Four Poems by Peter Robinson
"those days before that news."
The Truth in New York
‘where truth lies on its deathbed’
Frank O’Hara
Like joining the dots in still chilly March air see that faded ad on a high-rise wall for Blank & Co Men’s Neckwear gone out of business all those decades ago. Just walking around, we pause and stare at a beggar’s cardboard: ‘I feel invisible’— unlike St Francis by Bellini at the Frick showing his projective stigmata, a donkey tethered amongst those abstract rocks piled to a hillsides’ sun-caught citadel like water-tank-crowded rooftops here and speaking of the truth, as you were, the naked truth, according to Rembrandt or trompe l’œil billets doux, the truth of your senses in a New York Times billboard, just walking around, it was everywhere, the truth like something back in fashion after a season at Exchange & Mart. So, tell me, why would this buying and selling need to be governed, as never before, by the truth? Oh, that would be telling.
March 2017
Coincidences in New York
for Anna Saroldi
Now by park benches at Madison Square amongst these oddly familiar things like the Flatiron in need of repair, you would eventually find us beside that piece of found-art sculpture— an industrial crane on its side with one caterpillar track in the air … and though New York’s not the city of our childhoods so we remain at its margins— are strangers likewise over rutted cobblestones— because of all the kindness shown and taking in of huddled, tired from any- and everywhere, you’ll strike that note with your ‘Che follia!’ for us to be meeting even here.
NY Haikai
for Miko Nakai
Penn Station
Beyond the NJ Transit line
sunlight is stencilling chimneys
against a warmth-filled sky.
The High Line
By track beds, plantings, token points,
towards us restless faces come
through swarms of smutty pigeons.
West Village
Dusk’s red glow between Hoboken
skyscrapers extends
as far as Charles Lane’s cobblestones.
Young Shadows
after Louise Nevelson
Its low relief made of driftwood, wrack,
the planking from a burnt-out shack,
she’s assembled on the wall and painted black.
Seashell
With an ear to the hotel’s air-con all night,
it’s as if at the corner of 31st and Madison
I can hear the Hudson or Long Island Sound.
Passer
Our meetings on three continents—
fleeting as that single sparrow
flitting to the sidewalk’s metalled edges.
Unfolding
For when you’ve to go you’ve got to go
and from a lowered taxi window
how you wave goodbye!
Columbus Circle
But now we’re footsore and in need of a yellow cab to take us downtown after strolling up Broadway like Luciano Erba, shown in a circuit the hollowed-out façades and neon by Ernesto Cardenal … Still my take on it is not the world— but sensing that, you can glimpse unfold a future’s anxious days, its fates, though no longer setting the world to rights with your Pindaric flights— who’ve still not had enough of Frank O’Hara, Elizabeth Bishop and Langston Hughes or the truth of things, things as they are, come fall’s deep blankness through turned leaves those days before that news.
November 2024
