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His head’s a secret train-set in the attic:
quiet, straightforward, always summer.
The cattle in their fields of baize,
the postman on his bike,
the green sponge trees
by the papier-mâché tunnel, the children
forever waving their stiff handkerchiefs
at the trains that are always on time.
Copyright © 2022 by Robin Robertson. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 4, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
after Baudelaire
The men would sometimes try to catch one, throwing a looped wire at the great white cross that tracked their every turn, gliding over their deep gulfs and bitter waves: the bright pacific albatross. Now, with a cardboard sign around his neck, the king of the winds stands there, hobbled: head shorn, ashamed; his broken limbs hang down by his side, those huge white wings like dragging oars. Once beautiful and brave, now tarred, unfeathered, this lost traveller is a bad joke; a lord cut down to size. One pokes a muzzle in his mouth; anothe
Still sleepwalking through her life,
I wrap her up
and we go through the snow that fell all night
and all through this Christmas morning:
her trainers barely denting the whitened lawn, her
two strides for every stride of mine.
The slow-grained slide to embed the blade of the key is a sheathing, a gliding on graphite, pushing inside to find the ribs of the lock. Sunk home, the true key slots to its matrix; geared, tight-fitting, they turn together, shooting the spring-lock, throwing the bolt. Dactyls, iambics-- the clinch of words--the hidden couplings in the cased machine. A chime of sound on sound: the way the sung note snibs on meaning and holds.