After the painting by Theodore Robinson Two priests, on the narrow path to heaven, pass a balcony brimming with clementine. Like crows, they glance up, and see a woman with red hair, sipping a glass of Gragnano. She smiles and tells them there is more than one way to the top of the mountain. Ahead,
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 continues to meet the ceiling,the length staying true to the plumb.Then the trick of guiding it down into darkness so as not to snag and easing it out without tearing,fretting the
Because we talk we talk about the weather, its predictable mood-swings, good days, off days, days that come at any time of year as if from nowhere – stormy, or so sweet we have to go outside to feel, together, their July-in-April, March-in-May, nostalgic for a world whose atmosphere adapted us as we adapted wheat,
how Peleus won Thetis of the grey mistby clasping her to the couch, and holding onthrough her every changing shape, even the tigress. You gods on Olympus, grant me that peaceonce her shape-shifting is over, and promise meby the Styx, it be over once and for all.
Hard to believe the mirror:those sags you thought were cheekbones. Your size is no longer your size and the next one up buries you. Flimsy panels and the clothes hook swivels on a single screw. The curtain that won’t draw to: who might burst in, who’ll step out.
Listen, here they come, the easy rhyme wordsof the English language, flying into settle on the branches of the treeoutside my window, families of sound that perch together, calling their own absurdsuggestions through the comprehensive dinof common use and plain vocabulary,far-fetched, serendipitous, profound, and why not, we all want to be remembereddon’t we? There’s no
His habit is watching sceneryChanging at the bend,The view lying back encirclingIts dishevelment with an arm. Or watching a waterfallSilently on film, jumped shotsLeaving him unsplashed.It is visiting a Sussex castle Where he pictures the skirmishingOf frightened soldiery.It is any crowd he seesIn profile, fathers and sons anonymous As collectors’ coins. He observesThe cheerful blindness
in a racy world of competitive types, because, you know, two brains are generally better than one. Like the puttering hybrid – who’s the engine and who the battery? Like the panting pantomime horse, who has which end? Tirelessly, observers try to subvert the scheme, an affront to their own marital dynamic. Some days they
On 9 June 1865, Charles Dickens was involved in a railway accident on a viaduct at Staplehurst, Kent, while returning from France with his mistress Ellen Ternan. Ten people died and forty were injured. Dickens himself died five years to the day after the crash. I stopped mid-sentence – a broken train of thought. On
It’s been a while. Let me get used to it.I knew about the widows, of course, but hadn’t quite expected the crutches, the walking-frames, or that poor agitated soul endlessly pacing at the front. On the other hand, the baby chirruping during the one minute’s silence could hardly have given any offence. It’s been a
Two houses up, old Eddie died last week and a man I’ve never seen before is throwing things into the garden from the back door: a cardboard box, black plastic bags, a broken kitchen chair. The garden isn’t much, but Eddie had laid a path, hollowed a goldfish pond, sown a rockery with alpine
You are not churchy, I feel certain of it.You do not demand a particular hat or coatOr a room filled with a particular scent.You do not only like hymns And if someone laughs you don’t mind.There is no special kind of poem for youOr single word to wrap your meanings inNor can any category contain
Goddard prints his footsteps in the gloom and, from the transepts, Breathes an air swaying with a pleasant doom, not quite his own. He marks the candles, too, stacked and swelling for another age, And, for the thousandth time, repeats their sigh, repeats their sigh. Still the organ keys lie waiting for him, like the
through the French windows we see Vanessabarefoot on the misty suburban lawndoing an arabesque on the wet grassas we troop down to the breakfast tableher stepfather behind his black moustachesatisfied to have woken us at dawnwith a shout come on, get up! Vanessaat fifteen or sixteen prepares herselfto quietly drop the bomb of pregnancybetween the
Ball-bearings, silver, tilted inhis lidless gold tobacco tintip out and strike the garage floorlike props dropped by a conjurorwho scrabbles for them in the darkblackthreaded by the scent of barkto feel, in earth caked on a spade,the soul his careless ghost mislaidslip through cold hands that disinterthe winter bulbs he left for her,while cobwebs, hung
The room shakes. He holds the hairspring up to the light. In the hour before the jets come he plays old cassettes of Farid El-Atrache and dreams of Beluga where his son, Tariq, once drew a clock in the sand. They bring him pieces of broken time: cracked faces, lost years, and place them into
Flaubert said he could hear the fallof the words several pages aheadbefore he’d even written them. Your poems felt like that to me —or should I say, feel like that:they haven’t died, as you have, and never will, singer of backyards, afterlives, banished gods and the lost places of the earth. Seeing in inanimate things
First you have to give your name.Only when Callum finds it on his listwill he open the door and let you in. They have emptied the waiting roomof all but half-a-dozen chairs.We take it in turns. Each of us is called. We are all of an age, some with sticksmost grey-haired. One by onewe leave
To gambol and to sometimeslollop through the meadow,head, a yo-yo, beech-green eyes. To be a dog — to be a German Shepherd dog sniffing einfach, einfach, in between botanic explorations. Or a Vizsla — chieftain of the hunting arts, Hungarian and fed on chops, oroh to be a spaniel, simply that and snuffle pungent mushrooms
A 3×5 snap, black-and-white, fading, fallsfrom the pages. Summer ’68, Cuckmere Havensnatched with a child’s Instamatic: blurry, askew –tilted skyward mid-skirmish from a grassed-overtrench carved into the Downs. Resurrected:grinning urchins gangly in shorts – Bell, Lomax, Leeper – hamming it up as prisoner and Jerries,a penknife’s glint at the throat of a boy whose namenow