Embedded Files
LITTLE METANOPOLIS
1. Italian Front
Bright remnant glacial streaks
striating mountain peaks
topped in cloud-plume caps!
Life’s ancient griefs and losses
come back to us if snow
and ice give up their dead.
Soldiers perfectly preserved
from their three years’ war
emerge, still, in the Veneto
from this long ago!
2. Wayside Shrine
Virgins in their wayside shrines
and slope-roofed crucifixes
on weathered wooden stakes
haunt paths towards high skylines
with you exclaiming, far below,
at cyclamen and gentians
or rarer species of wild orchid
amongst the forest pines.
3. Kawa-no-Kami
Nature’s fighting back for us –
so you announce to sounds
of a torrent’s double waterfall
pouring through the trees;
we approach it over stones
brought down by one more flood
(you honouring its river god
in a scrap of Japanese).
4. Agip Village
Enrico Mattei himself still gazes
in effigy, a suit and tie,
this place’s visionary genius
on his plinth among the trees.
Arms folded, after that suspicious
airplane crash he’s taking in
four hundred and eighty or so
wood and concrete chalets
built for ENI employees –
such as the man behind his bar
at an Agip petrol station
when taken aback, being taken back,
she and I came in from the storm,
wet through, near fifty years ago.
5. Rome 1975
An elongated shadow –
it might be old de Chirico
at the Café Greco!
6. Fifties Interior
Like stepping right into a childhood
image of the modern –
an economic miracle
dependent on cheap oil –
I’m taken aback, being taken back
to utility-Bauhaus furniture
in an open plan machine
for living with its picture window:
a Dolomites mountain profile
leaf-canopy down below.
7. On the Balcony
Basking lizards visit me
on the wood-slatted balcony
where a song thrush plummeted
jamming beak and little head,
its speckled breast gone inwards
between two of the boards …
Yet it stays, half-heartedly thrown,
on a tree’s close-packed leaf cover
as if attempting one last flight
before it meets the ground.
8. Landslide
Great boulders by the roadside,
a parked car drowned in mud –
that rain-bomb-loosened landslide
half cuts us off and blocks for days
Via Enrico Mattei –
now a track through part-cleared sludge
lined with dirtied pines:
no heading north towards Cortina
as diggers, earthmovers, a fire truck
work to reopen the Strada Alemagna
severed once more by another landslide
– when, heaven help us, no one died.
9. Borca di Cadore
These mountain valleys, no,
no sunsets as light disappears:
a cuckoo in the evening.
10. Rain Curtain
After that night’s forked lightning
and rockfall siren sounding
now the sun shines through a rain
curtain with its glinting beads
in droplets and the rhythm
of that falling like a song
helps us keep our fears hidden
as the sudden shower eases
heat and moves our day along.
11. Church Militant
But I can’t get out of my mind’s
eye that steel and concrete church
in ’50s blockhouse style:
its bell tower’s half the pole
for another of those mobile
phone masts; its interior
(high-ceilinged musty A-frame)
has an altar, font, confessional,
a crucifix and virgin of its own –
oh brutalist church militant
alone, abandoned in the pines!
12. For my Daughters
after Joshua Reynolds, 1761
Not far from Titian’s birthplace
in Pieve di Cadore,
what was it about lake water lapping,
lapping on a valley floor?
After its verges’ precipitous slopes
on switchback mountain roads,
down here, I find myself again
being on the level
accompanied along a gravel
path by more paired butterflies;
yes, here I am like David Garrick
upheld between the tragic
and comic sense of life.
They’re helping me along this track
with ripples’ background sonatina
on our stroll in cleared, cleaner
air, although I’m bound to humour
Melpomene’s lofty profile
or frown at Thalia’s smile –
her pulling me back into place
between them, strolling forward,
hung on their every word.
Dear girls, I need you equally
and, no, cannot adjudicate
between you, being loath
to take sides, no, don’t have the heart
to say who might be in the right
and wouldn’t try, to tell the truth;
dear girls, no, couldn’t even start,
because I love you both.
Peter Robinson's new collection is Blind Summits to be published by Shearsman Books in early 2027. The Peter Robinson Archive: Recollections, Tributes, Explorations ed. Katherine Meehan and Vic Pickup is published by Two Rivers Press to coincide with its opening at University of Reading Special Collections in November 2026.
Copyright © 2026 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.
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