#the long take

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In these excerpts from the pages of Robin Robertson’s prize-winning The Long Take, soon to be published in paperback, we see New York City in 1946 through the eyes of Walker, a Nova Scotian D-Day veteran just landing on our shores. The book goes on to tell his story, as he makes his way west to become a journalist in Los Angeles, in the heyday of film noir.

from The Long Take

And there it was: the swell
and glitter of it like a standing wave –
the fabled, smoking ruin, the new towers rising
through the blue,
the ranked array of ivory and gold, the glint,
the glamour of buried light
as the world turned round it
very slowly
this autumn morning, all amazed.

And it stayed there, watching,
as they made toward it,
the truck-driver and the young man,
under pylons, wires, utility poles,
past warehouses, container parks,
deserted lots, between the long
oily marshes, landfill sites and swamps,
before slipping down
under the Hudson, and coming up
on the other side
to find a black wetness
of streets trashed and empty
and the city gone.

‘Try the docks. They can always use men.’

*

At night, the river rolls and turns like oil
under the bridges,
in through the slips.
He walked for hours –
following the glow
in the sky uptown he’d been told
was the lights of Times Square –
his shadow moving with him
below the street-lamps: dense, tight,
very black and sharp, foreshortened, but already
starting to lengthen as he goes, attenuating
to a weak stain. Then back in
under another streetlight, shadow
darkening again, clean and hard.
Who he really is, or was,
lies somewhere in between.

*

In the last splinter of sunlight allowed between the skyscrapers
an old lady is sitting with a book,
moving her chair every quarter of an hour
a little farther down the alleyway.