Everyone around me doggedly refuses to understand that I have never been able to live in the reality of things and people … Debussy – letter 8 July 1910, the piece L’Embarquement pour ailleurs still incomplete I have joined the Shipwrecked Mariners’ Society, fee 1 shilling. No
From a photograph of Himmler taken by an unknown German soldier in Ukraine, summer 1941 In a meadow heavy with the scent of everything that blooms without anticipation of death, two Ukrainian peasant girls encounter the Reichsführer SS. Freed from their labours they smile and greet the slight bespectacled man who appears benign, as he
Let’s take a knife and our differences down to the hazel wood. Two strokes each converts to four stakes in the ground. Let’s run these round with rope to make a ring, then step in. Let’s box. Or let’s kneel before a sacred court. Either way we’ll agree that justice should
Late winter elbows past in wind and rain while teenage waiters bearing lemonade and shandy take away my mother’s pecked-at Yorkshire pudding. Back behind the bar Michael Jackson blames it on the boogie in the beer-and-whiskey half-dark as we escort her to the car, one at each elbow, each sparrow elbow, as if making
take this moment beside the rapids, where sunlight clips the old weir wall, knowing itself to be only a faint replica of sunlight, not the sort found in other places, like Pisa or Nairobi, but without undue dismay at its shortcomings and invisibly corpsing, here and there, as only the old style comics knew how,
The art is on the floor so technically my feet are art. Watch your — says the curator, too late. I’m rearranging atoms, I’m making something move here, can’t you see? More verve, more discombobulation – more lifelike, don’t you think? The curator doesn’t think. I disentangle. She announces a round of applause for Tim,
All it takes is an Alice moment ducking my head to go down the passage into house number seven and my huswif’s eye takes over approves the stone dresser (not much dusting), the handy storage cells, the fit and bulk of the front door’s slab, the mattress of bracken, the sheepskin rugs. And outside a
They do not walk the world, our fragile dead: They do not stalk our streets or pace our floors; They do not stand behind unopened doors, Rehearsing all the words that went unsaid. They cannot walk our world as we would walk: They cannot choose to see a much-missed place, They cannot choose to see
The statues have been getting wetter and wetter. Always standing (they have no beds), they darken In the downpour. Even if we scrape the moss and lichen From their features as it comes, they won’t get better, But will grow more nimbus-like until the day It is impossible to be quite sure Who everybody is.
He was from the north and always right. Bet you come from some market town in Surrey, he muttered darkly over our first year Poor Law essays. I was dangerously short on street cred. Gift-wrapping hardbacks in a mock-Tudor bookshop deep in the privet-lands of suburbia, I ruminated tactics, just as Lenin must have
(i.m. Marie Colvin, 1956-2012) All autumn, the chafe and jar of nuclear war — Robert Lowell, ‘Fall 1961’ My father, who’d had ‘about as much as he could take’ by ’44, and still woke swearing at flies and soaked in sweat, read the Telegraph in dread and disbelief over his
Our honeymoon weaved from Hampton Court to the pavement labyrinth of Chartres, then on to the high hedged puzzle of the Villa Pisani, where he delighted in my wrong-footed confusion. All the while his notebook overflowing with looped alleys, abrupt dead ends, sly, coiling traps. Back home I soon came to feel the practice of
Muscle patterns that show satisfaction or delight as opposed to a disingenuous smirk have been identified by the Laboratory of Human Interaction to provide more information about suicidal patients who want to check themselves out of hospital in order to take their own lives. The best test for a genuine smile is to look
The heatwaves that would have filled my tubs and cones never came. ‘O sole mio’ falling flat as I drove through my hard fought for patch on the outskirts of Aldershot. The Whitby Morrison will have to go, it won’t fetch much, mouths to feed, another on the way and barely enough to stretch to
From The Years (Arc Publications, £8) I came to tend – I lie – to visit the grave of a friend and found an ugly shrub with waxy leaves had made the plot its home. Since my last attendance ten years had passed – doing I can’t think what, except translate a
The place was out beyond an old farmhouse, a path through woods, a clearing, sky; the others gathered close, bounded by what each of us withstood. The limestone scree tumbled down the hillside intermittently, clouds covered the sun. I shook the crushed femur and fibula of peppered ashes, watched them weightless glide like spores, and
Like regrets drifting through consciousness, They glide through the streets of our cities, Untouchably themselves, Silently intent on their purpose, Counting eternities with each corner they turn. Belonging to no time or place, They appear in our hearts, Offering up the flowers we never sent And the words we never spoke, Only to disappear once
In the park today, All that I found had a name. The black ball of a robin’s eye, The dizzy dart and dawdle of the sky blue butterfly Were almost just the same, But I had their song In my hands and lips, Like the grass I picked when it had been Rolled and
In its translation, this poem does not rhyme, Nor do its lines possess much of a metre, And yet its lilt has something of the chatter To be heard around the overpriced café Where its translator likes to spend his time Discoursing to the waitress on the way He matches sentiment to syllable To convey
Regent’s Park, November I pick a tree, from all those rows, ruggedly gesturing, voiceless, braced for the fall of shaming snows, a captive in its stark undress. At my feet the thousand-pieces puzzle in countless shades of brown attests to a handful of species whose leaves the recent winds brought down: English