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
How do the methodical make love? Do they peel off their clothes In separate corners, before Slipping under the sheets and Turning off the bedside light? Do you like the woman to lie there, To pump her between kisses until She asks you to do it from behind? I always pictured us in an alley,
The chief leaf man rises early. A breeze in the banyan tree. The water laps. Skink lizard on the prowl. Perfection. Blue. Perfection. No leaves on the water. Miles Davis –his ghost – becoming the banyan tree. Chief leaf man sees a leaf in the corner of the pool and shouts in Vietnamese. Leaf man
Waking, you swivel on bum and hip, then dropyour legs below the knee to the floor, the fightagainst gravity half-won, like a workshopusing prefabricated parts, the bed’s height helping. None of this lessens the jeopardy.When you thrust yourself up onto your feet,you need to balance your whole body adroitly.If there’s a handrail to take some
Every summer, my grandparents visited the fishing village in Scotland where she grew up, where he was stationed in the army. They brought back a crateload, caseful of kippers, strapped them to the car roof and the box cast its stinking shadow down the road home. Back in Wales, my grandad’s brothers, sisters
Everything waits. The lime trees in the park never more solitary. A moon parabola’s its passage, its slow arc, its high full toss; by the end of night hits the midwicket centre of the silhouetted trees, wedged in the blackened branches. In life, like the moon, we are all one day bowled back to earth.
You take a drink in the Merchant’s Arms, fire ablaze… Exeter quietly pummelling Bath on the muted telly. People drawing back together after being away at New Year, Christmas. The mood relaxed, now there’s no pressure to celebrate. Convivial in a Hotwell’s bar that makes few demands. As you walk home the moon floats in
All this – of course – was heaven when I smoked.Standing under the trees,my sweet asylum,resourceful and joyful, and dry. Once – when I smoked that is –the people coming up the pavement –people with great lives ahead,cheered as I stood there.A Bohemian, they said. Truly. Notwithstanding the rainwe observe a man with a cigarette. Like
The rustle of coarse, carded yarn, through fine taut cotton, pulled to a point: tense, hoarse, a wordless whisper, saying something sexual.
i.m. Mick Imlah There is a brief respitewhile our lives are held suspended.We’ll laugh when this is over,wiser for this glimpse of the abyss. For now, we go to work as usual,a zigzag route through the estates,our own private shortcut,till they close the gates at night. We leave behind the Florence, the Alhambra,their dreams of
Seth, Seth, the servile serf Earned his cruste by plowing earthe. Thick filthe lay on his every limbe. The stynke of Seth was foule and grimme. When summer came with azure skye And barleycorne was ripe and drye, Seth leapt at dawne, uncleane from bedde, To shake the dandruffe from his hedde. He scythed ’til
Ancaiano At the end of Augustthe moon fixed itself in the skyas if a pope were about to die. It got into the olive trees.It got into the porcupine.It got into the stone. Into the guts. Held its position till morning.Owl-tremour, dog-bark, cock-crow.My window my lover. The blue had goneand the house was washed in
Beeston Castle, English Heritage event, 2023/1265 The castle is perched on a rocky sandstone cragabove a moat of weeds and shadow-fields of flint:a subterranean memory-bank of history and hurt. A banquet of burdock and wild boar is being servedto the fingertip-march of a minstrel’s plucked lute —though I am stationed in the silt-flushed basin below.
Past time, maintains the broken clock. It isn’t off, not by a minute. Without a tick, without a tock, Past time, maintains the broken clock. Twice every day, those still hands mock the present, but they’re never in it. Past time, maintains the broken clock, It isn’t off, not by a minute.
The same window sticks. I push hard and sometimes it gives, lets in a distant sea, a child’s laughter in the waves. Mostly I can’t decipher the songs on the locked baby grand. Death has stolen their keys. The metronome still works. I slide its weight to the end, watch it pole-vault back and fore
‘Love and war are the same thing…’ — Miguel de Cervantes Somewhere over the tiled foothills of our council estate A man and a woman are arguing. The focus of the argument is something brutally trivial A TV programme choice, that sort of thing, Yet the air is a hot Isandlewana of big
He felt brave, capable and full of duty He went out with the rest of them and scoured the high grass And the tide-step and low sandy grass He saw how early morning on the river had its beauty They spread out in a loose crescent form Each man could hear the other’s high rubber
Night is returning to teatime. Soon a coneof orange streetlight will be all he has to see her byas she touches her laurel, steps inside her homeon which he’s been keeping an eye while she’s at work, as no one else will.Only the postie or Amazon opens that gateand once he saw the latter with
Open the front door into waterBrown water with no heart in itOne side of the street to the other – Small shops drowned in itOur car drowned in itThe sun gleamed down on it like a joke Unseasonal, climate change thingAt an upstairs window an old womanStaring down like a question Water in the hall,