and wet clothes, smuts from the oil lamps, the valves in the radio like embers, glowing; the penetrating, never-ending rain – and winter, like a white door closing for six months. Skipping Mass at St Margaret’s. Gazing out over the gunmetal sea.
*
He would watch the river all day for that moment:
when the tide reaches slack
and the bottles afloat on the surface are completely still.
The slap of waves against the rocky shingle
like the distant crackle and crump
of small arms or mortars, or the flap of wet tarpaulin.
A block away, in the pearl dusk, some whore
worked-over for a dollar bill; dancing now,
face down, in the Hudson.
*
In the bath-house, where he went every week,
the usual hair and yellowed Kleenex in the shower-room’s gutter,
the Band-Aids in the pool; the usual chat
in the steam-room, sitting on the slatted wood,
no dog-tags now, just the St Christopher:
‘Hey, bud, what goes? Where you staying?’
‘The Mills. Flophouse on Bleecker – a real dump,
but it’ll do till I get things straightened out.
What about you?’
‘Got outta the joint last week. Gonna see a friend of mine.
Make a meet, y’know? Says he’s got a job for me.’
‘No kidding?
When the whole thing was over,
when we got back home,
I thought there’d be a job for me too.’
*
Then the slow retreat of winter. Spring’s advent and reprieve. You’d see drift ice from the Arctic, which sometimes passed so near you could hear the songs of the seals voyaging there on those gray shelves of ice.
*
At night, the river rolls and turns like oil
under the bridges,
in through the slips.
He walked for hours –
following the glow
in the sky uptown he’d been told
was the lights of Times Square –
his shadow moving with him
below the streetlamps: dense, tight,
very black and sharp, foreshortened, but already
starting to lengthen as he goes, attenuating
to a weak stain. Then back in
under another streetlight, shadow
darkening again, clean and hard.
Who he really is, or was,
lies somewhere in between.
*
Watching Ride the Pink Horse
then Out of the Past the same week at the Majestic:
New Mexico and Acapulco on the screen, with ice and rain outside.
The projector’s cone of light above their heads in the darkness,
the way the smoke from their cigarettes
went up into it, twisted and bloomed.
*
The hawthorn hangs like mist in the valleys. The gorse bright against the melting snow, with its smell of coconut on the high sea cliffs; the mayflower opening its sweetness in the black wood.
*
He moved to the fish market
where the work was easier, safer, the crates smaller,
and you could see those lovelies, from all down the coast:
Portland, Maine, to Cape Canaveral.
Late April, into May, was flounder, whiting, monkfish, hake,
striped bass and mackerel, and, briefly, Hudson River shad.
Shad fillet and roe from Carmine’s or Whyte’s:
the best fish he’d had in years.
One day he lifted some lobster boxes onto his barrow,
and stared at the stamp showing
MacLeod’s Point, Ingonish, N.S.
He saw the little harbor, the blue boats,
Star of the Sea, The Rover, Màire Bàn;
the old hand-woven pots.
The faces of the very fishermen.
*
The bay boiling with the capelin scull coming in, and the codfish after them – and after them the heave of whales. Like waves of black weed the small fish roll and beach, twining and flipping silver on the sand, where the women wait with their nets and baskets, on the same stretch of shore where the capelin come, each year, to spawn, to signal spring.
*
Central Park: a clearing
in this forest of stone;
a fire-gap among the ziggurats
that’s cut in living green.
In the stringency of early-morning light
he walked through a may-storm of petals,
the pink of cherry-blossom thick in the gutter
and filling every crack in the sidewalk.
He heard a sound like a slide whistle:
whoit whoit whoit whoit
and there, in that tree, unbelievably,
a red bird.
*
New York’s got just about anything you want. It’s like a market: a place where everything’s available, everything’s for sale. But it’s all finite,already disappearing. So we want it now; we have to have it now.
A cardinal. One day I’ll learn all their names.
May, 47
*
He was standing in an east-side bar, nursing a double,
when the one next to him says:
‘You see him in the corner, friend?’ pointing with his eyes.
The old guy they’re looking at is looking at the bottle
as he pours, the beer going greedy into the glass.
His face a knuckle:
tight red, white where the muscle moved;
putty-colored teeth; eyes countersunk.
‘Story is, he used to run with Maranzano.
They say he knocked a guy down once,
put a pen in his ear and kicked it home.
Then the heat came down when they got his boss
and he moved to Jersey, started as a ring-fighter,
had an act where he dressed as a fisherman,
wrestled an octopus.’
The beer is poured.
Dark vertical lines drop from the sides of his mouth
like a ventriloquist’s dummy.
As he swallows
the slot moves up and down.
The friend shakes his head. ‘Some guy.’
*
In the summer, under the slats and latticework
of the El, you see a net of sun and shadow
dice everyone like vegetables.
The drunks will wake up later, underneath: