Robin Robertson
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Robin Robertson (Britain, 1955)
The Wrecking Light (2010) [p] + 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 birthdayparty guests – this smoke in the emulsion, the flaw. A ghost is there; the ghost gets up to go. From "Signs on a White Field" 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 gun or a dropped plank, as if the whole lake has snapped in two and the world will follow, falling into fracture. 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, deep and percussive as a muffled giant drum. 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 blue-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 learned how to fly. merging, turning, as all women turn, back into my daughters, and I am swimming naked at night, off the island, in the witch-fire of mareld light, listening to the silence of the stars, with my children beside me, my beautiful lost children, in the swell of the night, swimming beside me. ... And out, out into the swinging dark, a moon of mercury, lines of vitriol trees and the loose earth that rises up, drops on me, burying me, night after night after night. Swithering (2006) [p] |
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