Three Poems by Michael Symmons Roberts

Wunderkammer

Were it not for their pins, these specimens
– bluebottles, beetle-gems, puffed-up bees –
would flitter in their shallow,
glass-topped drawer,
or so goes the illusion,

like the mutter of an old projector
running one last film, its final frame a dragonfly,
more solid than the rest,
its shoulder stripes’ pale ochre,
its welded ten-piece chassis,
posed as latent flight,
in that split-second before taking off,
only to be let down by its wings.
Who cares? Let them shiver into dust.

Outside, mayflies on strings bob
on parked cars’ roofs, a mile from any river,
but they shine – all sex and fury –
mouthless icons of brevity, these dayflies,
driven by an overwhelming purpose,
fierce in their eternity.

A Winter Inventory

One light left on in the smallest of hours.
A figure behind frosted glass,
reckoning up the comings and goings.

The dark outside is growing crystals.
Longer you look, more you see:

a stunted cactus on the windowsill,
metronome of gutter drips,
broken sycamore embossed on sky.

Beyond the garden, over our fence,
the local school, abandoned, has run wild:

playground seized by moss,
climbing frame by brambles now in fruit,
sports field turned savanna,

goalposts upturned by the grasses,
crossbars like frames of sunken ships.

Thistles burst through tarmac,
nettles up the climbing wall,
desire paths cut by badgers, looters, cats.

More of us were born than ever died.
We still keep our noses ahead of them.

Eurasian Blackbird

You dark of plumage,
darker still of voice,
denizen of deepest wildwoods,

you who drew yourself
through countless generations
into gardens and suburban parks

primeval singer with a modern
repertoire, you showy,
you sassy, you spindrift,

you priest who starts an evensong
across this continent
in spring, you sunbather

on dry-baked lawns,
splayed like a broken paper fan,
cat’s crime scene,

you whose eye I must not
catch for fear of being pulled in
through the halo

then your honeycomb iris
into the negative space
where a pupil should be,

where you hold the old woods,
dense and slow with song:
all beasts, shadows, shafts of sun

distilled into a ripe full-stop.
If you scare now while I’m in there
I will never leave.

Michael Symmons Roberts’ ninth collection of poems – Dog Star – is published by Cape in February. His nonfiction book – Quartet for the End of Time: on Music, Grief and Birdsong – was published last year.