‘I’ve booked a holiday village’ she says. I see cockroaches and thieves and lager louts abusing the pool but say ‘What date do we leave?’ There’s a purpose to this holiday neither of us has spoken of. Who speaks of broken years? Mothers of daughters lost? I look up local festivals and foods, advice for […]

Here is rest, your journey’s end. The welcome mat put out for you says this is now the place where you belong. Here is food, and drink. We’re guessing that you haven’t had a meal in days. Eat up, grow strong. Here is work, to liberate yourself. No time for chat. The music of your […]

I bought a dozen of this birthday card – two kittens, beautiful, “From both of us” inscribed above the lovely photograph. No use for these now. Time to face my loss, give them to a friend whose husband’s there, who nightly occupies the other chair.

Every family has one somewhere on the tree, slipping out late with a cardboard suitcase, enough to pay his passage. Or slamming out, cracking the plaster, waking neighbours who keep silence, knowing their own. Or one-day-doesn’t-come-in, and his girl eyeing the calendar. Not great writers the raw-skinned terraced lads. They know enough not to look […]

Dressed up in gowns and furs two sisters in the attic tear Church Times into squares the size of postage stamps.   Cross-legged under the table, high heels tied on with odd ribbons, they stir the enamel bowl with a charred wooden spoon.   When the papier mâché is dry they stuff it in cardboard […]

wants to crash through the door of the Sutton Arms at closing time, down a pint in one then bend the barmaid back like a Tango partner and snog her in front of her mother.   He does not want to attend the Church Fenton Christmas Carol Service, but leer at the nuns who shop […]

It is that time, almost a whisper. That kind of moment, like a long wave opening or when the lights come on and the thinnest slither of the moon, side-stepping us, untethered clears its twin, rising above the horizon into the sky in which we float. From the sky, in which we float it clears […]

My lover prowls the room watching me write. He is poised beneath thick sleek hide, which senses my fingertips tap keys as forms rise behind glass – settle into chains. Moonlight seeps through a gap in the curtains onto his fur, the bands of orange and black. In the space between lines, I imagine going […]

(John Torrington 1825 – 1846) If I were young         and a man and                 square shouldered enough I’d choose         a shirt like his –                 the ice in its fine dark stripe on […]

Past an open door big enough to drive in, a soup of steamed up figures just visible inside, angled shouts over the hatcheting of hung meat. Up a wide staircase: lino into whitewash as we climb back-lit by metal framed windows, a token logo – hand painted, off-brand – to make clients welcome. Long tables […]

The bees that sleep inside me fill my mind with buzz. I am Nectar they say, I am Wax and Cone, I am of Bee but not of Bee. In the morning I look at my bee stripes under the covers, something strange and flighty is taking place inside me, my head hums like something […]

The flower, golden as the sun, opens only to the sound of Middle C and so is wooed by wing-beats – each bee that settles, whose hum strikes the right note, drinks deep, and his furred, striped body blurs in a cloud-burst of pollen that is carried onwards, brushed into other blooms nearby, until, sated […]

Dark across the lawn gangling shadows stretch between the honey promises of clover Under the hedge a cross-hatched fret of grey hems brightening green Tucked in ivy dark humbug snails hide from the piercing sun On the verandah a single wasp investigates a cricket corpse Upwards to the summer sky two iridescent flies spiral round […]

Always there, unspoken, in the photograph’s smudged greys, beyond smiling children caught quiet for once, the dolls and tea-sets and three-wheelers, and plastic beakers of squash, remembered orange. His Sunday work, following roast and gravy, with the regular push and whirr rising over garden fences, the roller squealing for oily rest, old blades whistling a […]

You didn’t see, but last night I drew four lines in the sand You couldn’t see because I hid them beneath the covers I’ll never let you see unless the knife is there in my hand I’ll not tell you anything false, so you can soon discover – When the salt returns to wash away […]

He sidles close and slips them like a drug into my drink, so they escape my pen as freely as ‘f’ words in a playground. See them fly like pigeons from a loft: luminous, iridescent, shimmering, myriad, miasma, moonlit, beauteous, wondrous, joyous. I turn my back on him and cross them out: myriad X, miasma […]

From this vantage point, your habit is to be dark with spots and sparkles of light impinging on your nature. The colour scheme is not absolute and depending on universal positioning, you can dress in all the spectrum of colours. I am looking at you with an inquiring eye. It is 3 am and the […]

For Jane Draycott As winter secrets melt with the purple sun, what is revealed is electric — notes tune unknown scales, syntax alters tongues, terracotta melts white, banyan ribbons into armatures as branch-roots twist, meeting soil in a circle. Circuits glazed under cloth carry alphabets for a calligrapher’s nib italicised in invisible ink, letters never […]

Everywhere hot, still. A shimmer above the corn melts the blue cavern of the distant woods. Wimbledon pick-pocks on television sets as Liz and I bike up Vicarage Lane, sun flitting through the trees, then run over that striped lawn to dive at last into the Johnsons’ pool.

The end of term, a long, dry spell. Someone gave you an orchid with seven flowers. On the mantelpiece, each pink head seemed to loll its tongue, its mouth wide open, holding its breath, clinging to the stalk that drooped to the left. We fed the orchid, watered it, and then the good news came. […]

after the painting by Russell Drysdale Last night I dreamt I was a bairn again back home in a Perthshire garden, mouth open to catch snowflakes. I woke before I could taste them. It was dawn and already the sun was torching the trees. I lifted the sack and looked out; no green shoots cracking […]

Become dark, more muted shades of crimson as they reach their permanent wilting point. Remarks about romantic weekends away one subject in a thorny bunch of talk. Fretting over choices, asparagus in season, potted Cromer crab or watercress soup. We courted through an English drought. Married in one that became a must have designer accessory […]

Today I have nothing to say. Your mother’s breath was loaded with dust from the mountains. You were oil dunked on account of the dryness. You slept all afternoon. Your father called you pimpernel. Today I have nothing to say. Your mother’s eyes were blue, not black, your father traded olives for a gun, stole […]

This evening the air thick with resin clings to our hair and skin dust powders our lashes and floats over stick-dry clothes scattering ashes over shirts pegged out like penitents. Pine cones pop with heat spitting seeds that twist in a mad choreography and a monster moon looms through a bendy mirror like a red […]

We sent word to the pigman it being the fifteenth of July the jet stream screaming north of Oban, grey weather, dry. What starts without precipitation will become impossible to beat even just sitting sweating was enough work in this heat. There were thirty-nine steps to follow each one drier than the last enough to […]

On another day he would be plucky Hector or Chaska Star Spirit of the Selva gazing gormless into CrocCam™. This lifetime his film crew are eating sandwiches and mocking up spider habitats in Borehamwood, not staring into the fruitless eye sockets of a dried up reptile on a Peruvian cocha. A confiscated luxury belt buckle, […]

Bring it on so we can crack the very bones of summer, pick them white and dry. Let us pour out another gin, then lie as breathless as two bales of tawny grass. The sky is dust. My skin drinks oil and butter by the hour. Even our sleep is singed.

Yesterday we scattered Frances on the moor, placed her where coming over the fourth hill you can at last see Whitby Abbey and the sea, for her the start of childhood holidays. The four of us – the old and older still – standing in heather that was tinder dry, spread gouts of ash that […]

I They dug up the dead and knocked the church down. We’d sung our last hymn on Sunday filled to overflowing, in candlelight: Now the day is over night is growing nigh everywhere flattened and that was the end of West End. They re-buried the already dead in a forlorn field of gravestones high up […]

The train skirts the bricked-in brickworks guarded by some barbed wire, an old mattress on rough ground strewn with knickers and crushed cans, the shell of a burnt-out car. A pub with people outside dressed in black: the wake perhaps for that local lad blown up on night patrol in An Najaf. Smashed windows, streets […]

Up from the plains where piles of morning rubbish slide into the street, daily detritus of commerce, and labourers wait, desperate for work. Up, up past the national park, past the sal trees’ flaking bark, past checkpoints manned by lazy soldiers and landslides of granite boulders, unhinged by the monsoon rain. Into the valley of […]

She listens to him tie their names together                 in some strange hybrid he’s created                 for the occasion- first ones not just the second ones and when he does she finds it the gift completed with the loop the bow the two of hers the paper starts to peel away in petals   the […]

Apple trees fell long ago to the red fungus, rose bushes shrivelled to brittle twigs. Early leaf fall finished off the trees in the distant wood. The holly bush clings to life, black flies gather into its curled leaves and lick frozen sap. Hedgehogs with hunched shoulders and visible ribs rummage among bones of blackbirds. […]

There were no constants, those first months: no voice, no waft of soft-worn cotton, no rapt embrace, no looming shapes with which to anchor my position against sunlight, time. No memory of that other place: a quiet room, a different quality of light, those drifts of silence settling into hours. Perhaps I grew strong on […]

The old farm with its pink windows is for sale on the far side of our valley and always magical, but now close to, I see the casements are rotting, a sad red, roof and gutters sag like the old iron bedstead, unlotted, just hauled into the yard. Inside the ceilings curl down, a nest, […]

Tumbled walls, the drizzled sheen of scattered hand-hewn stone, thistles as flame in the hearth, troubled sky for a roof, the door that kept outside from straying in, skim-thin imprint – all those faces and footfalls, outstretched hands, that ever passed through to bring news indoors, handfuls of kindling, gleanings of oatmeal, or else, caught […]

Clearing from the nocturnal fields like the white owl, memory seized us after we sang exile’s bitter herbs and drank the turbulent wine that hurt us as your son, mourning his mother’s sudden death, rejected you, tearing up the cheque you gave him. You left. Like the impeccable snow reflecting our inner peace, all too […]

The night you left was lit by lightning. Bang on cue, it struck the tower as you gunned the engine and roared away. Later, torrents flooded the valley, sign-posts drowned, roads submerged. That night much was laid low. The day dawned haggard, bleary with longing. I tried to conjure up your face, my eyes half-open […]

(after Cape Cod Morning by Edward Hopper) It took twenty years or more before the trees gave up their souls and bodies to the woodcutter. Summer, autumn, winter and spring seasoned the sappy wood before they cut it into boards to build the house and paint it white, catching the light which seemed to fall sideways […]

Here’s one that missed the gather. Straggling where her lamb succumbed, this ewe drifts her fleece over heather and furze. Follow her, you may retrieve enough to spin. Eventually she’ll shed it all in matted clumps, then saunter, scruffy, bleating her call at the flock flooding up to the common moor, their flanks, shoulders, necks […]

The herbs have taken over now – a hidden path beneath the arching spray of mint and rosemary. There is a pond beyond that hedge, behind the empty bird feeder that swings from the apple tree. He used to push that lawnmower, the nonelectric back-breaker, the green paint rusted and all the blades blunt. His […]

By the rust road, a lattice strip of iron. Red-clad. A dozen more, bent and furred between sea edge and the Black Beacon: coils of crude traceries discarded like mis-shapes. All objects wrestle themselves in this easterly wind. The North Sea heaves stones from their comfortable silence up to the spit and the weathered calls […]

We talked about the pit falls of summer babies, those BAD-UNS gone to seed and Whitsun weddings, Easter when it falls early and the time we found all that CHOCOLATE that she had GIVEN UP for Lent hidden in the bottom of the cleaning closet. And how we despised the way she cried and said […]

I wasn’t there. It was certainly someone else who looked like me. The women crying – I had nothing to do with that. You mention a child plagued by sad memories. I repeat I was not there. Photographic evidence is not admissible. People took so much trouble and all their efforts went for nothing? I […]

A matinee that Saturday – watching Dirk, bad and beautiful in The Blue Lamp. Beauty is never comfortable, and in a man of course, entirely gratuitous. What can you do with it? Gaze at it, guard it, fuck it, outstare it, wait for it to fade or thicken into something easier to bear.

To find her like that on a hot night, as though the stairs down to us, and lamps, and the smell of cooking, were utterly impassable – to burn on the frozen metal of her cries. It is my nightmare as much as hers: to be less real than giants or wolves, a ghost touch, […]