in parentheses

Recent work by Bruce Robinson appears or is forthcoming in Tar River Poetry, Spoon River, Rattle, Mantis, Two Hawks Quarterly, Berkeley Poetry Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, North Dakota Quarterly, Last Stanza, and Aji. He has raced whippets in the midwest, and is part of that stubborn undercurrent in Brooklyn that continues to root for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Work by B. Robinson has been previously featured by In Parentheses.

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Cocktail Hour at Tala Bistro

As the ice melts,
and the air above your glass
begins covertly to warm
and as Savannah offers
to top off your glass
and you put up your hand politely,
to demur, perhaps you’d feel it,

an incipient chaleur, not much warning.
No one offers ice, there should be plenty
although, its absence noticed,
one could order more. And as the water
or whatever molecules you’re cradling
begins to warm, there it slips,
the dissolution of a solid

relationship: Chemistry, 11th grade.
If your drink is darker than the ice
in your glass, it augurs worse; in summer,
on the bistro’s patio, the sun that heats the water
spikes the ice. If this is a problem
elsewhere, let’s not let it bother us here:
Make Savannah happy; order more.

Interrogations on Sunday Morning

Today’s paper offshore in the driveway
awaiting its sustenance, its subsequent
demolishment, a heaving between

the fires and the columns, those antic
unlives neither there nor time to awaken,
the paper gives me meals, I’ll let you know

how that ripeness feels, the tangerines
that woke you, avocados and peccadilloes,
shopping carts in the afterlife,

the cameras gaze at a tourist in their aisles,
zealous pilgrim in want of just what I’m,
no, a minimum purchase on this finite

horizon before the real line dims,
the question seats itself at the register,
just what to pay for, what to steal.

Birdwalk

That’s right, you don’t even have to
tell a story, not even
write a sentence, just a

couple of words put together
can be praised. Go ahead, you’ve got the cash.
Outside, even in this bitter wind,

I don’t know why, but the birds,
that’s right, back in their trees,
seem to be snickering at you.

Obladi Oblada

Ooo ee, ooo ah ah, ting tang,
walla walla bing bang, yes,
I tried that, didn’t work, don’t know

why I thought it might, figured
it was worth a try. Well, it was
wasn’t it? What did I have to lose?

What did I have at all, when you
think about it: not much.
I don’t know that I have much more

right now, and maybe I ought to use
that old phrase at least once more,
songs fall from threes, it’s not as though

that bouquet from the arboreal
dispensary held up its end of the anthem,
nor the woodcut print from the Japanese,

and while we’re on that topic, it’s not as though
they had all that much going for them either,
or so the story goes. So what does work?

Problem is, I know that’s not the sort of thing
you’ll like to tell me, so my asking
is sort of like suggesting a verse

that I’ll guess no one really cares to read,
or if not positively averse, not really
attending to, the way I let the words of others

surge right past me, Rama Lama ding dong,
dredging up a pail of sand. Here I stand,
rolling the grains in my hand as though

they were seeds that could be planted,
then letting them recede with the waves
that hastened them, which is, no, listen,

just what that song I tried to sing to you,
Rama Lam, alama lama ding dong,
the waves of that song, had thought to do.

navigationthemovie.com

Pass eastward of the first red spar buoy,
thence between hither and thither,
thence westward of the black spar buoy,
and eastward of the second
red spar buoy, and thence northward
to the port area in a bight whither
there should be (keep
constant bearing)
a recondite harbor for errant vessels.
I’d be lost without you.
Tarry.
Linger.

Accompaniment to a Hairdryer

The pastoral scene beyond my screen
displays a ride-on mower and a lawn,
across the street a chainsaw yawns
simple surgery like syrup on a tree.

You’d think there’d be a constant drone
but that’s not so, as far as I can tell,
scything permutations of the mower,
rasps of a lopped-off limb, susurrations

of a love-starved engine, even with the
windows closed, and soon the door as well.
Violins in the morning well before
the opening bell, no thought to any breath

we’ll hazard, as long as we may take one:
inside the cats are quiet, drowsy, no more
apple carts to empty, no more dishes
to employ. No thought to any close impending,

or so I suppose, they’ll be well done
of all of this before too long. That’s how
I think the story goes.

Rupestrian
The sure extinction that we travel to…

Once past Chambers you’re almost there, fourteenth
twenty-third, thirty-fourth Penn, only as long
as we can stand our ground. No more

than the tunnel of Penn, you know, its fetid
air, rebuke on a wall, and simpler
to mourn than the stops you used to call

your family. Is that the way each ticket rides,
its adult fare, the slowdown on the tracks
a pediment, what thou lov’st well

is less than clear, a flicker, then a right of way,
a lantern then a windowpane, a loop
of film that spins too fast to care,

an uptown stop you pass right by, your mind
in some rearranged way occupied,
under the world or above it all,

the window closing, the open air?
Was I once lost? The route’s not clear but
those must be my hands on that wall.

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