We stand at the door and watch the pale night, you, my twelve pounds of grackle bird, seagull boy, oblivious to the moonlight and what lies beyond – the foxes silently slipping through fences, robbers waiting in their cars for a gap in their nerves. A helicopter rides overhead, restless and searching. It’s all right […]

(note: a quarrel is an old name for a diamond-shaped pane of glass used in making lattice windows) I love to think of them standing on a bench outside the Angel, Walter Bogan, John Tucker, 8 in the evening Nicholas Gay, William Amyott, a candle on the table, Edward Rounsevall, taking turns to stand on […]

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 […]

Then in the twentieth century they invented transparent adhesive tape, the first record played on Radio 1 was Flowers In The Rain by the Move, and whereas ink had previously been in pots, now it was in cartridges. They killed each other a lot and found ingenious and crafty ways to do it, sometimes one […]

chin snug in her palm, her elbow plugged firmly in the knobbly joint of her kneecap, legs a little ajar beneath her skirts, is sound asleep upon the stool, dreaming of her mother teaching her how to scrape parsnips, which is how at 11.10pm the mistress of the house discovers her, stares at her a […]

i.m. James Agee What are you going to tell us, Bud; about the days that keep coming and rain and wind and the sour smell of shacks and empty fields and the silence of women? How do you look your children in the eye and what stories can there possibly be to hide the intimidation, […]

89. Incident on the Horikiko Coast (30/07/78) Young couple alone, he recumbent on red rock near pinnacle of sand-hill pocketed with grass, she by his feet, sky making threat of raindrops though earth remaindered dry. Mid-afternoon, adjacent to sun’s zenith, she touching ground at plural potions of her body, while lightning conflaged cracked dead-bush 6m […]

John Canoe you come with me I show how danger fly             like upside down bird like woman jumping from high perch where she no right to be into your crumpled bed   John Canoe she not for you             she marble and stone when moon shine in churchyard     she darkness and witchwoman   and you going […]

them come at midnight i remember that i was fooding the cat what happened to the cat in and across the hall them was before the last bod slam the door i was scared more for décor all bootmark in the twill mud set to stone too quick in nape and alley and fuss would […]

My first wife knew no more than me, no telling where her needs ended, mine began. One day though I turned the hill to find the boat moored in the field, the house out in the bay, adrift, door open wide. I rowed out to a message on the mat: gone to my cousin’s place […]

There’s a missing person in everyone, a draft dodger, truant, man on the run,   deserter, defaulter, garden fence vaulter, an into the wide blue yonder absconder,   and I found mine, or he found me, and together we sauntered out for a paper   or a carton of milk that wasn’t needed to match […]

We’re talking different kinds of vulnerability here. These icicles aren’t going to last for ever Suspended in the ultra violet rays of a Dumfries sun. But here they hang, a frozen whirligig of lightning, And the famous American sculptor Who scrambles the world with his tripod For strangeness au naturel, got sunset to fill them. […]

Beyond the house, where the woods dwindle to a few stray trees, my father walks on the lake with a hammer.   He’s never seen so many stars, and wonders why with all that light in the sky   it doesn’t cast a single shadow. He takes a few blows at the ice, and drops […]

jigharzi an me stand in de water warm an friendly for de world smell like snails oooozing on hot charcoal   an jigharzi step wary as tiger fish skip between his legs an he make like he hate de coral forever   an i slip from his back     de knife in my hand forget de […]

‘Drivers wanted. Thieves and alcoholics need not apply.’ Job ad in a butcher’s window. And yet we’re good with meat. Our agile fingers know how to pick a crusted lock. Corn-fed chickens wait quartered in the cold safe in a fur of breath. Under our coats we hide small finds—an ear, a stiffened wing, a […]

You get addicted to the ink, or the pain; one of the two. When she came in here for that rose   on her shoulder, I might have known it would come to this; years later, her body painted from head   to foot in a thousand colours. I read her now like a picture […]

Less light was what they wanted. Less light and a chance to look up to see tonight’s old stars shining and dying. Dark skies and fewer street lamps leaking Lucozade into a space once reserved for heaven, where they might glimpse Venus opening her door a crack, or, leaning out of an upstairs window, overhear […]

Virtual snow on the line, a starry damask night, the train quits the virtual station. Wellwishers gather on the cinderpath. Knowing   how to say goodbye. Passengers with tall hats in half windows alight in the opening pages. A red signal power-cut lasts an entire chapter.   But the couple are true; emerge from lost […]

What is held here, weighing so little, keeps close to the floor and where linoleum gives way to wilderness, gathers in the shadows of stones.   The days pass like thieves, in the disinfection of letters, the collective study of quarantine law and the microscopic recitation of sand.   At the doors experts assemble for […]

Paleontologists treasure the rare geological circumstances that permit an occasional preservation of soft parts. – Stephen Jay Gould Perhaps there is some transcendental place, some cove or niche somewhere in which the pouches, lobes and gills, suckers, lips and tentacles of countless ancient animals endure. For bones are not much more than relics really. They […]

We take the air of our low-maintenance roof-garden this austere quad our best line of defence from the smoky street where we hear arteries harden.   Honesty seems a new form of pretence for here is hardly either Avalon or Eden. Yet this gravel reach can seem a wild expanse.   We splay on deckchairs […]

I. The Art of Illumination At times it is a good life, with the evening sun gilding the abbey tower, the brook’s cold waters sliding past and every hour in my Book a blank page, vellum pumice-stoned to chalky lustres which my inks suffuse: saffron and sandarach and dragon’s blood, azure and verdigris. Monsters and […]

If they were boats, the rain had tipped them the wrong way up, put their hulls in the sky. If they were walls, the walls worked. They kept strange things out. They put us in our place. Their loneliness scared us. If they were prone lions, they were old and under the weather. If dogs, […]

She was a small singing bird, a young wren you caught in your hand and felt her heartbeat. You chose two rings, one for her foot and then one for your hand. She fluttered like green wheat beginning to sense the wind, not ready for ploughing. She flew into the bush and when you came […]

There was a craze for fountain pens. Fat lacquered ones, walnut-effect, gold-nibbed, unlocked and lifted, two-handed, from spot-lit glass cabinets and carried over plush by silent nail-varnished assistants to the desk where you and your mum or dad would have been waiting almost eighteen years, not talking much, you worrying because the pen you liked […]

There was no secret murmured down through a long line of elect; no dark fakir, no flutter of notes from a pipe, no proof, no footage of it – but I did it, Guildhall Square, noon, in front of everyone. There were walls, bells, passers-by; then a rope, thrown, caught by the sky and me, […]

WELL DRESSERS can be surprisingly cynical, jeering at any elations that make the gloom rise. Look for: pickpocketing, glove snipping, button theft, hat spoiling, fragrant evasion of bosom tax.   WILL WITNESSES will occasionally bring back a few viviparous jokes from the intestate beyond. Look for: rare mischief lights in the eyes, quadruple handshakes, crypto-Calvinist […]

Armstrong making the moon, was z. Giving that chicken next door a synchronised Chinese burn for sidling his angular wish-bones into our hide-n-seek: z.   Zapped, before break, your double-dare to work it into Maths. If 4a – 4b equals 2a + 6b, what is a? and I said z so dead-pan Sir had to […]

With pollution and GM, future seas may change colour. Worl alway same me rekon nuttin much-change Dere alway green melon-anana Alway yelow-sea Me granee she live-be twennysix wit ray hair Me tel me-babee we not die-soon We like granee – we live-long An me caree-she for look-see thru eave – for look yelow-sea An me […]

Apparently born of a hinny and her ass he hee-haws awesomely: of the little words and letters like ‘A’ and ‘and’ and ‘as’, and yet – alas, alack­ – never saw the major work complete; of sawhorses strung with lanterns in a Brooklyn Street – wherein two ‘A’s made the ‘M’ of the Latin word […]

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 […]

Thirty years dead and still curmudgeonly, my grandfather is driving me through the fog-numbed streets of Crystal Palace at five a.m. He’s in the plaid dressing gown he wore to die in, and he’s shaved, badly, flecks of dark blood stippling his chin. We’re the only Austin 1100 on the road; he tuts, crunching through […]

Preparez – vous à des ragouts, De rats aux champignons d’egouts’ Victor Hugo, Paris 1870   All night Krupps’ cannons pound the walls, darkness smells of soil and gas and at Voison’s, rue Cambon, a special black card buys sauce souris on pate of rat.   It’s a challenge to garnish donkey with cepes; there’s […]

If I had a gold locket with my husband’s picture in it – which I don’t, and I were dead – which I’m not, and I could still think while being dead – which I couldn’t, I’d be happy to think that some young woman with a penchant for the past had found my locket […]

People in the neighborhood called him The Writer because he loitered on certain corners for hours at a stretch, making notations in pocket-sized spiral notebooks. At all times of year he wore a dark dirty overcoat. At no time did he interact with passersby. The rumor went that he was a Lebanese man who, either […]

Once we were armourers to the gods. We fashioned Zeus’s thunderbolts, Poseidon’s trident, Artemis’s bow. We built the massive walls of Argos and Mycenae, and laboured in Hephaistos’ forge’s fiery glow. Zeus allotted us this land where grapes and corn and apples grow without the need to plough or sow.   Now we are shepherds […]

Her belongings, like skins,float back to the original effluvia of ocean beds.An archive of buttons, newly dyed with fish spawn,congealedwith masonry skill,disturbs the isotopes of an ocean’s plan.A crustacean, plotting the symmetries of a worldbetween its kelp stones,stares at the hems and petticoats trailing him.   The pink ghosts of muscles still fasten round the […]

Thora Dardel sees her portrait by Modigliani for the first time in forty-six years. I am not the woman you see sitting in the corner at the private view. My name is Dardel. In nineteen nineteen, in Montparnasse, I was painted by the dying Modigliani. He sketched me in a café. He devoured me with […]

In the end, we never made it to the Pavilion but preferred instead to imagine the gauche chinoiserie of Regency folly, a camp flourish of minarets standing out against the bitter English rain.   We closed our eyes and conjured faux Indian domes knocked out from a nation’s first concrete casts – brown and smooth […]

They’ve lived there for years, the aurox, Since the last inhabitants left them With the island, casting off Into the fierce conflicting tides.   Two bulls, four calves and six cows Roam the boggy fields, Hoof-prints like runes Across abandoned acres.   Once a year, a vet makes the journey. He watches them from a […]

No one can quite remember whether it was during the Select Committee or a cabinet meeting that he first whinnied, then flared his nostrils in the direction of the Secretary for Culture, Media and Sport. Certainly this wasn’t minuted and either way such things are often overlooked in Whitehall. You might have thought the formal […]

In the woods she skipped at my feet, swung on my arm, pestered for stories, as the dead leaves drifted down, and my wife, thoughtful, slightly apart, walked ahead, when my small daughter looked up to the high branches and pointed suddenly to the black bird which swooped clattering, from the bare tree-top, wheeling across […]

Jonathan Trappe had a dream, sitting in his office swivel chair, gazing vacantly out of the window. He imagined taking to the air. Just taking off; buying fifty-five huge helium balloons; a fantasia of reds, whites, greens, yellows and blues. And he saw himself in slow motion frames, inflating each one, tying each with string, […]

My tiny aunt was always afraid she might be blown away. She fluttered about in the draft of her house chasing snails that slid under the door. Each night she climbed a steepening stair to lie beneath the stars’ straining light, hidden in sodium glare. Her four room cave in the shade of passing buses, […]

The heroine lay dying in her pasteboard cot Seized by coughing, clutching with both hands The big tenor who knelt at her side It was too much I slipped from my seat, stumbled through feet and knees Mounted the stage in a burst of saving love For heaven’s sake, I said, she’s a sick woman […]

We buried him with a potato in each hand on New Year’s Day when the ground was hard as luck, wearing just cotton, his dancing shoes plus a half bottle of pear cider to stave off the thirst. In his breast pocket we left a taxi number and a packet of sunflower seeds; at his […]

recaf ‘Leading the way in pay to play'(2) ‘Move…’(3) Addendum (by finger in the dirt) ‘Bristol’(4) Nice thought whether heartfelt or wistful. ‘Police follow this van.  Hatch is time delayed.’(5) ‘No tools left overnight’(6) de rigueur white vans display. ‘Dairy Farmers of Britain’(7) …unite – playful.(8) ‘There for you – Spar.’(9) ‘People who care – […]

(Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm) Full fathom five in A&E, my father Lies white as a cuttlefish blade, suddenly granted The sailor’s death war denied him. Water runs Clear from his mouth and the puncture wounds Where they pumped in saline to keep his heart afloat Too late. Holed below the water line, he’s drowned, Awash, beached, […]

“We’ve discovered Superman’s address, and got to the bottom of the wing-beat rate a beetle needs to stay dry in the rain, all of which brings to mind the last stand of a certain man on this very field, what, sixteen years since, is it Greg? You’ll remember Amit’s aztec gaze, how he’d play from […]

Lakeview, Chicago.  Summer of ’91.  “…how do you uproot something that’s already taken hold?”    Historian, Arnold Hirsch, on failed attempts to remedy segregation in Chicago. One simmering afternoon, he blocks your path with an open paw.  Tells you he’s a panther escaped from Lincoln Park Zoo.  He bleeds papaya juice, pees coconut water, shits burnt […]

When the men came to speak to my father   I was sent out into the garden. I could hear the cold hissing in the cracks of the concrete, could feel its boldness, how it longed to slip between my edges.   Hands buzzing like wasps, I practised my skipping, counted steps, the lash of […]

The toss, the tumble, the nearly making it last minute plummet.  The damp, the shade lightening, the lifting of fibres away: the visible softening tumbling toss of the towels.   Dave nearly making it, jogging to Strauss.  The onetwothree, onetwothree, onetwo–       –Hal peering through his portal, its red gleam of eye.  ‘What are you doing, […]

Sure as I’m dying, I need it. Bring them nuggets of zingiber, fire-packed rhizomes to mash into candy or jam between pillows, ward off hag-rodeo. Bring that curio brings me luck, most outrageous medicine, puts charge in me, want for that juiciest medicine. Let me gnaw it and gob in the westerly (right up my […]

It always starts with a dead girl somewhere in the picture: Lukewarm and pretty, in an organdy crinoline, One arm sticking out from under a credenza.   There is a foreigner with dark hair and a secret Who says Eet ees not me! when he is questioned; A shady dressmaker who’s missing a finger; A […]

The women in the Umbrian mountain village gather around the hood of the parked blue Alfa-Romeo touching it reverently with the palms of their hands whispering “Roma”, “Roma” at the heat of the engine. They stand on medieval cobblestones marvelling at such things as head, distance and speed. The older women, the ones in black, […]

You would recognise that hook nose anywhere, his hump and paunch, the shiny pink erection of his chin. Withered, crossed legs on the barstool dangle like transplants from a much smaller body. He could have found his ideal slot in the Gestapo, been a dab hand with a blinding iron. And the scold’s bridal would […]

Pavel in profile his eye at the spy-hole watches Mrs Beltinska in the bath.   Steam from the spy-hole rises and unravels in the dark cold apartment at his back,   where a TV with the sound down shows the River Vltava bursting its banks.   And as Prague’s metro floods and the Mala Strana […]

In Japan, in a laboratory in the hills, a man is whispering to water. A man, whose wife has left him, is focusing on structure through a powerful microscope. He’s astounded when each isolated drop seems to listen, absorb the words, change like a face transformed by smiling or a splash of shock. He studies […]

Read the dictionary, and you will learn such things about human pleasure as will make your hair curl. – Les Murray Like that pleasure itself is a verb both transitive and reflexive – the pleasuring in, and the pleasuring of. Like that the English fucked a century before they made love, and the prim Victorians […]

When I let the chickens out, I hurl mixed corn in a golden arc across the frosted ground. I know it’s junk, they shouldn’t have it, they don’t need it, but everyone deserves joy somewhere. I’ve been looking for something I once had and miss and want again. I meet him in the beach café. […]