Bauhaus It’s 28 minutes and the river is Bauhaus and a god lipping slowly, steadily, not feared, but worshipped for its plausibility. Each day I approach the north branch, the river is a series of renovations confronting me. I am impressed. I am the workman who has left new windows overnight in the grass. The […]
Poetry
Three Poems
The Method Everything I do, I do in order to get something. For example: Jane. I want Jane, but she doesn’t want me. Now, everything I do, I do in order to get past the obstacles to Jane. Why doesn’t Jane want me? Perhaps she fears me. Why does Jane fear me? Perhaps I am […]
Periwinkle
Periwinkle You’re like an Austin FX4 hackney carriage in miniature: slow and expensive these days, an oddity, like dulse or potted herrings. • Between the pads of my thumb and my index I pinch the pin, then flip out your operculum. I hold that flimsy disk up to the sunlight and it becomes a-nazar-of-a peacock’s […]
Thinning Apples at Ludag
Thinning Apples at Ludag Gone untrimmed, when the yield came down perhaps I’d think that I was rich – buckets and basins running over. But all would be small: small blushed skin small stiff core – maybe of no use unless for pickling or stewing or practising to split them open, like a clasped book, […]
Three Poems
Shetland Swop I’ll swop you my wheatear for your ringed plover, my lapwing for your rock pippet, this bevy of seals for your noisy hanging cliff-garden of two thousand nesting guillemots. If you can spare me two miles of pink thrift I’ll give you a broadside of tammie nouries and all my spare bonxies. As […]
Three Poems
From a Bonfire There’s plenty I miss, still, that I wouldn’t want back – which I’m beginning to think might be all regret’s ever had to mean, and there’s maybe no shame, then, in having known some and, all these years, I’ve pretty much been wrong. Not that being wrong means wasting time, exactly. What […]
Three Poems
Notes on Mary Torrance (‘Mary is Mary’) Career spanning four decades, seventy-four essays, eleven collections. Formal poems; decline in moral values. Hated free verse in Poetry ’86, ‘The devil Whitman ruined it for everyone’ and in Paris Review ’92, ‘The New York Pre-School, why no one is counting’. Her book, Beat, Stick, ‘Howl’: Barefoot / […]
Three Poems
Cod with the Voice of a Cantor Still we send the trawlers out, although no one alive has heard the song, and no one dead will tell. Boat after boat hauls back, and captains hold their silent ground on decks of gasping contraband to listen for a note, a tentative first ‘O’ among the mottled […]
Three Poems
On Latterly Overcoming Last October’s Loss for Rosa Tomalin Laugh out loud, oh lover of levity, our lingering optimism lightens our load. Observe, lover, our lashings of luxurious ornament: lilac oil, Lebanese ocarinas, legumes, oriental lanterns, oranges, lemons or limes; O listful of lissom, obdurate, lifely objects, lighting opulently like old-fashioned lamp-posts onto liveries of […]
Another day he might have simply changed the wheel
Another day he might have simply changed the wheel Smoke mountains the will of concrete under the cluster bomb The fallout rains us birds. We kill them! We eat them! The flesh of the birds delivers word that a roadside mechanic kills a man who’s come to have his wheel replaced. He kills using the […]
Two Poems
Love after Douglas Sirk Take me to the country club in my red dress. Make me locally infamous. Fix me a Martini—Dry— I am getting weepy. I almost want to die. O take me, please, to the clinic in Zurich. I’m not being ironic— I cannot see to see! You—you have blinded me! Be my […]
Divination Isn’t What It Was
Divination Isn’t What It Was The pay-as-you-go syndrome catches up with you. This morning all my tags were apathetic or empty. It was overcast, impatient and grey. I went out amongst leaf litter that seemed glum. I looked into clouds for divination. I couldn’t construe their puffy encryptions. Newsprint melted into the driveway. There were […]
Three Poems
Search History I can’t read properly at work, I can’t shop productively as ‘adult bike’ brings pornography. I can’t browse articles edgy enough to mutter ‘fuck’ and ‘life drawing’ comes up blank but a search for ‘mature cheddar’ presses buttons I’d rather not have to go figure, though even I can understand an obvious failure […]
Two Poems
The Beautiful World 1. You cannot reach the beautiful world. It is everywhere and nowhere. It thinks we do not know, but we do. 2. Once I glimpsed it. My sister opened the door and ran through. She vanished among the trees beside the lake. The rest of us returned to our tasks. […]
The Elements House
The Elements House A gap in the woods. See the house through the cordon of trees. Hear the wind chimes. Crows. Black dog scraping at the back door. Left to the elements, the house lies in state- a mouldering woodland creature, demonstrating each stage of death. Sinew stretched to its limits, the roof folds. The […]
The Answer to Your Question is Yes, but Not as Some Unremitting Paradise
The Answer to Your Question is Yes, but Not as Some Unremitting Paradise Once you get entranced by what birds can do in winter— stark murmurations against a grey sky, seed pods scavenged in a landscape that looks blank and nearly dead—you forget that the stone statues on the parish lawn have some meaning too, […]
Coming from the Mill
Coming from the Mill Close to midnight, we finish the first puzzle we bought from the Arndale. For the first time since you told me, we try drowning the silence with kissing. It’s a jigsaw of a Lowry painting, and it’s pretty tough because all those half-bent spines and hats coming from the mill look […]