Shearsman 51 Peter Robinson Two Poems Numbers Game   1 Approaching the ancestral tombs in their stands of pine, I'm wondering how many mildewed stone stairs there are here, how many years it is since last I climbed them, and hear myself learning to count, once again, on flights of worn-down steps as we make our way back to the grandparents' house at 22 Sea View Terrace however many years ago.   2 Now groves are stillness itself on the climb. By black iron railings and a children's graveyard I've misjudged the time. It's past 4:30 and that gentler slope towards the ancestral tomb museum, my short cut's just been closed.   3 Damp shadows, red pine bark, the hollowed-out stone, flowerless peonies, silence and moss pass by as I practise the rule of adding one... When they asked me how many to home, back then, I could hardly guess.   4 Approaching the ancestral tombs in their stands of pine, I've had to take a long way round -   5 and keeping on over the cared-for ground wonder just why it should be that though numbers came, still, you can't know how many years, more or less, there are, how many stairs to climb before you arrive near the top, the top step, step up and go. Babel Tower Languishing languages, the dying dialects bereft of mouths and ears, with barely anyone left who can sound them, let alone a poet to make them sing... It seems you've already forgotten the sunset reflected on a thousand windows, forgotten each monosyllabic cry from construction workers ensconced in the sky and scaffolding grids across heaped cloud overwrought with the colourful meaning. It seems you've already forgotten love-scribbles in steamed-up panes or the dust, your senses, the feeling made known then lost with whatever named thing. Or perhaps you barely knew any more than a garbled bird-call as pidgin-idiom warbles interrupt empty blue silence, then nothing at all. Now even the Tower of Babel's to be kept up.     copyright © Peter Robinson, 2002 Peter Robinson's About Time Too was published by Carcanet in 2001. The same publisher will publish his Selected Poems in 2003. He has also recently published The Great Friend and Other Translated Poems (Worple Press) and Poetry, Poets, Readers: Making Things Happen (Oxford University Press). He teaches at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan. An interview with Peter Robinson was published by The Poetry Kit in 1999. You can find it here. Another interview, this time concerning Perfect Bound magazine, which Peter Robinson edited in the late 1970s, can be found on the jacket website. Descriptions of each of his books can be found on his own website here.