Via Gellia

1. COME TO THE PARTY 

Setting the table for a cold-cuts lunch, 

I placed one chair too many. 

You put it down to my two faces, 

selves, whatever, both of me 

wanting a portion of that feast. 

Likely. But the place was also 

for those others, yours or mine, 

who couldn’t make it, were delayed, 

partakers of the common fate – 

the absent ones, the late, for whom, 

hapless, a place has been laid. 

2. A MAN COULD STAND UP

but only with the help of that contraption 

lifting you out of your pharaonic state, 

and daily carers who would move you 

from chair to bed and back again – 

where now you’re instructing me through 

Joe Sullivan ‘knocking the bejabbers’ 

out of ‘Squeeze Me’ on Jazz Casual. 

When asked to play it Joe just says: ‘Can do!’ 

3. WELL HEAD 

Being nourished by the dead 

who keep us company, 

there, at a well-kept well head, 

wind-buffeted now I see 

how the waters disappear 

underground to re-emerge 

years later and, come here 

to this sun-struck village 

bowled through with crisped grey leaves 

torn from stubborn trees 

on skylines, can trace graves’ 

lichen-deep asperities.

4. A SUDDEN TOAST 

Mildewed branches in a window frame, 

I see them, come back to the party, 

now one of our own stands up, glass raised, 

invites those gathered to remember 

another from our number 

whose death would bring us back together … 

Then with his words there came 

a cardinal compass-point weathervane 

aslant and, no ghosts in that house, 

Four Ways, past Glutton Bridge 

beside the springs of Dove. 

5. THE MANIFOLD 

For now though spring is here, a hole 

opens in the landscape, like a gap 

to squeeze through, opens up 

between grey walling capstones – 

recompense for that last gasp. 

Daylight’s lengthened shadows 

are pointing to a presence 

in the Manifold’s many-fold colours, 

all of them awoken, startled, 

at light effects, uninterrupted blue 

along bud-tinted branches. 

6. YOUR GARDEN 

Driving the Via Gellia again, 

fresh darkness around each corner 

leads us into them, alone, 

then we’re as quickly gone. 

You’ve taken a lead from your garden 

leaving home, as on a skyline 

branches caught in the curving screen 

form a crosstree skeleton – 

a hair-like profile backlit by the sun.

You’ve taken a leaf from your garden 

languishing, revisited by daffodils, 

and, Roy, got clean away. 

Published in Retrieved Attachments (Two Rivers Press, 2023).

Peter Robinson has published aphorisms, prose poems, short stories, fiction and literary criticism. For some of his poetry and translations he has been awarded the Cheltenham Prize, the John Florio Prize, and two Poetry Book Society Recommendations. Recent publications include Retrieved Attachments (Reading: Two Rivers Press, 2023) and, with Roberta Antognini, the Collected Poems of Giorgio Bassani (New York: Agincourt Press, 2023).

Copyright © 2024 by Peter Robinson, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author