The Ship of State is rolling on,rolling on to its fate. The Captain is elsewhere.A cardboard mirage stands uponthe Bridge. Officers bustle round,looking important, achieving little. The Crew come and go,seemingly as they please, do enough, just enough, to keepthe enterprise afloat. But so much is automatic —and for the rest, the mantra is: avoid
From the painting by Claude Monet Look closely, and you’ll see sand in the paint from the beach at Trouville, where I sat with Camille that summer. From this, you would hardly guess that war was coming; that Prussia had lured us in; that the clouds were not clouds, but the report of cannon fire.
Eventually we get Dad down into the boatwhere he loudly invites all the elderly ladiesto a seat on his lap‘as the benches are so squashed’.He is talking too much –it’s the joy of a captive audiencebut he’s been off the boards too longand needs to rediscover his art. The boat swivels off in a flourish,a
We no longer hold hands because you use a walking-stick to stand. Instead we slip together afternoons, stretch across the double-bed we can’t use nights now you’re so restless. I lie fingers on your arm, toes against your skinny tibia and it’s enough through seaweed feet to slither deep, not to sleep but into another
As when a man who has been dementing for years –old friends burst into tearswhen they see the ruins of his mindold lovers in despairlook up the rules for Dignitas – when he dies at last, gently, in deep sleepand one by one for the rest of usthe memories sweep back,how he listened, how he
They appear to believe they’ve laid the patio of everyone’s dreams: beautiful, lovingly made, fashionably disordered. You can see from their faces they’re proud of their work, proud of themselves — though it’s a haphazard, crazed mess, compounded of slabs of different sizes that simply don’t fit together — gaps chinking through — some slabs
Some of us can’t see the wood for the piles of notes obscuring the windows – notes on paper, in the making of which the established view has had to be dismantled. We try another tack, bend our minds to an alternative approach, but down on the beach it’s high-note tide, the smooth and shiny
It is the fear by which all fears are fed, The certainty one day you will lie dead. Such fear is groundless, some might call it rot: Consider, where death is there you are not. Truly, this should have no power to scare, Like you, it will be neither here nor there. Just wait, the
For this to work, we must switch places so my cell, this window, these walls become yours, so now, in the blue night you can see the shadow of a bird as it flits across the moon and in the morning, feel the sun, like a jailor, pouring its light meanly through the bars. Listen,
Who invented the clock, pray tell, time’s division, the ticking spell? An ice-cold man that hated song, who sat and thought the whole night long and listened to the starved mice brawl and beetles pacing in the wall. What invented the kiss? I’ll tell: a lovely mouth, you know full well, that kissed and did
Awful you were christened on the eighth daywith a name that was like any name the christener’s gift. Awful you were christened because your actswere so awfully and obsessively oddand broke every law of the house.Who would have known you served another lawthat advised your awe-filled dreadof what on earth would happen if you didn’t flickthe
Take back your big green foam rubber balland the red one with teeth marks, and the shuttlecock. Take the leather sandal kidnapped from next door.Take your chewed KFC packaging, plus the sachet of sauce, the paper napkinand the surgical mask you scavenged from the pavement. Replace the mountain of earth you dug outfrom under the
(A legend of the Christmas rose) The old man on the Tor that morning Woke up, he said, to find his mooring Had overnight become a hill, The lake scattered with piles of land Become a valley. A lorry undid The tiny tangled road below. Where was his trading ship ? he asked, And the
She dings the bell, a muffled chime from the gut of number twenty-nine, and both of us step off the step, survey. This place was quite a schlep from where we parked behind the bar we’d called ‘our future local.’ Ha! A couple emerges, whips past, and a suited lad is left; one hand grips
They’re trying to hold the shapeof their smiles while wrestling with their darlings who, it seems,would rather be anywhere than planted on their knees: mum and thunderous son,dad clutching daughter, as she flails towards something in flight.The photographer clicks anyway. They’ve made an effort: the knitsare new and ties are properly knotted. Poor parents. These
He wakes. Alive. No cash. No phone. Down from their ash trees squirrels nose through drink and dope enough to stone a wood’s astonishment of crows. He stirs and gives the crows a scare. Pinned up with lamps, tar paper sky flaps open at a corner where, tipped out of dusk, moths flicker by, skim
I painted beaches, seasides, shores or waves dashed on a harbour wall, a mackerel sky, a signature, to peddle to the gullible, until the seasons ran aground with darkly varnished fishing smacks or chalk-white gulls soared to astound the cliffs that threw their shadows back. My friend Proudhon said property was theft and so each
On the yard behind Hanley Fire Station, Jean-Claude from the French manufacturer is servicing the ladder. Bob, the chief mechanic, hands slipped inside navy boiler suit warm on his belly, purses his lips, puffs his cheeks at Jean-Claude spinning in the operator’s seat like a funfair ride, testing the turntable: sending the ladder
If I still remember the termsprotasis and apodosisfrom Latin grammar days at school, why can’t I exchange this knowledgewith its minimal relevanceto my subsequent life, in which sentences trot along quite wellunparsed and without their clausesneeding precise designations, for instant access to the namesof acquaintances approaching,all smiles, at social gatherings?
Not regret at what could have been said but regret, half way down, at what was said (… this will be called the fifth tread of ten). Not only regret at what was said but that it was said before it knew it was said (… this will be