GRATUITY

In the low bad mood of gratuity
you had not suffered and you saw this
with some clarity. Blurred chartreuse willows
fork and bend with hawthorn competition
hard coin of sun behind clouds, black stalks,
and the ground itself unfolding.

This is the rhythm of that departure,
played over again and again. Stars
with slightest footwork scrape the flanks
and shiver to be held, pale white cabbage
in the economic night.

I came into this year with premonitions,
hands knotted in latent spring-like measure.

But I’ll never be ready, and I’ll always
be surprised. Pain also fades.

Call off the supernumeraries.
Call off the dog handlers and their dogs.

Don’t you love your art like you did
when starting out?

It lifts your head from the desk,
it brings us eyelash to eyelash
shoving our face in the earth.

Cranelights flicker and ring out one by one,
giddy with prescriptions and recipes.

The air, too, shakes in fluent discipline.
Your crepuscular license has expired.

CLOSED LOOP

The pristine day is filling up. You think
I can bury my head in it, passive customs,
making sound decisions for us both.

I heard it sail over my head: laughter,
nervous birdsong, weak sequence of tissue
and ribcage.

You can splash the water with your face,
place your hand against the surface
feeling less and less amazed
at what gets saved and what gets lost
in the jaws of definite lustre.

So blue behind the sun behind the railings
I whispered my own name, my details,
to get the sound key, cooled-off
but not yet funny.

The pristine day sinks deepest
in the deeper work to do.

The winter oaks.

The winter blue.

Luke Roberts is the author of Home Radio (2021), Glacial Decoys (2021) and other works of poetry and prose. He recently co-edited books by Cecilia Vicuña and by Mark Hyatt. With Amy Tobin he runs the small press Distance No Object. He lives in London.