Looking at the ceiling day after day? the Siemen’s air-conditioning vent, protruding speakers, lights, the sound proof panels, she tolerated the radio’s monotonousness until today when, out of the blue, Ray Charles dropped into the room with ‘What’d I Say?’ and she followed his every word, each bluesy chord, the entire pulse of him wondering […]

I have circled the planet. Above the tawny land of my ancestors, the Arc of the Covenant on its holy mountain, I saw the inside of a cotton bag yanked down over my head; at my wrists and ankles percussion of steel, blood and the links’ negation. Oh my grandfather in the Emperor’s palaces!   […]

We’re walking home late from the theatre, my lover and I. She’s wearing pearls and a linen trouser- suit ? it was a ‘well-made’ play. Sweetheart, I say, the writer drank snake blood for inspiration. She flicks her tongue.   We’re lying in bed reading the supplements, my lover and I. I’m wearing yellow socks; […]

I heard a shout from my master’s orchard. Boy! a man called. He did not know my name. Not my master ? a guest called Benedick. I ran to him. I said, Signior? I watched and waited. In the window of my chamber lies, he said, a book. Go fetch it quick to me here […]

All day and night you tread water in a well, hear soldiers shooting, burying groaning bodies on the mountain. When the bucket rattles down, you dive. Near dawn an exhausted conscript shines a torch.   He’s drunk. Hello, he calls in posh Moscow Russian. Hello, you mouth. Disappointed there’s no echo, he frowns, shakes his […]

First, Charlie Chaplin as a runner bean ? there are seven of him. You can’t tell which bean he is. They all have hats and turned-up shoes, wear tight jackets that are pulling, wrinkled slightly. These look-alikes don’t make the catalogue ? maybe Charles Jones who photographed, arranged them side by side, had never seen […]

Cresting the gradual stairs in the Museo Del Duomo, you come to the Magdalena, who is nearly a river of hair. Here clothes, if they be clothes, Donatello has ragged to tresses that leave her only more bare ? snaking the bight of her thigh’s line, giving rib into hip ? in their tumbling watery […]

What beasts are these coming down to drink at the shallow pools in the river bed? The drought has drawn them out.                         And now the herdsmen; two, three. One squats; the others stand leaning on their spears. They do not watch the herd. Their eyes rest in space. A breeze rises, stirs the grass […]

I’d taken out the bones so that he settled easily, dropping into a lazy S, unless draped -as now- across a bench, or hung – yesterday – from a branch. Wherever I choose to rest and release the weight of him, I am careful to keep intact the parted tuft of soft white hair. I […]

monsoon         oolong         spoon … Reynard lies along the garden wall smoking. ‘I thought you were a cat,’ I say. Reynard takes off his i-Pod, sits up, arranges his brush: ‘Sorry, would you like one?’ And he takes out an egg-shaped case and opens it. It’s full of feathers and chicken skin twisted into the shape […]

He’s been here two years. I wonder if the others ask as I do not, why he left, or of all places, why he chose our well-meaning suburb. We sit before his mirrors, him behind, or to one side. He’s still young, and slim with a little belly. His hair curls where it will. I […]