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 for his return. (Note. Line 8: tr. ‘Is there peace?
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 mirror. No safety belts in this air con bubble, all doors locked. Every swerve is a punch as he weaves between trucks of workers back from the brick kilns, their faces streaked with ash, arms dangling to catch air. It’s all tuk-tuk fracas, log jam, rickshaw horn-honk like geese calling to each other across water.
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 chorus of children cries We want to be chilled to our marrows. Bring back the shock and surprise! But Anna approves of these changes as she sits there nodding her head. This is so much more like it she says. No one wicked or punished or dead!
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 is English countryside and thisunseasonable weather with a view,a motorway, exhaust and early mist,chromatic shifts from pigeon grey to blue.
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 the powerpack you’re charging on the countertop has just erupted into flame, even there, right at the dead centre heart of that lithium- fuelled-multi-hyphenated-indoor- Catherine-Wheel-Scenario swirls poetry —a little puff of it &.
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 called The End of the World. That’s when we decide to move to the edge, and yes, dusk happens here and trees which disappear into the night. There is much to appreciate in a line of white birds flying east, crossing a shadow moving west. The rustic gate. The low crime rate. My wellingtons are waiting in the hall.
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 affair. Frank hopes to stay off the booze. Trish never stops dancing. Halfway into the Second Act – Terry declares his medical condition and expectation of demise. Six monologues. Then they make a promise. A year from now they will return for another celebration, all of them, Terry will be with them, Terry will always be with them. Laughing, singing, they leave human litter on the beach. Silence.
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, Seduced by a discarded mattress, The sadness of which turned to joy, As you pushed me down on Its faded striped ticking and Pressed your mouth against mine. To stain the stained mattress, to Dirty the sullied, to feel its broken Springs beneath me and you on top; That is the way I want you to take me, In haste, with fingers fumbling zippers, And the real taste of your warm breath Delivering me to an urgency unrefined.
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 number two crouches, picks it out. The apprentice leaf boy, conical hat, takes a broom from the storeroom. Sweeps. The hotel dog –a Saigon mongrel – watches. Eternal – mythological – war of leaves. The frangipani quickens. I watch its petals drop upon the water. A stiffening breeze from Saigon River. The palm trees writhe and thrash.
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 of your weight, use it – not only for push but to steadyyourself. Press your panic button to call,if you panic, whoever is standing by. Whatever their struggles, anyone maydrift off in sleep. But some just die, then fall;and more, like my dear father, fall, then die.
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 waited, feasted for a month on that smoked flesh, raising my grandmother’s birthplace to their lips and chewing it, and calling it delicious. My grandmother sat in silence all the way home, eleven months from when she’d see again her mother, sisters, the coastline that her childhood sounded like.
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. Lean light days. Enough stillness to sense the future beyond this future; hours that will live (and die) beyond these hours. But for the prancing magpies, solitary crows, the park has shut up shop, people pass through quickly as though unwelcome.The lime trees are obstinate, indifferent, taut as tuning forks. The days lose themselves easily as lost change. The blood slows and the pond stagnates.
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 a perfect pool of blackness. Strange to turn from fireside company down the harbour road, past the locked-up boatyard into the arms of the skeletal lime trees and the swallowing dark; familiar, yes, in the here-of-this, but under that moon you’re now a million miles from anywhere.
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 Baudelaire in the suburbs.Reeking of nicotine.Awaiting his horse-pulled limousine.
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 domes in amber light.The way home is due north,King’s Cross by way of Scotland, streets alive with her familiars:the Angus house, the Flora, the Loch Lomond,emblems of proud Caledoniaflaunting their two stars. Argyle Walk, tarmac breaking into cobblesshiny with night and rain,a murky sodium glow, a kind of false dawn,where we come to a halt. ‘They think I may have it’ you tell me,London’s rivers rushing below our feet.
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 noon then founde some shade To kisse a pungent dairie maide. His wife Griselda came with lunche, Saw what he didde and threwe a punche. Seth fybbed, ‘I kissed her not. Thou art a fool. It’s time to use the ducking stool!’ ‘I’ll fecche,’ yelled wife, ‘the village prieste. Thou heartless manne, thou nastie beaste.’ The priest was eating mutton pie. He wiped his chinne and breathed a sigh.
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 sun. A cherry tree rattling in the breeze.A redstart perched on the house. I saw an eagle soaring upwards,with a long snake in its mouth.
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. Today I refuse the role of the slave for the soldierto brandish a sword that cuts deeper than words;a shield that protects more than any page could. Granted a gambeson and a loose-sleeved shirt,I billow between the growing crowds and cracksof moss-flanked flagstones as light as a ghost.
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.