Bruce Robinson

ALEMBIC

It’s raining. It’s pouring. A car is
idling beside a swamp field
somewhere beyond the turnpike.
It has no lights, but there’s smoke
from the field, smoke from the exhaust,

the smoke is visible

even without the light of multiple impressions,
the trunk’s closed, it had been open,
now it’s closed. You’ve got two guys
standing around, their boots staining in the marl,
they’re watching without much interest
the last bubbles popping from the bog.

One of them coughs.


Bruce reads "Alembic":



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Bruce confesses: "Most of what we read about Iron Age cadavers who apparently met violent deaths describes bodies discovered in the peat bogs of northern Europe; I’ve reconfigured the ritual as covert disposal of a corpse in, go figure, New Jersey. Far less romantic. I’d read about bog people well before the PBS documentary, yet the idea that many bog bodies are well preserved never bothered me as I buried my own. I guess if a body’s not discovered, it doesn’t matter that it hasn’t decayed."

Recent work by BRUCE ROBINSON appears or is forthcoming in Mobius, Pangyrus, The Menteur, Connecticut Poetry Review, and Common Ground.