He wakes. Alive. No cash. No phone. Down from their ash trees squirrels nose through drink and dope enough to stone a wood’s astonishment of crows. He stirs and gives the crows a scare. Pinned up with lamps, tar paper sky flaps open at a corner where, tipped out of dusk, moths flicker by, skim
I painted beaches, seasides, shores or waves dashed on a harbour wall, a mackerel sky, a signature, to peddle to the gullible, until the seasons ran aground with darkly varnished fishing smacks or chalk-white gulls soared to astound the cliffs that threw their shadows back. My friend Proudhon said property was theft and so each
On the yard behind Hanley Fire Station, Jean-Claude from the French manufacturer is servicing the ladder. Bob, the chief mechanic, hands slipped inside navy boiler suit warm on his belly, purses his lips, puffs his cheeks at Jean-Claude spinning in the operator’s seat like a funfair ride, testing the turntable: sending the ladder
If I still remember the termsprotasis and apodosisfrom Latin grammar days at school, why can’t I exchange this knowledgewith its minimal relevanceto my subsequent life, in which sentences trot along quite wellunparsed and without their clausesneeding precise designations, for instant access to the namesof acquaintances approaching,all smiles, at social gatherings?
Not regret at what could have been said but regret, half way down, at what was said (… this will be called the fifth tread of ten). Not only regret at what was said but that it was said before it knew it was said (… this will be
Enough to walk – enough to walk, untied enough to move together side- by-side, to let the words occur to let the world occur around. Scrap the table in between, the stare and all it means, enough to brush a shoulder, let a misstep cause two hips to touch. Enough a glance, a glancing off
Had I south Devon’s embattled cliffs, Ablaze with gorse-bloom and salted light, The sand and the schist and the chalk cliffs Of rust and slate and softest white, I would spread the cliffs under your feet: But I, being here, have only ploughed fields; I have spread ploughed fields under your feet; Head south, love;
When he was a young reporter, writing for the Straits Times on the Korean War, my brother-in-law was based in Japan. His girlfriend, Itsuko by name, taught him certain refinements concerning hygiene that had not been part of his upbringing: for example, to dry between his toes. Sometimes I embarrass friends by asking if they
The point of the hike was to forget the waveof restructures. Cuts were in favour all season,each team member prepared for transformationagainst a profile, a personal specification. Beyond the M40 underpass, we trod the gaps,those places the towns had not made their own,so we could talk through what matterslike wanting to be outside of ourselves
I paid the fisherman as he passed by, took in my hand this vile monstrosity, a creature murky as its watery haunt, an outsize weevil, or a hydra’s runt; shapeless as shade, and nameless as the Lord. A maw that gaped, and a black stump that bored out through the scales… It snapped at me.
Under the lamp of childhood, the atlas of the world is open to the man: his fingers travel continents, stroke the blue seas, cross their blood red lines to America — to that inevitable page, with circles where his father had set down his whisky glass on the Nebraska plain, with pencilled names of strangers
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,
Don’t dare shred me one Tuesday afternoon In a corner of your dismal office, Or spend two minutes of the life you’ve settled for Pondering if I can be recycled in the blue Rather than composted down in the brown. Don’t even think about turning me Into recollected-in-tranquillity, Re-imagined and therefore rubbish poems. If you
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
The Sacred Heart sister at Sophia Posts me an airmail letter With two sought-after stamps For her twelve year-old collector. Much later, on cassette, She talks of doing a doctorate On etiquette in Edo, Plus a traveller’s guide for the Gaijin. The millennium hosts its moment; A tsunami coasts toward Christmas. She tells me on
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
Chichester to London Victoria They feel the same, the missing and the found, once empty stillness settles in the mind and dulls the edge of every loss you find. These glancing lights more serious than they seem, which tell a stranger’s age though not their name, something of living have: