Poems

Slowly the slow train pulls away To run beside the river bed With everything I long to say To people who are long since dead.

The house I hatedhated me, gave mea precariously narrow landingat the top of stairs, so I fellinto intensive carefollowed by Neuro-Rehabilitationresidence where I pay little attentionto double vision, double incontinenceand a wheelchair, focusing on the dizzinesswhich suggested that brain and Imay not be keeping company. Occupational Therapists –Nonulia watches me make a cup of tea.She

Only I was allowed to sit on the Golden Bidet of Lerici. Lord Byron sat on it as well as Percy Bysshe and Mary. D.H. Lawrence swung by and perched there like a demigod – as well as Frieda von Richthofen. Virginia Woolf sat on it in 1933 knocking out a beautiful sentence – Max

i.m. The ‘Discovery’ Tree, c. 609-1853 5 September 1876, Calaveras Big Trees State Park, four miles northeast of Arnold, California – At the Calaveras Grove there stood a tree which the guidebook says took 5 men 25 days to cut down, the work being performed with pump augers. Upon the stump which measures 25 feet

There was a train in the distance.Comforting to know the train was coming.Comforting to know it was a long way off. One day I stood on the platformtrying to imagine the train lolloping in.It rushed by and kicked up a wind. And – figure this? – it knocked off my hat.

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

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

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

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

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