You wouldn’t believe all this house has cost me- In body language  terms, it has turned me upside down. I’ve been carried from one structure to the other On a chair of human arms, and liked the feel Of being weightless, that fraternity of clothes Now my own life hits me in the throat, the […]

Gold survives the fire that’s hot enough to make you ashes in a standard urn. An envelope of course official buff contains your wedding ring that wouldn’t burn.   Dad told me I’d to tell at St. James’s the ring should go in the incinerator. That “eternity” inscribed with both their names is his surety […]

Such a peculiar lot we are, we people without money, in daylong yearlong sunlight, knowing money is somewhere, somewhere.   Everybody says it’s big bigger brain bother now, money. Such millions and millions of us don’t manage at all without it, like war going on.   And we can’t eat it. Yet without it our […]

They see me always as a flickering figure on a shilling screen. Not real. My hands, still wet, sprout wooden pegs. I smell the apples burning as I hang the washing out. Mummy, say the little voices of the ghosts of children on the telephone. Mummy   A row of paper dollies, clean wounds or […]

Trapped in the wreckage by his broken arm he watched the flames flower from the front end. So much pain- Holy Jesus, let them get to me– so much pain he heard his screams like music when he closed his eyes- the school organ at Rugby Matins with light slanting down hot and heady from […]

Words were dust-sheets, blinds. People dying randomly, “for want of breath” shadowed my bed-times. babies happened; adults buried questions under bushes.   Nouns would have been too robust for body-parts; they were curt, homeless prepositions- “inside” “down here”, “behind”, “below”. No word for what went on in darkness, overheard.   Underground, straining for language that […]

1 The Visit There were barns, paddocks, young fruit trees coquetting in the rain and thrum of wind. It blew so hard the awning of the outside love-seat split a little further every hour. Tall dogs with silky hair slipped moorings by the Aga gliding up to my strange scent; the squash-faced semi-precious cat subsided […]

We were as lip as the guidebooks to the city. We had our ankle tendons severed to combat the heat. We dined on carp all summer: the magazines were full of recipes. The city fathers talked about a new guidebook which would inform the tourists in languages and dialects for all. It was delightful in […]