Peter Robinson
RETRIEVED ATTACHMENTS
1. IMAGINARY PORTRAIT
That cream Formica table’s surface,
plates with flakes of pastry, cups,
a poorly printed anthology between us
were stage props in your narrative
of fluid gestures, sullied things.
Set against grey aperture façades
opposite, an intervening street,
its traffic dust, grime, hot summer haze,
your face’s depth shaped an open window,
lips moved by moving words.
2. TRAVEL WRITER
Inwards, the ordinary things
of life you seemed to praise
in a depth of night, Havana,
its dollar shops and shortages
realized in that haze.
Helpful, you’d supplied the need
and want friends pressed upon you
being moved to laugh or pity,
later, anger at the manner
your travelogue was travestied.
3. YOU TOO
At hesitant words, elusively opaque,
I saw the London daylight deepen:
expecting to be strangled there
you too had let it happen,
now let your violated body speak –
which, wanting, so unsettled me,
whilst tolerance of his mistake
also lay behind your look.
4. BEING EARNEST
Remember, all that we could say
when, kneeling, I proposed to you
and kissed, embraced you in that play.
The shame you knew, it was a shame,
your face’s depth in an open window
accepting its wooden frame.
TO THE STREETS
‘We are all in the gutter, but some
of us are looking at the stars.’
Oscar Wilde
Between the power-architecture’s
columned stone façades,
these would-be architects of change
come strolling past the black-cast sculptures,
slow-moved figures, contre-jour,
their outlines etched in sun.
*
Low-angled, raked beams show
under helicopter cameras
native wit, satiric rhymes,
the ‘fat cheques’ fact checks’ or ‘vote love’ –
those banners’ punning slogans
against the day, the times …
*
It’s a sunny day in autumn, time
to make a fresh account of
disaffections, or the value
in that ‘gutter … at the stars’
allusion with its yellow symbols
on a field of blue!
*
They want an end to Fortress Europe’s
hapless continental system,
its ten austere years,
and, look, I’m in this mass of persons
uplifted down Pall Mall, through club-land,
as if it were Remainia’s
*
no-place, a twelve-star state of mind,
good neighbours without fences –
and since the politicians
have made their mess of Brexit,
it’s like just we, some of the people,
have a chance to fix it …
*
But now the flags are furled away
and along side streets, dispersing
peacefully, what’s left of day
is filled with stalled alternatives,
scenarios and, pausing,
uncertainties before us
*
rise through turquoise distances
in vapour trails, rose-tinged high cirrus,
a variegated later light
flashed through this vast metropolis
as its airy, red-sky promise
leads on to cloudy night.
SPECULATIVE
for Roberta Antognini
Among those moments not to be repeated,
some weren’t even meant, as when
I missed our meeting at the Bahnhof Trefpunkt
by an hour, sharp, then waited
in a café at the heart of the banking district
surrounded by everything I hated –
its polished chrome, aromas, and the scent
of money buying time, being spent
on rendezvous and assignation …
and if, embarrassed, ashamed, no longer
able, it seemed, to keep an appointment,
I was haunted, a step from Paradeplatz,
by false accusations and to pass the time
in my head translated
a poem set outside Pessoa’s famous café
near the Baixa-Chiado business quarter,
till my elder daughter could escape
her bank desk for a moment to assure me …
then I saw, settling up to head back home,
our persons both distorted in that chrome.
1. IMAGINARY PORTRAIT
That cream Formica table’s surface,
plates with flakes of pastry, cups,
a poorly printed anthology between us
were stage props in your narrative
of fluid gestures, sullied things.
Set against grey aperture façades
opposite, an intervening street,
its traffic dust, grime, hot summer haze,
your face’s depth shaped an open window,
lips moved by moving words.
2. TRAVEL WRITER
Inwards, the ordinary things
of life you seemed to praise
in a depth of night, Havana,
its dollar shops and shortages
realized in that haze.
Helpful, you’d supplied the need
and want friends pressed upon you
being moved to laugh or pity,
later, anger at the manner
your travelogue was travestied.
3. YOU TOO
At hesitant words, elusively opaque,
I saw the London daylight deepen:
expecting to be strangled there
you too had let it happen,
now let your violated body speak –
which, wanting, so unsettled me,
whilst tolerance of his mistake
also lay behind your look.
4. BEING EARNEST
Remember, all that we could say
when, kneeling, I proposed to you
and kissed, embraced you in that play.
The shame you knew, it was a shame,
your face’s depth in an open window
accepting its wooden frame.
TO THE STREETS
‘We are all in the gutter, but some
of us are looking at the stars.’
Oscar Wilde
Between the power-architecture’s
columned stone façades,
these would-be architects of change
come strolling past the black-cast sculptures,
slow-moved figures, contre-jour,
their outlines etched in sun.
*
Low-angled, raked beams show
under helicopter cameras
native wit, satiric rhymes,
the ‘fat cheques’ fact checks’ or ‘vote love’ –
those banners’ punning slogans
against the day, the times …
*
It’s a sunny day in autumn, time
to make a fresh account of
disaffections, or the value
in that ‘gutter … at the stars’
allusion with its yellow symbols
on a field of blue!
*
They want an end to Fortress Europe’s
hapless continental system,
its ten austere years,
and, look, I’m in this mass of persons
uplifted down Pall Mall, through club-land,
as if it were Remainia’s
*
no-place, a twelve-star state of mind,
good neighbours without fences –
and since the politicians
have made their mess of Brexit,
it’s like just we, some of the people,
have a chance to fix it …
*
But now the flags are furled away
and along side streets, dispersing
peacefully, what’s left of day
is filled with stalled alternatives,
scenarios and, pausing,
uncertainties before us
*
rise through turquoise distances
in vapour trails, rose-tinged high cirrus,
a variegated later light
flashed through this vast metropolis
as its airy, red-sky promise
leads on to cloudy night.
SPECULATIVE
for Roberta Antognini
Among those moments not to be repeated,
some weren’t even meant, as when
I missed our meeting at the Bahnhof Trefpunkt
by an hour, sharp, then waited
in a café at the heart of the banking district
surrounded by everything I hated –
its polished chrome, aromas, and the scent
of money buying time, being spent
on rendezvous and assignation …
and if, embarrassed, ashamed, no longer
able, it seemed, to keep an appointment,
I was haunted, a step from Paradeplatz,
by false accusations and to pass the time
in my head translated
a poem set outside Pessoa’s famous café
near the Baixa-Chiado business quarter,
till my elder daughter could escape
her bank desk for a moment to assure me …
then I saw, settling up to head back home,
our persons both distorted in that chrome.
© Copyright Peter Robinson 2020
Peter Robinson is Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Reading and poetry editor for Two Rivers Press. He has published books of aphorisms, prose poems, short stories, fiction and literary criticism, as well as many collections of poetry and translation, for some of which he has been awarded the Cheltenham Prize, the John Florio Prize, and two Poetry Book Society Recommendations. Shearsman Books publish his Collected Poems (2017). The Sound Sense of Poetry appeared from CUP in 2018, and a psycho-geographical homage to Robinson Crusoe entitled The Constitutionals from Two Rivers Press in 2019. His most recent book of poetry is Bonjour Mr Inshaw (2020), a tribute to the painter, also from Two Rivers Press. Retrieved Attachments is the putative title for a supplement to his Collected Poems currently being assembled. This is his fourth appearance in Molly Bloom.