In Economy’s cramped haul it’s all I ever watch. Our course is laid on screen before me, a dotted line miles wide, plotting the next ten dry-eyed hours. This kind of travel is the loneliest of procedures: solo-piloting a pale track above computer-graphic continents. Across the aisle a blindfold man dreams, ears cupped to rattling
Ten minutes — or less — before we step down at one of the ‘London Terminals’, ploughed land restarts and the newest cow-parsley spreads by the side of fields that held on through the April drought. The immediate foreground is dashing on past a stationary middle-distance while a forest on the horizon, darkly capped by
Shops that only pop up in your dreams are not unlike the ones you visit awake, except that what you buy then vanishes in the blink of an eye. In my case, it’s never anything practical but always some obscure edition of verse or a record salvaged from the Soviet archives and much of the
Tell me, do you wonder why the lionfish ignores you? Why your face droops into a puddle on the ground is wiped up, wrung out to flavour coffee in a foam paper cup? Well tonight take a step forward, seize life, apply yourself! on the company website to become a lionfish or a paper cup
I have preferred the practice wall and not the netted court a decent racquet and a ball the steady thump of steady thought and no one else at all
I sat all morning in the college sick bay Counting bells knelling classes to a close. At two o’clock our neighbors drove me home. In the porch I met my father crying — He had always taken funerals in his stride — And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow. The baby cooed
We went about in circles one hand on the next man’s shoulders something out of Gogol or Great War blind: we ate chicken soup, which gave one old man stomach cramps: he was taken away, snotting. A trustee, if such a thing is imaginable in a lunatic asylum, clicked around as part of a service-trolley,
We learn how every item is its own army the day we split the house down parting lines; the bookcases ready to be divided: the little troops that stand with their stiff spines.
Not birds I know, dank-feathered, inky-eyed, spinning in a ring until one breaks free, flies in. And already I am out of bed and on the path to my father’s room, the whole house sleeping but for him, his old face stunned in the white light webbed on the wall and I say Dad, the
My lifelong friend, dear heart, these days you’re losing the plot: you’re a fish in a bucket, open-mouthed, flopping about in a panic, bereft of your sheen, all confidence gone. Examined in action on a black and white screen, every movement recorded, you’re haplessly tethered, chaotically jumping, locked into a pulse of your own. Tracked
Seals — well, they rhyme with steel — can stand the cold. And they can even dive and mate at once. They hold their breath; and one knows how to fold his vulnerable parts into the other’s. Even virgin seals don’t need experience to do this properly so no one smothers. We need warm waters
I am not jealous. If you arrived with a man on your back, or a hundred men hanging in the rigging of your hair, or a thousand men sleeping on the soft mound of your belly, if you were a river filled with drowned men met by the furious sea foaming at its mouth, by
One moment basking in the sun, the next knee-deep in snow astonished at the way these tracks must have filled to the top of their dry-stone walls during the April blizzards. To walk has been the idea since we were small, and so we go on along new paths and old, the way our parents
He said, it’s a structural workforce imbalance and I thought where’s the scope for a man of your talents? He said, it’s retargeting personal goals and I thought yet all human resources have souls. He said, it’s a preplanned executive cull and I thought you’ve a horrible shape to your skull. He said, it’s a
Invisible hand that jangles the lantern over the porch and tells the leaves on the pond to imagine they are clippers and wrenches the shed door , and makes leylandii lurch, unnerving the cat, wobbling the elderly; that viciously clobbers pedestrians at the corner, then snatches up bills and payslips put out for recycling and
(after Yoshio Markino, 1911) Colours of women, a grey-veiled pink, a bloom Fading to yellow, stippled, dust-hung, flecked Soot startling white lace in summer gloom. Colours of trees, pavements sticky with leaves Trodden to blackened bronze, a patina Attached to every twig. The heart grieves, Colours the blood with fungus, smudges all Spires, bridges, waters,
That ‘bullet hole’ in your bush hat, there should have been two holes — for the truth to pass through. I think you believed your own lies, liked how they altered the light on the bullet, as it passed through. Who fired the gun? Who died? Who prayed for the victim’s soul? So many questions,
Midnight for the squirrels and the drunks, midnight for you dear and your chest hair too, put your pen down pet and rest here. Midnight swallowing the mirror whole, swallowing my mother in her pale blue slippers, and my brother, my big brother in his too small bed. Bed, the longed for stopped short sound
Fate landed us here by mistake, set us to walk Welsh hillsides with a plodding heart or paddle Essex estuaries under duress, our talk always of somewhere else (tacked to kitchen walls a Swedish lake, a mountain range in Switzerland). See us crouch in living rooms as daylight palls, an old draught trespassing beneath the
No angels listen when you cry out here, but seals rise up to see, and criticize perhaps, as you intone the omega (their favourite vowel) or the medical alpha (sticking your tongue out) for these gods of ocean. Words wouldn’t do. There are no consonants in the mouths of seals. They can appreciate only the