Poems
So much activity outside
where sunlight spills across the snow
like cream –
Rain bubble-wrapping the windows. Rain
falling as though someone ran a blade down the spines
of fish setting those tiny backbones free. Rain
with its squinting glance, rain
And the world is fire.
And the sky wears a smoky veil.
And the bloodshot sun stares.
... (read more)‘Addio, valle di pianti’ –
These the composer’s plainchant words
No librettist dare rewrite
At using up imprisoned air
To sing like miners’ warning birds
Inside the sunless atmosphere
Of Eros and eternal night,
Amneris concertante.
... (read more)the gardens dyed silver. finally he was
less keen like an eaten bird, it wasnt my thing
the path diverged off course to a camp.
you were willing to grow a pomegranate inside.
here they were gods people with their quiet domestics,
the redheads were nicer however. the pram, was full with a baby,
‘dreaming’ of white museums. & white art.
... (read more)Freefall
must be like this,
To be alone in the wide room
in the house’s crooked elbow, turning point
for extensions as the family grew
and grew – and grew – to be alone in the one room
nobody needed now, though it might be resumed
like land, for guests or blow-ins, at any moment,
without notice (and that was part of
the appeal, the very tenuous feel of the place) to play the ...
Not since I was four or five at most
and in the first of many striped tee-shirts
have I been this close to the flavour of safety.
I’m walking into town again, the child of hills.
You bought me fish and chips for lunch, my own
adult portion because I asked for it, in Evans’s
tiled restaurant, the Alhambra of takeaways.
Waiting on a reeking strange
railway station –
then the dead-quiet but crowded
night ferry.
It’s midnight now and sounds like midnight then,
The words like distant stars that faintly grace
The all-pervading dark of space,
But not meant for the world of men.
It’s not what we forget
But what was never known we most regret
Discovery of. Checking one last cassette
Among my old unlabelled discards, few
Of which reward the playing, I find you.