The Wrecking Light Read Online Free PDF

to seed.
I take a last look at the yellow trees,
a last look at the brown, and I hear the sound
of old leaves under my feet
and the low noise of water.
    I have found the place I wasn't meant to find.
The shallow creek, churning
its red and silver secrets:
failed salmon, bearded with barbs,
riding each other down;
the shore lined with baby pigeons, animals
birthing, others coming back to die.
Placenta and bones in the undergrowth,
in the clearing, in the places of drowning.
Jellyfish have taken to the woods;
mussels rope the tree-trunks.
I watch a fish flip on a thorn
in a pester of flies, one eye fixed on mine.
    The wood stretched behind me, now full
of my own kind, those
who have stepped through my shadow;
a life's-worth of women in the forest corridor,
faces turned to the bark. The rows of lovers.
Mother and sister. Wife. And my daughters,
walking away into the blue distance,
turning their heads to look back.
    Hung on a silver birch, my school cap
and satchel; next to them, the docken suit,
and next to that, pinned to a branch,
my lost comforter —
a piece of blanket worn to the size of my hand.
My hand as a boy. The forgotten smell of it,
the smell of myself.
And something is moving, something
held down by stones, and one by one
I see the dead unbury themselves
and take their places by the seated corpse
whose face I seem to know.
He was shivering.
It's cold,
I said.
He looked up at me and nodded,
It's cold.

What is this place? What brings you here?
This is my home, we replied.

MIDDLE WATCH, HAMMERSMITH
    He switches off the fridge
just to sit and watch
the hardness of the iced-up
ice-box start to drip,
its white block
loosening like a tooth.

LANDFALL
    The fishboxes
of Fraserburgh, Aberdeen,
Peterhead, the wood that broke
on your beach, crates that once held herring,
freshly dead, now hold distance, nothing but the names
of the places I came from, years ago;
and you pull me from the waves,
drawing me out like a skelf,
as I would say:
a splinter.

CALLING HOME
after Tomas Tranströmer
    Our phonecall spilled out into the dark
and glittered between the countryside and the town
like the mess of a knife-fight.
Afterwards, all night jittery and spent in the hotel bed,
I dreamt I was the needle in a compass
some orienteer bore through the forest with a spinning heart.

ICTUS
for Tomas Tranströmer
    I find myself at your side, turning the pages
for you — haltingly — with my wrong hand,
while you play those delicate, certain notes
without effort, sounding a long
free line through the sea-lanes on the skiff
of
your
wrong hand, the left,
your only moving hand,
your whole right side snowbound.
    Who would swap the hammer
for the hammer-blow, the seasons
for this wintering life, that
lethal fold in time? No one I know.
But there are those who can make an art
of setting a logan-stone rocking
here in'Södermalm, or learn the perfect
stress of lines, and ferry-times, by heart.
    I find I can suddenly read the score, know
when to turn the page: cack-handed,
my dull heart-tick always indicating left.
Sunlight squares the room
and I am snowblind. You slip away
on the wind. Your grandfather,
the pilot, stares out over the archipelago
from his solid wooden frame.

THE UNWRITTEN LETTER
after Montale
    Only this? Those shivers at first-light, this succession
of moments, thread after thin thread — hours, years
drawn into the curve of a life — is this it? That pair
of dolphins, circling with their young, do they only
leap and tumble for a few hours, a few days? No,
I don't want to hear from you,
don't want to see your eyes.
There's more to life than this.
    I can't dive, can't reappear; night's red
pyrotechnics are running late, the evening drags,
all prayer is hopeless, the message
in its bottle hasn't made it through the rocks.
The empty waves smash open
on the point at Finisterre.

BEGINNING TO GREEN
    I find a kind of hope here, in this
homelessness, in this place
where no one knows me —
where I'll be gone, like