JAMES ROBISON

A Temper


I

Up from sea glass to meet its
Twin down from clouds, a white wire
Splits the world, cracking it,
Because fury mirrors fury.
 
     
II

The fist crushed your lines, tangled them
From Pantagruel, pasta, quinine, Valour
To snippets of spit, spat, nibe, um
Threads, truncated, snargled.
 

III

Her nerve is lovely, her audacity, and
How her sovereignty ends with everything orange,
Pinked, livid, aroused and drowsy;
A Turner where velocity spins up only memories.
 

IV

One January night in front of the
Intercontinental in Paris, the battering rain,
The hammering rain on Rue de Castiglione,
Before golden glass, turned to snow.
     
 
V

Flowering snow in fountains of moth flight,
A moonless breath, like hearing forgiveness,
Making a multifarious, smoothing case for
Shrugging them off: grudges, politics, wrongs.
 

Vl

She wins. With her detailed back, her
Fall of hair, the clarity of her eye,
She will win. Gray eyed. The curl
Of her, its calm, its comprehensive cool












image: James Robison































James Robison has published stories in The New Yorker, won a Whiting Grant for his short fiction and a Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his first novel. His work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, and Grand Street. He has poetry and prose forthcoming or published in The Manchester Review, Story Quarterly, The Northwest Review, The Montreal Review, The Raleigh Review, and elsewhere. He taught for eight years at the University of Houston's Creative Writing Program, was Visiting Writer at Loyola College of Maryland, was Fiction Editor of The North Dakota Quarterly and was 2011 Visiting Artist at The University of Southern Mississippi.