My son, who’s never been allowed to tread on the scarce, yellowed lawns back in Spain, hesitantly takes a few steps in Priory Park, glances back, checks for approval, then breaks into a wild canter. And I, who played in our garden all summer long and who took it for granted, learn the amazement of
Something of the faded dandy hangs about God’s moth-eaten evening coat, his worn-out cloth-uppers. He seems to be cruising lost time in search of fellow flâneurs who might remember him from the good old days before he dyed his hair. He holds out a threadbare mauve suede glove as if begging forgiveness from the crowds
From direct to indirect speech,spelling and pronunciationremain the same, though the meaning of this word has changed forever,my tone no longer impatientor jokey, but strictly neutral. I end up juggling sentencesto give the proper noun the slipand dodge any mention of Dad.
I’m four pints deep at The Signal Box since no trains are leaving Euston now. At the bar there’s a guy who talks and talks. The departure boards are blank as snow. Silent as someone who, three hours ago, stood at the tracks’ edge. Turning and turning a stone in one hand. Someone who knew
These are the days when no words will do.Such horrors accrue by the phone’s blue lightconstant as the wind tonight rattles throughthe alleys, a side gate banging to. Rain whitein the gutters, the new year’s promise a kiteflapping in a thunderstorm as you, farwith only second-hand knowledge, rewritethese lines, for all the good they’ll do.
Instead of scattering your ashes, let’s go for another walk, across those swaying fields you’ll sprint half the length of, sun low as I dawdle your lead, watch you weaving free through waist-high grasses, time blurring as wind whittles away at gritstone edge. You’ll sniff your way up the scree, village blinking below like so
(after Mallarmé) The moon grew sad. Abstracted seraphim, weeping with their bows in their hands, in the calm of misty flowers, played on mortal violas white sighs glazing the deep blue of His corollas – it was the sacred day of your first kiss. My reverie, content to be martyred like this, drew a lucid
Her tiny headpeers above three jarscrammed with votive jonquils – her face among the crows, the marching limes, the warty humps and bubblesof the London planes. Bronze and bluebell. Bronze on high Portland stone. Her beauty wrenched from clay, whose sculptor stabbed unfinished voidsto stare directly at the surging wave, eyes that studied fin and rainbowforced, like millions
Ever wonder why foxes always slip into poems? Imagine the present moment embodied, coat ablaze as it skips littered bushes and moonlight’s lament like the burnt shock of iron sediment at a river’s turn, you’ll find its furtive glare soon meets your own. Now it stops, head bent to sniff the rutted earth scattered with
(after Rimbaud) Lord, when the meadows are cold, and when in the despondent hamlets all prayer is silent, down on Nature bare and old let them swoop from the skies, those dearest and delightful crows. Strange troops with your cheerless cries, winds assault your nests, it seems! Over winter’s jaundiced streams, lanes with moss-grown calvaries,
The squirty old style fuel pumps lie dead as I hook the car up to the charging point and brace in case the plug recoils. I’m pleased we’re powered by wind and solar now shale gas lies untouched and coal’s defunct. A half-hour charge beside the jet-wash gun with pushy forecourt ads, someone changing oil,
The office is so full of bloody books, propped dangerously on tables, cases, chairs, propped everywhere, so everywhere one looks one briefly shrugs one’s shoulders and despairs. The drawback to so many bloody books is that they come between us, me and her, and interrupt what should be melting looks with titles unforgivably obscure. Take
Another week gone by in the pubmeans time called on someone elseas if the reaper’s too lazy to aimhigher than the fermented windfalls. The regulars are sad but secretly gladit’s not them in the pine overcoatas they discuss at length how hardit is to drive to that new crematorium. They complain it’s just off the
If it is here, tethered by thornsto the soil, for a reason,it is solely to hold him, his shepherd’s ghosthome from a field in Belgium, to let his tired frame restand the breeze call through him A oes heddwch? A oes heddwch? … expecting no answer. Mysterious in the unshorn mistit mourns his absence,waits patiently
We’re due at The Press Club at six for a briefing on the Padma Bridge. Rivers here drown in their own plenitude. I don’t normally wear pearls, but shalwar glamour has boxed me into a corner. All I can see of our driver is his left arm and watch. Koranic verses swing from the rear-view
for Anna Punch has made up with Judy and put his big stick away. He’s happy to cuddle the baby. He’s a new man as from today. A husband on best behaviour. A loving father restored. But preferring him as raver the audience feels cheated and bored. Bring back the Judge and the gallows the
A stone thrown, from this distance, might dispersecrows flocked around the shadow of a manwho waves his arms, appearing to rehearsehis plea beneath the apse’s vanished span;or hit the glassless chancel where sun shonelike holy water poured from its cleft rockas once, perhaps, on Tyre and Babylon,the sand of Thebes, the dust of Antioch:but here
in the gaps between the goo you scoop up out of the pan and whilst the suds in the sink circle once… twice… (those soapy suds nothing can rush them) and even yes even in that split second when you leap up/swear/ knock over your chair/exhale all at once because the battery in
On 10 August 2003 the temperature in London exceeded a hundred degrees for the first time That apocalyptic summer, buildings going up, trees coming down. Day after day, nowhere to hide. A police helicopter banks and circles, lower and lower every sleepless night. The heat is on until November and doesn’t end with a firework
Distillation of a play by Brian Friel, first performed at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, on 30 June 1993 Silence. Sound – waves tumbling over each other, seagull, singing, laughing, as three couples run onto the beach. They are celebrating the birthday of Terry. Angela and Berna are sisters. Angela and George are having a secret