Shearsman 51 Robin Fulton Three Poems On The Death of Werner Aspenström The life-stories: insistent and many-tongued as the routes invented by highland rain through heather. There's no silence. The one-tongued river agrees. One of the stories has just stopped. His poems don't notice. I think of them as standing- stones whose dead weight is weightless. They are outside language now. By day they shed a darkness. By night they illuminate those who have lost sight of day. Even the fluent river can't interrupt their silence.   Watercolour Four verticals, unsupported slabs balanced on air, misty openings in a non-wall, or sky samples each with all the shades of a grey rainbow. Cloudscapes seen from crumbling arrow-slots. Papyrus scraps pasted where they fit. Skyscrapers at a rainy distance. Old Men of Hoy. Organ-pipes. Birch-boles. In the gaps between the grey oblongs three thin blue strokes, also vertical. The blueness of the blue will ward off pessimistic interpretations.   Birch in July When I'm feeling least up to it – rejuvenation and suchlike – there it is, a sky more cobalt than I could have hoped for now there above me and birch buds that once in a week of cold rain and death decided to become black stones have changed their minds and are open after all each leaf reputed to be unique enough of them with whispery variations on the evening breeze to sound like unargumentative rivers at peace with their courses, that breeze no doubt cousin to the high wind shredding occasional cloud wisps that follow timetables fearless of depths below and heights above.     copyright © Robin Fulton, 2002 Scottish poet Robin Fulton lives in Stavanger, Norway. His most recent collections are Fields of Focus (Anvil Press Poetry, London) and Coming Down to Earth and Spring is Soon (Oasis Books / Shearsman Books).