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PNAutumn15

Light box

As a child, I would trace what I couldn’t draw against the window glass, the side of my hand cold and too smooth afterwards. I didn’t think to look out. Fatigue reduces the day to a light box. I press myself against it, peel off the outline of a complicated life to colour in later.

The Day Patterns Whilst My Lover Cooks

Today light flew in diagonals through Hungerford Bridge. Now ingredients are found, weighed. Today was about tension, and relief. The relaxed logic of a day off. Now he sighs, dries his hands. Today I walked away from that hospital. Brights, metals. Now a tick tick tick to the crown of flame. Today the river was […]

Under Kew Railway Bridge

I enter the river-birds’ world, its dark and damp         graffitied walls, a smell of rot in museum cool while the Thames’ salty breath dries a cormorant’s wings, laps at the bridge’s concrete pillars,         brings word inland of the distant sea, the life that goes on and on, years without stopping, day […]

Power Cut

You strike the first match – the room lurches from black to indistinct before colour reasserts itself in ambers and golds. Walls and ceilings shift and dip, all down the street windows flickering, half the valley out by the look of it and your face, as you reach for the corkscrew, is like it was […]

The Glow

Finding the crab apples, my astonishment I’d gauge as being on a par with pilgrims seeing a tear build in the corner of the Spanish Virgin’s powder-blue eye. Or those Egyptian passers-by, agape, saying a year’s worth of prayers in one day to the smiling saint on the roof who gave city air the sheen […]

The poets who watched the sky at night

What were they like – Lu-Yu, Yang-Ti, Kojiju – sitting by their bamboo house under the moon, unable to sleep, reflecting on how that pale flower in the stream cannot be caught in a jar? Did they use lanterns or the brightness of the dark to stir those brushes as pine cones dropped in the […]

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