Patricia – Pat – was dumpy, with a curling lip, Pat was in fact the Office Bitch. Every night she walked (stridently) home along our beautiful meaningless beach. I sometimes saw her from the car, an umbral figure with an itch for grey skies, pavements and — she told us this — ‘some decent human
Hans Island, 80°N 66°W There’s a small island in the north that bears your name—not named after you but after someone with the same name as you, and not even their real name just the forename explorers gave their guide and interpreter, Suersaq, their interpreter and guide— in a moment of good humour perhaps or
One day a man forgets a sea, a continent, a planet he forgets the features on his father’s face the prints of his own hand he forgets the flash of his eyes in another’s and the sound of water in his head he forgets the timbre of his own voice and the noise of his
Don’t bother catching the Cathay Pacific Airbus. Cheaper to take off the back of a transistor radio and weld yourself to the circuit board.
after Humphrey Spender’s ‘Dominoes’ Near as dammit to Orwell’s ideal, this,or at least his pub’s essential qualities:no radio or piano; the quiet blissof talk and its vital communality;good honest beer; uncompromisinglyVictorian in its architecture;tobacco smoke like a light fog on the sea.These barmaids know each Bolton regularby name. A southern foreigner, Spenderfelt out of place
The condition of my heart is a January swan.Mottled. Twisty. Largely humdrum. I wear my motley on my sleeve, where you ought.Some call it frippery. I call it fraught. The vocables I shoot for are punchy and swift.Yes. No. Stay. Go. Here. Now. Whisht. Violent assertions? A tempest in your soul?Make like a racoon trashing
This one I’ll leave till last, postponing the problems – how the wallpaper will come round the corner and the principal fern in the pattern will continue to meet the ceiling, the length staying true to the plumb. Then the trick of easing it down behind the radiator so it won’t snag on the wall,
Do you remember the feelingof how things appearedwhen you went home earlyfrom school, alone? I had a sense ofthis is how the world iswhen I’m not in it. Hedges and houses seemed new –more themselves, differentto 7.20 hedges, and home-time houses,as though they weren’t expecting me back so soon. Brick and leafbreathed, or seemed tofill
Unlike all their predecessors with their stubs recording new bikes, a week’s holiday in Cornwall or a magazine subscription, your last chequebooks wait in the drawer. Complete, pristine and obsolete, they’ve got no story left to tell. Though that’s a story in itself.
11 April 1876, Hobart, Tasmania – There is but one survivor of the Tasmanian race still alive, her name is Mrs or Queen Truccanine, she lives here ‘en famille’, the kind people who have taken her under their protection for some years get a government grant of £60 to help defray the expenses of her
after Humphrey Spender’s ‘Scout Parade’ Each day has its care, but each care has its day a proverb proclaims from a church billboard as a scout parade files through its archway. Half these young men look solemn, half bored, caught between the effort and the reward of endeavour; the same way today they’d seek out
When scholars were magicians, They learned to sing And then began to fly, for it was Spring then, And even the intelligent were chockful of passions. So, at night when they were high over the town or wood, They left behind The need to be both diligent and good And surveyed the land below
An island is one great eye gazing out the poet once said, an image I like for its stubbornness, solitude’s drought holding firm before the garrulous strike of water’s insistence. Say you hike the fell of yourself to this clear summit, become its focused pupil, childlike to rediscover the wholly private needn’t mean the selfish
Good job these poets aren’t tightrope walkers she said, else half the fakers would be dead –- another tumble from a tone-deaf shocker. But for a few still dexterous in their tread this formal panache isn’t just possible, it’s song as comprehension in itself: how meaning’s strung out between two shelves. True balance makes this
A friend of mine from college days once told me his greatest pleasure was cooking a meal and then dropping it on the floor. He’d dropped every kind of dish in his time from lasagna and stew to a full roast. What seemed to excite him most was the moment before the plate of food
It’s an early, cold Easter and on Good Friday Jean Munro and I go to a small Greek restaurant on Charlotte Street for our very first ever lunch together. She eats with messy, dripping gusto, Ably assisted by two 75 ml carafes of Retsina. Over Turkish coffee and Turkish Delight I explain that my ambition
When you are sad, and imminently grey, Will you take down my poems and say ‘That bastard took and took and took From me, for the sake of his lousy book’ —And have me, who am truly old and grey Terribly in handcuffs taken away?
scaturiginichthys vermeilipinnis One day do IMeet the Red-finned Blue-eye?Everybody said IMet the White-finned Red-eyeAnd folks say in town IWooed the Blue-finned Brown-eyeBut did I or do IMeet the Red-finned Blue-eye? In another place and time IKnew the Jade-finned Lime-eyeAnd dark rumours hold ISought the Black-finned Gold-eye,I’m willing to suppose ISquired the Green-finned Rose-eye,But, anybody, do
His eyes brim with the patience of his vigil. Time hangs like heavy pendants from his ears. His dewlap spreads like some contorted hill Of larva, frozen for a thousand years. He will lie here quite motionless until The door is opened, and the man appears. And when the man appears, the waiting dog Will
Beneath the towering oils of holy deaths — Cascading thunderstorms of crucifixion, Hands tortured into final benediction, Forgiveness in so many final breaths — They stand, a little dull, a little pale, A little worn by all the years of prayer, As if the hopes still hanging in the air Had left them strangely tired