The truth is, it was only part white; the albino blackbird that came to your garden two winters ago – but into my head comes this ghost of a bird, shadowless, a white absence, blind negative   in the snow. No reflection glides over the lake where he flies, light and boneless, no sound from […]

He senses danger and is gone, the water bulging in his wake. You needn’t ever count upon this sight again, and so should take the memory and then move on?   You’ll never know what rendezvous he’ll break with liquid arabesques – nor how he’ll trawl fresh eddys, find new shoals to dredge. His underwater […]

Ridiculous to think at twenty-three I used to wear a hot pink tee shirt and one dangly black earring to the typing school in Mayfair I was the only guy in the class except for one man three weeks ahead of me with a very fast w.p.m. Key learning strategy: don’t look at the keyboard, […]

The year we married, rainy season lasted so long the rice crop failed. People gave up trying to stay dry; abandoned umbrellas littered the streets like dead birds. One evening that summer, a typhoon broke the waters of the Imperial moat and sent orange carp flopping through the streets around the train station, under the […]