Poetry

Heart & Company

‘plus vite … que le cœur d’un mortel’

Charles Baudelaire

Once more, fearful of missing the train,

dad taxis me to Lime Street station

and, think of that, we’re lost again

before each temporary roundabout

or work in progress, each crash barrier,

sculpture, traffic light, deviation;

we’re flummoxed by all this renovation

for the European City of Culture Year.

Out on the town, then, with a son

and family, dad’s got lost again

after one more unfamiliar

turn, caught in the wrong filter lane.

So there we are among improvements

down a brand-new, dead-end street

far as bollards, flowerbeds,

a game of penalties going on …

But now they’ve fixed my mother’s heart.

Its leaky valve’s replaced, the veins

a street map of some building site;

and there we stop to ask directions

of a crone, perhaps, all aches and pains

who keeps the till in a charity shop

and, peering, pokes a finger right

out beyond the back end of nowhere.

Evacuation Drill

‘a future only beckons beyond airspace.’

David Pascoe

When the alarm went off at Glasgow Airport,

we each trooped out to a holding area

under the noses of an Airbus or two.

Although that sky looked clear enough

for landing and take-off, as to the future

(another story altogether),

it beckoned beyond those near hill contours,

lochs, firths, braes, and the purple heather.

Topiary, lawn, red brick and sandstone,

the lengthened shadows as we banked above

were becoming by extension

all I might have lost through this —

like a faraway story of unrequited love;

from the cumulo-nimbus, one ae fond kiss …

and then its wings were engulfed in cloud cover.

Down on the tarmac before at Glasgow

there had been no kind of bomb-scare,

terrorist attack, or technical failure.

At cruising height first drinks would flow

until the entire trip started to appear

like a routine exercise, a training alarm

for the management of that hope, that fear;

for one ae fond kiss, and then whatever.

Sound Advice

            1

Like a Chinese paper orchestra

with cardboard box percussion section

now cicadas, monks’ prayer sticks,

and hammers of house carpenters

come knock-knocking through a heat haze.

Meanwhile, round us, there are whirs

and ticks from the conditioners;

then some cries of van loud speakers

bring boomed timbres, tinkling cymbals’

tacit wave-forms through still air.

Stunned from the drumming of an inner ear,

I’m advised by rustled news sheets,

martial anthems, sounding brasses

come on through this heat haze …

These too strike the note of home.

            2

Like washboards or maracas,

those chorusing cicadas

drown out even our CD player

and yet you see no source for them,

invisible creatures of the heat;

from quivering leaves, their noise

dies down as dusk encroaches.

Then you hear night change its tune

to the whisper of far crickets

or cracks from an electric storm.

When heat returns, the racket’s

back as applause at a party rally

swelling with every implausible thing

platform speakers say.

            3

But listen, down this riverside

after dark you’ll hear

mingle with the leaves and hisses

strains of practising musicians’

flutes, guitars, drums, saxophones …

The season’s terror-struck madnesses,

anxieties at being here

dissolve a moment with these traces

of flattened and diminished tones,

and all their western intervals

invite us to be gone back home.

Peter Robinson

Peter Robinson is a British poet born in Salford, Lancashire. With the exception of five years, he grew up in Liverpool. He graduated from the University of York in 1974. In the 1970s he edited the poetry magazine Perfect, bound and helped organize several Cambridge International Poetry Festivals. After teaching for the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and at the University of Cambridge, he has held various posts in Japan. This year he is returning to the UK to take up a post as professor of English and American literature at the University of Reading. He has published 8 collections of poems, including a Carcanet Selected Poems. Salt has just published a companion to his poetry, edited by Adam Piette and Katy Price ©: Details online at: Salt Publishing

His reading with Roy Fisher, in the Theatre Workshop last year, launched Route 57. We are very proud to be able to publish these three poems.