Robin Robertson

The sides of the hill are stubbed with fire-pits. The sky is paraffin blue.

A pigeon’s heart swings here on the kissing-gate, withered, stuck through with pins,

while out on the estuary, beaks of birds needle to the wind’s compass,

the sky’s protocol. Swans go singing out to sea; the weather is changing cold.

...

The estate at dawn hangs like smoke; the forest

drawn in grainy bands of smeared, cross-hatched,

illegible trees: a botched photocopy of itself.

Swamp maple, sugar maple, red and white oak; first light lifts

the pale yellow flare of a beech tree’s papery leaves.

Where are you going?What on earth’s the time?

A salting of snow, blown across the white table of the lake:

thrown leaves...

The impatience for summer is desire: ritual, imbedded hard as a hinge in the earth’s mesh. From the papery bulb, the spurred, flesh-green horn pushes, straining for air; flexes its distended, perfect, cleft muscle out and up through the crust.

Then the deeper sleep of August, ninety degrees of hanging fire: the yellow lawns, the blighted flowerless trees, the malformed leaves sticky...

Still as a battlefield, the strewn citygoes under, slips into silhouette.Some threads of smoke,the lift and fall of flags in orange light.The glinting windows go out one by one.

Low over the Firth, a fork of geesecomes pulling past, straight-necked:creaking like rowlocksover the frozen hill.On the Parthenon below, querulous gullsscreel and skraik and peel away,bickering,...

Edinburgh burns below us, this blazing day where flame’s invisible, a dark wave lapping at the petrol’s grain, as the fire-eaters assuage their thirst. The fanned embers of the city rustle like the wrappers of sweets; heat tinkering in the coal. Sitting under the colonnade, we are so close we almost touch.

Tumblers flip and flex, desultory on the dry grass; gulls channer in the...