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
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
In bulb-beds in the public park, daffodils lie headlong, scythed by Spring storms. The rate of attrition is high: one in ten felled beyond saving, fodder for slugs. I triage the casualties, their snapped stems, bruised blooms spattered with mud. These I bring home, and a vase of water will be their hospice: a tattered
I can detect a new feelingfrom shoulders to fingertips.My handwriting returns. Or is it an old feeling?Ironing, folding, combing hair —habits flaunt themselves in the face of recent history.What can I do with myself?Skiing, karaoke, roller blading… I’m ready for anything.I want to rush out and tell everyone,I’m back and mean business. I want to
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
Sometimes in bed you turn your back on me and I on you, and a lazy game of footsie is the product of those two negatives, a slow dancing cheek to cheek. I like the tangle and the tightness of a hug, the snug asymmetry of spooning. But when our heads diverge, reflecting each on
At the front of second-hand books,reminders of ones I’ve writtenor received myself. Dead-end cluesto lives that might have changed or stopped,birthdays or anniversaries,dates that exhausted all meaningsand slipped back into calendars. In a dingy, ramshackle shop,I stand in the aisle and read them,imagine their faces and plots.It’s time to take them home with meand give
The first, essential task: repudiate your parents. Reject their values and advice. Make clear they have no right to legislate. There will be rows, of course, but that’s the price. The later task: reject the youthful you. Remove the smirk from that conceited face. It may take tens of years to see this through.
and where yesterday I lay broiling in the vat of my bedroom today a sneaky little breeze tickles my soles — Coo-ee! Only me! shifty at first but soon breeze picks up speed with What — did you think I was gone for good? That me and my three ‘e’s had danced our final conga
in his Clouseau-era. I want to get home knowing at any minute I might karate chop Burt Kwouk as he comes flying round the corner or trap his trouser-tie in the fridge door or flip up the fold-down bed on his head — basically I want to triumph frequently by freakish misadventure. And I want