So much steam and shaftsof sooty light. The porterslook like Laurel and Hardyand I like the train driver’sleathery smell, the glowof hot coals, the crowdedplatforms. Our mumsand dads are on the move,escaping wars, seekinglost weekends, travellingsomewhere sad alongwith the dead. WhenI blink whole epochsare shunted off. Onthe holiday specialwhere I once satthere’s a dazed, aged
Sometimes nothing would do but the jug band from the swamp stomping the dirt road down the bayou grunting bass and wailing mouth-harp chain-gang holler and low moon riding the cypress trees hauling along that long-time sorrow crying out in that strange joy sometimes nothing else could hope to bring it home
I wanted to be a writer, but instead of sitting down I strode out over the shingle ridge and saw the sun coming up pink, pushing the thick clouds away, and felt the cold wind forcing the morning’s door, hurrying everything along, even the tiniest stones, which rained down in little landslides no bigger than
Life begins, everlastingly, with light.A cloud-green chaos, the creator’s tear,that crystal deluge breaks to disappear.Rich oil, soft ochre-black, becomes a heightof stone, to pierce, amid the wilderness,our Virgin Mother’s deep azure and gold.Her fingers, hesitant as blood, unfoldto bless the child above the last abyss. Land’s End. Nanjizal Bay at low tide formeda cratered Armageddon
The geometric universe reels beside the motorway – this Lammas night, a measure on the harvest sway of ears, a murmured song, a lullaby from spheres of leaf-green light, breathes circles, petals, stars, makes rough bristles collapse suddenly as one, and, while the lorries pass, the pattern’s spun.
Time, Butcher’s Van, that I began To hymn you panegyrically! When at your wheels the gravel pinged And tingled, no van, were it winged, Could have arrived more lyrically! We marked the man vacate you, Van, To hob and nob satirically With maid and cook, produce the book To sign as
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.
A response to Larkin’s poem ‘The Old Fools’ No, Philip, they’re not fools they’re just old, the world over mind-boggling millions of them the lot who are always losing things — sometimes not only things — the stooped battalions for whom bladders and stairs are now an issue along with banks without cashiers, opening tins
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
i.m. Charles Ferdinand Smyth, born 9 January 1865 at Stephen’s Green; died February 1871 of rheumatic fever 29 June 1876, Hokitika, South Island, New Zealand – All went in search of the donkey, Dandybear, & found the truant half way on the road to Kaneiri. The children ride on this animal on saddles of home
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
Who wanted to be my mammy. Who I wanted to be my mammy. We didn’t tell anyone not even ourselves. Mother stood in the way obdurate, certain of ownership, not knowing I’d fallen in love with another. Ida wanted to hold me I wanted Ida to hold me It never happened. We knew it was
these days to rob any bank would take a certain élan – a Clyde-like bohomie – smiling shouting ‘Thanks’ as you fire over their heads a sweep of the hat a flourish before you run now The Banks are boarded-up or have taken a turn
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
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