22. The path The sea is melting into floes. The melt-water softens our dogs’ paws and ice splinters their toes. We tie seal-skin boots they try to flick off. We sled the ice-foot, the belt of shore-fast, until the air is as crass as the water below. The grown is […]
Poetry
Five Poems
Franklin, in prospect Trad. it says on the record sleeve only a century later, now truth beyond question. Such enchantment in the tune. Sometimes I wonder who paid the piper. * Even the name beguiles: open, bare-chested to the weather, then slender and refined. We would not have taken on so […]
Five Poems
The Blue Garden Bluebell or cornflower, it’s all the one to the cherry tree with its many doors opening, hour by hour, on one colour as rooms with forgetful walls might do, their layers of paint and antique paper golden with birds and golden flowers, hunkering under a whim of novelty. By such […]
Death at Doo Lough Valley
1 It is wild in Killadoon. The waves roar at you. ‘You have to do something,’ Eugene the horse man told us. ‘You have to get out and do something here. You can’t just be sitting in, no matter the weather.’ A man stood in a small field, watching his cows feed. His elbows […]
Two Poems
Better By Far By bus? Better by far a magic carpet, finely knotted, richer than blood, broad enough to keep the family together, islanded, apart from every danger, journeying smoothly across the unsegmented sky – not in the cauldron of summer, but in the fresher feel of […]
Three Poems
Granattrichter mit Blumen (1924) after an etching by Otto Dix Because he couldn’t forget it eight years later we stand ten yards from that crater, prevented from gazing into the heart: he blacked that in, held us back from it. And he recalled the background bare, but etched a chain of full-grown wildflowers […]
Three Poems
Retablo for Barrie Cooke This retablo has been made for my friend Barrie, that he may be easy within himself and free from pain or fear. Helsinki Harbour is alive with floes that dip and grind against the nudging ferry. A dusk-fox waits for fish beside an ice-hole. An island is a fortress […]
Two Poems And A Sequence
Pieris japonica in Liverpool front gardens It has an undeniably Japanese look. It embodies the principles of contrast and asymmetry. Its twisting woody stems are like laid paths in a Japanese garden, that open onto unexpected vistas. Its leaf-growth, lying at different heights, suggests rock-terraces. The scarlet of new […]
Two Poems
LETTERPRESS ‘A print is properly a dent on the page. The whole history of letterpress is the abolition of that dent.’ Eric Gill Your first challenge is how to read upside down and left to right. When you’ve mastered this, compose your chosen letters on the stick, like Scrabble. Don’t fret at impenetrable […]
Three Poems
Jardin des Plantes The ruined summer’s lush despondency, Arrested, Tennysonian…Late afternoon Grows fog from all-day rain. Did we have prospects, once? We are the characters we’ve read about, Provincial and enraged At waking up to find we’re dead. In the insanitary capitals Grim functionaries glare Across the sodden parks As the invasion is delayed, […]
Two Poems
The Humane Society My mother brought home the strangest creatures: a lamb wearing a big white diaper; a blind raccoon; a wolfhound with a broken hip, spooked by birthday balloons— Then there was Mary Lou: two hundred sixty pounds and bruised, she held a big leather purse, drank diet pop, smacked pink gum, went […]
Two Poems
2d6 We followed the train of thought through to its termination. It was a mistake we wouldn’t make soon, but would eventually, again and again. The populations shiver and sit, mysteryless, like commoners knighted on the eve of a battle suddenly postponed or perhaps cancelled entirely, nobody knew? We hope it was once as simple […]