Beneath the towering oils of holy deaths — Cascading thunderstorms of crucifixion, Hands tortured into final benediction, Forgiveness in so many final breaths — They stand, a little dull, a little pale, A little worn by all the years of prayer, As if the hopes still hanging in the air Had left them strangely tired
not just in the stretched sunsets and ticking clocks of poets but in the microwave – those four insistent bleeps Pachelbel’s Canon the word ‘lachrymose’ having to google the word lachrymose and the breathless stop when you spot what could be a new mole on your back or hear the guy who voiced your
Among late summer’s casualties, their dry retreats, their whispering in falls and drifting piles of leaves, her going went the worst for him with foxgloves where wire fencing sags, a sozzled hollyhock’s nosedive, the foxes’ feast of ripped bin bags anemones somehow survive; entangled heaps of splintered canes, their broken-backed tomato plants and, rattled by
zaglossus attenboroughi ‘a single echidna specimen collected in 1961… near the top of Mount Rara, in the Cyclops Mountains of Northern Dutch New Guinea [now Indonesia] was named in recognition of Attenborough’s contribution to increased public appreciation of New Guinean flora and fauna through his documentary work…’ – Wikipedia A world from there but roughly
I like to think I’m special to you, although I know you have so many special friends here, in the dark heart of the year when even the neighbour’s rowan scrapes against the window, plaintive, with that sound everyone hated as a child. What days I have seem shorter than ever and all my jackets
at arm’s reach, side by side, more than twenty-five feet up our treble extension ladders, shuddered by artics and buses thundering up and down Newcastle Street. But Stanway won’t lend me his scraper. It would take seconds, less than a minute, to run it around the window frame where wood meets glass, scrape off the
The cocktail umbrella surprises me. Its scalloped orange and blue pierces the lemon slice angled on the glass. The barman pulling pints smiles. Everyone’s making an effort tonight. Enter the women in glitter tops, it’s legs out although summer, if it ever was, has gone. Autumn doesn’t only happen in New York. We shimmer here
Her flat is on the fourteenth floor. String handles make his fingers burn. Both lifts are out again. Sod’s law. He stops half way. A giddy turn. More staggered flights. Encaustic tiles. Glass cladding visible for miles. She’s in of course. Unsnibs the Yale, shrinks back into her chilly hall then, shushing him, don’t tell
Low little thick-walled stone cottage on the dwindling, forest encroached old Usk road. You’d catch it at your eyeline, squat above the hedgerows, like a cup on its saucer; whitewashed, dim windowed, slightly sad outer face. Dad’s last home. His, more than hers, ‘a refuge place.’ After he’d died, Mum toiled in the garden that
All night I listen out for you, stalled in my terrace window like Pegasus in a field of stars. A clothes horse between semesters, draped in your colours, a bra for blinkers … I wait, still
Nice to get rid of yourself in a few words,Not to think any further or say any more.Nice to conceal in a strange town, To say, I am this, I am that, to use wordsThat are fixed and ripe to ignore.Nice to dispose in a few words. Who wants to live in the woods where
She’s everybody’s mother now. Our latest carer from Birmingham has a birthmark on her chin, wears coral nail extensions and might as well be a figure out of Grimm. She calls her ‘mum’ and ‘mother’, says ‘oh bless!’ whatever my mother says, shows me pictures of her boyfriend – ‘He’s my he/him’ – admires the
heteromirafa sidamoensis Reminds me of a poet I knew, the lye-ben lark. That’s how I said her name at first, with lye-ben lark to rhyme with why-ben, ‘By the way, it’s Libben Lark,’ she told me at the door, ‘it rhymes with ribbon-lark.’ I’d taught her for an hour. I liked the liben lark. ‘You
Grunting, you slipper-creep across the floor slower than a sailboat in a Force 1 breeze. I wonder whether in that ancient circuit board of a head from which so little intelligible has issued for weeks the Beaufort Scale still means anything or whether, if mentioned, you would as usual get totally muddled, mistake Force 1,
dendrophylax fawcettii sometimes though I just met youand in your look is everythingI want from life beginning now — I know now I just met youand start to picture everythingI scythe it to before our livesI mow it to extinction — and I had so hoped to save youfrom a world which didn’t have youand
Matron comes to tell them off again.The racket’s rocking all over the wing.Life would be so much easier if each octogen-arian wasn’t so convinced he could sing. Her brisk heels drum solo down the parquet floor.She checks the time. One thing of which she’s certain’sIf they give her Sisters of Mercy just once moreIt won’t
‘Two distincts, division none’ – Shakespeare, ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle Dove’ I heard it again the other night, The owl whose call I used to imitate, Ooh-hoo, when you were dropping off – shrieks And giggles from you
Every now and then, during my late-nighttussle with rhyme and metre, I glance upat the top flat opposite, wondering whetherits male occupant, silhouetted and backlit,is thinking, each time he raises his headand seems to gaze back, how excitingit is to overlook on the ground flooropposite an insomniac poet constantlylicking his stanzas into shape, and maybeeven
It was too tight even then, as if he wishedme slimmer or to spill out erotically at every move. Now, as I rip strips for shoebuffing, the cockerel-red cloth pulls hard against me, held by its gristle of seams.The stitches resist, baring white teeth that grin all the way to where he loved best.An embroidered
Or rather the ostrich, like the crocodile, swallows hard stones such as quartz or granite which jostle in the gizzard to assist the slow work of digestion. Such was the work required to mill a wide diet of New Zealand vegetation that the enormous moas went miles in search of the right stones which can