A canny cousin taught me the handshake trick. I was ten or eleven. Small for my age, but quick As a flash, after a smiling approach, I could duck Beneath my arm and get the affable chap Locked in a Half-Nelson. Thing about tricks is You shouldn’t use them too often. This I learnt
‘I Remember Arras’, a sequence in four parts corresponding numerically to the four stanzas of ‘Adlestrop’, imagines Edward Thomas as having survived the war and looking back on his experience in France. The sequence plays fast and loose with some bits and pieces drawn from Thomas’s writings, including his 1917 diary. I ARRAS I remember
After breakfast, our bonuses in the bag, time sheets collected, the weekend begins. Down by the battered garages near the burnt-out Escort, our apprentices go for it: first to find one gets chips for his dinner. Stanway says to take it behind that steel-shuttered house, top of the estate, and for all of us to
Summer in the suburbs, Its wealth confined to a bedroom Where a tepid waft disturbs And strokes with silver gloom The long beast with demon eyes Who, stealthy as all cats, will come To tipple from the vase of the anemones.
My soul, my shadow, the dreams I stare into the night are wounded. I kiss my mirror-self. The lips with which I bite are wounded. I am a year filled with venom, every season is autumn: leaf-filled evenings, the snaking twilight are wounded. The signs of the stars – my Scorpio, my Libra,
Hearing ‘Caravan’ by Duke Ellington and I’m at the Blue Parrot in Casablanca: the house bird perched outside unfazed by whirring ceiling fans, and the belly dancer’s creeping shadow. The band playing jazz to a fluent clientele leave the exotic bird unperturbed. A street market unfolds under her gaze. How simple the menu at Ferrari’s
In the beginning a slap gets it going and a child once told me breath’s here ‘to blow bubbles’. In heaven I was once informed breathing is no longer needed. I should have guessed. Breath’s always been a downmarket option, wholly belonging to earthly struggles, to life and death and other mundane matters.
Cleat hooks glinted on the window wall. We checked again the spotless parquet for paint flecks, even the galvanised conduits and trunking, the suspended lights. A song of an American summer played low. He slipped in ahead of schedule, mild, beige, miles from his reputation. From a chrome tin a telescopic aerial deftly linked to
Placed on a pile tenderly as if to encourage brief sleep, or easily torn from a tiny fist – a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand companions and twice the number of unseeing eyes made of glass. No child parent came back to reclaim their mannequin infant, no sudden cry, no crouching down to draw them
Metaphysics took my mindoff things. Now I’m coming to mysenses, An astronaut with his headin a washing machine. I stink, therefore I am.It’s a good start. The pure is sterile; thesterile is unclean. The stepwell smells like aswimmer’s towelling. That Euro coin’s aconsecrated host. It has travelled frombum-bags through tollgates To a church with apay-view
You hide behind dark glasses in a privacy of thought that when you take them off looks much like wisdom or so one might suppose from the light returning with such concentration to your steady gaze. An eloquent silence hangs in the air between us as it seems to contemplate becoming speech but then the
I’m not the kind to fidget, fray or fret.I’m truly a soul at peace – ask anyone!The savoir faire for which I’m widely knownhas optimised my odds in life’s roulette. Am I the underdog to back? You bet!With equal yin and yang, in union,I have a personal hotline to the Zone.I relish risk, I rise
In memory of David Best (1952–2021) I’ve savaged with my fork weed after weed. My lost hori-hori trowel, if it’s here – this is my hope – might smilingly appear again, old friend, from its green dungeon – freed! It’s heartbreaking to have the sheath alone, as if shrugged off by death, and not the
He walked each day the same, Picking around Inside his broken, frameless mind For bits of comforting, Pushing his feet With care among free leaves On pavements his for the walking Where no one stopped him with talking : A hatless, witless man. He knew the shabby parts Picking around: The tree-wreck of a rusty
How sad are our misapprehensions. How much we are misunderstood Despite our best efforts, Despite the best of intentions. With the scribble of a smile we hope To address the matter in hand, Like a frank and forward glance, Like a speeded envelope. As with any double bluff, Any take-it-or-leave-it offer, A guess may well
You need to do more formalised walking the doctor said. Why not buy one of those formalised walking devices that measures your tread? They’re good. I had one and loved it until I felt it was judging me. Then I stamped on it. I liked this doctor — Lebrun was his name. To some degree
was a down-and-out in awe of a pencil salesmanin a café, midtown Manhattan.Handsome like a movie star, the salesman turns on his sales patter,speaking loudly peachy keens and aw shucks and I am fine here Sandra in The Big Apple, but honeycould you look in my…and the street guy’s envylike a furnace, his eyeslike beads
In the end there is nobody out there. The female blackbird bounces on the lawn in the late afternoon, tossing up worms, harvesting the edge of the flower bed in two-legged hops, and off between the trees. A black address book by the phone gives nothing: Hello. A chat. Goodbye. It isn’t that. A son,
Lit up and out of tune she’d bawl to make her ten green bottles fall but near the end, its song and dance, they came down like an avalanche; decades of empties drained and tossed in stairwells, basements, cellars, lost to blackouts or, pulled back once more, a locked ward off a corridor it took
In the Mugello I Pear trees, unpruned, but still producing fruit Grew by the farm, Leaves dusty yellow as the pears. How many years since they had taken root? I stretched my arm To them as if across the years And bring them back into the present day, Clutching the form, Pears that resembled rounded