I SILVERED WATER ALBUM I am almost never there, in these 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. SIGNS ON A WHITE FIELD The sun's hinge on the burnt horizon has woken the sealed lake, leaving a sleeve of sound. No wind, just curved plates of air re-shaping under the trap-ice, straining to give; the groans and rumbles like someone shifting heavy tables far below. I snick a stone over the long sprung deck to get the dobro's glassy note, the crying slide of a bottleneck, its tremulous ululation to the other shore. The rocks are ice-veined; the trees swagged with snow. Here and there, a sudden frost has caught some turbulence in the water and made it solid: frozen in its distress to a scar, or a skin-graft. Everywhere, frost-heave has jacked up boulders clear of the surface, and the ice-shove has piled great slabs on the lake-edge like luggage tumbled from a carousel. A racket of jackdaws, the serrated call of a falcon as I walk out onto the lake. A living lens of ice; you can hear it bending, 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 dropped plank, as if the whole lake has snapped in two and the world will follow. 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, like a muffled giant drum. I hear the lake all night as a distant war. In the morning's brightness I brush the snow off with a glove, smooth down a porthole in the crust and find, somehow, the living green beneath. The green leaf looks back, and sees a man walking out in this shuddering light to the sound of air under the ice, out onto the lake, among sun-cups, snow penitents: a drowned man, waked in this weathering ground. BY CLACHAN BRIDGE for Alasdair Roberts I remember the girl with the hare-lip down by Clachan Bridge, cutting up fish to see how they worked; by morning's end her nails were black red, her hands all sequined silver. She unpuzzled rabbits to a rickle of bones; dipped into a dormouse for the pip of its heart. She'd open everything, that girl. They say they found wax dolls in her wall, poppets full of human hair, but I'd say they're wrong. What's true is that the blacksmith's son, the simpleton, came down here once and fathomed her. Claimed she licked him clean as a whistle. I remember the tiny stars 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 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 found how to fly. TULIPS Sifting sand in the Starsign Hotel on 96th and Madison, trying not to hear the sirens: the heart's fist, desire's empty hand. The room awash with its terrible light; a sky unable to rain. Cradling a glass of nothing much at all, it's all come down to this: the electric fan's stop-start - the stalled, half-circle twist of draught over the bed; the sea-spill of sheets, the head in storm. Look at what's beached here on the night-stand: a flipped photograph and a silk scarf, a set of keys. These tulips, loosening in a vase. Excerpted from The Wrecking Light by Robin Robertson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
