The condition of my heart is a January swan.Mottled. Twisty. Largely humdrum. I wear my motley on my sleeve, where you ought.Some call it frippery. I call it fraught. The vocables I shoot for are punchy and swift.Yes. No. Stay. Go. Here. Now. Whisht. Violent assertions? A tempest in your soul?Make like a racoon trashing
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 will continue to meet the ceiling, the length staying true to the plumb. Then the trick of easing it down behind the radiator so it won’t snag on the wall,
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
Unlike all their predecessors with their stubs recording new bikes, a week’s holiday in Cornwall or a magazine subscription, your last chequebooks wait in the drawer. Complete, pristine and obsolete, they’ve got no story left to tell. Though that’s a story in itself.
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
When scholars were magicians, They learned to sing And then began to fly, for it was Spring then, And even the intelligent were chockful of passions. So, at night when they were high over the town or wood, They left behind The need to be both diligent and good And surveyed the land below
An island is one great eye gazing out the poet once said, an image I like for its stubbornness, solitude’s drought holding firm before the garrulous strike of water’s insistence. Say you hike the fell of yourself to this clear summit, become its focused pupil, childlike to rediscover the wholly private needn’t mean the selfish
Good job these poets aren’t tightrope walkers she said, else half the fakers would be dead –- another tumble from a tone-deaf shocker. But for a few still dexterous in their tread this formal panache isn’t just possible, it’s song as comprehension in itself: how meaning’s strung out between two shelves. True balance makes this
A friend of mine from college days once told me his greatest pleasure was cooking a meal and then dropping it on the floor. He’d dropped every kind of dish in his time from lasagna and stew to a full roast. What seemed to excite him most was the moment before the plate of food
It’s an early, cold Easter and on Good Friday Jean Munro and I go to a small Greek restaurant on Charlotte Street for our very first ever lunch together. She eats with messy, dripping gusto, Ably assisted by two 75 ml carafes of Retsina. Over Turkish coffee and Turkish Delight I explain that my ambition
When you are sad, and imminently grey, Will you take down my poems and say ‘That bastard took and took and took From me, for the sake of his lousy book’ —And have me, who am truly old and grey Terribly in handcuffs taken away?
scaturiginichthys vermeilipinnis One day do IMeet the Red-finned Blue-eye?Everybody said IMet the White-finned Red-eyeAnd folks say in town IWooed the Blue-finned Brown-eyeBut did I or do IMeet the Red-finned Blue-eye? In another place and time IKnew the Jade-finned Lime-eyeAnd dark rumours hold ISought the Black-finned Gold-eye,I’m willing to suppose ISquired the Green-finned Rose-eye,But, anybody, do
His eyes brim with the patience of his vigil. Time hangs like heavy pendants from his ears. His dewlap spreads like some contorted hill Of larva, frozen for a thousand years. He will lie here quite motionless until The door is opened, and the man appears. And when the man appears, the waiting dog Will
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