By Peter Robinson.

‘We must not expend all our limited resources
trying to make water flow uphill.’

Come to think of it, the sky,
our big estuary sky
between one Christmas and New Year:
cloud cover all an off-whiteness,
blown plumes billow from far cooling towers;
now the bridge rises before us,
we’re lifted above wide expanses of space;
and, look, terrace housetops,
refineries, the water
separating Runcorn from Widnes
and sandbanks exposed at low tide, today,
form in an infinitely various
livery of grey …

Similarly high, come to think of it again,
there we were, suspended in glass,
crossing the solicitor’s office space when
gone to sign those documents …
A riverfront greyness below,
we’d carried our untidy lives
from blustery street level, cluttering their atrium,
to a sight of cargo vessels
moored along the Wirral shore,
its ferry boats plying back and forth as before.

Everywhere recalled, come to think of it again,
there’s always someone reminiscent
of a Rembrandt in old age —
behind his head, more clouded
skylines, flamed refineries,
and that house across the water,
its glints of windows in a dusk
looking back at us, as were his patient eyes.

Then the flow of money, come to think of it again,
with immigrants and emigrants
swarming on these waters,
I could sense them as we signed,
were tied in legal ribbon
here with memorials of this city
(ship models in their cases)
aground on its ebb tide.
Then we managed our descent to the grey outside.

Absurdly useful, come to think of it again,
poetry down those avenues
drawn from valve murmurs in the poor trees,
their wind-twitched branches, stirred
rhythms of a labouring heart,
was offering its words,
its advice about how to survive —
given what’s occurred,
and Liverpool stretched out below your ward’s
beeping life supports I heard.

But, leaving, come to think of it again,
still I glimpse the seagulls’
flocks of white flecks feeding
over exposed sandbanks,
can see the dripping trees
with calligraphic bark, boles, branches
and the water flow uphill
at extremes of windscreen wipers
when driven off towards
the bridge down this same city’s boulevards.

♦

Peter Robinson‘s most recent collection of poems is The Returning Sky (Shearsman Books), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation in 2012. In 2013 he published Foreigners, Drunks and Babies: Eleven Stories (Two Rivers Press) and a chapbook of new poems, Like the Living End (Worple Press).

Portfolio: This is one of six new poems published in June 2013 in the Fortnightly Review.