(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
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