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:
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
There’s a black door in Piazza Della Lepre with neoclassical figures. The stairs lead up to a knocking shop, at the very top. The best in the city, oh what ceilings! There’s no lift. You must walk up the slate stairs. The stairs are steep. Not everyone can: heart seizure, ennui, brain softening and some
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
Each twig of the willow tree was gluedto a clear twig shadow of frozen dew. By midday, a one degree rise in heatloosened ridges of ice to the ground in showers. They lay amongst the grassstrangely, like transparent razor blades and glistled as they fell. Under thisgentle fire: two blackbirds and a robin fought over
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
The festival ended aeons ago but the queue haunts on between two fields to a meadow. Only a few ahead of us now, jovial, as if the rusty clang- clang tolled fresh vows. A sapling thrills in the breeze like a dog shaking off a river. Children lose themselves in trees. And now that