Poems

Every day another word slips away I never know it’s gone  until I’m lost for it But some days I get one back to roll around my tongue and wonder what exactly it is going to say

How much space was it really taking upat the back of the garage? Flipped open,on the lid’s underside, a handsawand a brass-backed tenon saw held fastby swivel pegs; two shallow box drawers with gimlets, awls, that yellow cylindrical tinfor the bricklaying plumb line, slid apartto get at the bigger stuff, any old howat the bottom: chisels,

Campus trees, grown tall, shadow this forgotten place. In one small room, The Birds of Europe rage, awaiting Judgement’s storm and fire. That day, released from their engraver’s burning cage, red breast, white wing, gold eye will light the dust-grey shelves, as each one flees through broken windows, hinge-sagging doors, to settle, call and sing

for Wendy So time, for one of us, will carry onin chilly rooms where either you or mewill linger for a while after we’ve gonein silences on worn upholstery,in orange paperbacks we’ll never readby crooked lamps, the shadows they still thrownow falling where, for once, we’d both agreedthe lucky one would be the first to

For three days now it has been possiblereading the letters and looking at photographs,to tell myself there is no differencebetween this and your just being somewhere else. I’ve been philosophising like a foolsupposed resemblances, absence apart:memory, other minds and the rest of it.Nothing resembles the fact that you are not. Rarely knowing what I’d come

The shepherds are on quad bikes. They wear Adidas and drink Black Sheep.  Still, only they know the tenderness of hills:   fleecy skies, the shiver of gorse; empty lanes  and the prayer of a winter dawn. Their angels  are on Instagram; their psalms are by Dave.  They dream of glad tidings: Lotto numbers  daubed

Her frail breath calls through the quickening hours:‘My body is broken, make up my bed,a deep cup of reed leaves lined with reed flowers, feathers and flickers beyond human powersand cram it with anguish when I am dead.’Her frail breath calls through the quickening hours: ‘Furnish with letters, my Saint Christopher’smedal, an unleavened morsel of

Sectioned, I was sent to the Cicada Lunatic Asylum. Doctor Coppola signed the papers. His patients, he explained, were beleaguered by obsessions. Hence the cicadas which colonised the trees in the great courtyard. We were encouraged to adore them. This was Doctor Coppola’s radical way of defying insanity, he was known across Europe. It wasn’t

This is not you because you don’t work anymore. Hands that once caused crowds to roar in derby matches – flicking balls like flies over the bar – now struggle with a fork. That chest which swelled to face the cavalry stampede of strikers groans at all the air still left in the world. Legs

(after Heine) I saw the elves in the wood last night, riding in the light of the moon; I heard their little horns ring out, their bony bells’ portentous tune. They spurred past me as swift as thought on mice whose antlers shone like gold; those steeds flew silently as swans, wild swans that range

Split apart with a thumbnailits two leaves open: brushed mild steel,cool in your palm, symmetrical. Allow a finger to settlein any of the countersunk screw holes –the natural comfort of cupping. The definite edges of each leafwill be bedded one day flushin the door’s back edge and the jamb. This is where the work is

Craned onto the site from a truck  the ten-by-ten corrugated steel cube,  our paint shop. Nothing for sale  but a magnet for kids: bricked,  scorched, clambered upon, adorned  Stoke, Vale, obscenities from spray cans.  Inside the door, an Alsatian’s head   in sagging red gloss welcomes you to a throat-seizing reek of turps,  linseed and