won’t budge. Tiredof her name,tired of traveland the southernblue, she sinksinto the patchof land she’sfound, and spreadsher windsurf wingsonly to feelthe sun. Shewon’t meet hermate of thirtyyears again – somuch water underthe bridge. She’lldie here, andnothing and noone will care.And that’s fine.
From reception they followed stringboards upstairs to the photocopying room, through accounts, into the main offices. Miles of white cables overpowering skirting boards, pinned around door frames. And where they came up short, taped to woodchipped walls or burrowed beneath fitted carpets – those ripples never went back quite the same. Superhighways of glossy-coated wiring off the spools of the intercom, computer and telephone men I cursed for gunning on another; electricians bamboozled by which were live. Few takers now for packets of cable pins, backing up on racks in hardware stores. I miss them. We talk to ourselvesstepping about, the skirting tops are ledges for dust.
The streets are closed with hazard tape,wrecked by big oil and snaky traffic jams.The road crew works by geosat to tracethe burnt-out cable where a blackout starts.Last week, the spigots flooded, storm drains blockedand now a drop in gigawatts clears the streetand turns the dragon-headed streetlights out.Crew men strap head LEDs on to help them thinkin the electric buzz of town where a forest stood.It might have been a landscape for a myth,a quest, romance, a creature killed or kissed.Now everywhere’s an access point,the grid and wire where cyberspace beginsand Burger King died when the lights blanked out.Kitted up in high-end tech and clumsy clothesthe crew consult a heat map from the skythen face the smoking serpent in the pit.
Dismounting lightly as a thoughtful child,The tiny king looked younger than his years,And older than eternity. He smiled,But Van Dyck noticed a faint sheen of tearsIn his unguarded gaze. Then, with a sigh,Charles asked: ‘How long until you’re done, d’you say?’‘It will depend, Your Highness, on the eye,’The painter answered, glancing at the grey.‘Your Highness’ mount is fine and full of grace.An eye more honest I have rarely seen.’Charles brought his head toward the horse’s face.‘Marry, I think we both know what you mean.’And how will you, my beauty, end your life?He turned. ‘I must unto the Queen my wife.
Red Swingball bats and the Disney eyeof an inflatable dolphin pressed against the hatch of the Renault 16 in front. Lorries ahead, cabs to trailers to cabs; faces at coach windows, all lanes blocked. I slump in the back seat. We edge forwards. I twiddle with the window winder. Nearer the bridge. And see it: black smoke,down the embankment a white car, a man on the hard shoulder. Almost home, round my mate’s, tell him about the joke shop on the pier, the big dipper, that car on fire.
Everyone around me doggedly refuses to understand that I have never been able to live in the reality of things and people … Debussy – letter 8 July 1910, the piece L’Embarquement pour ailleurs still incomplete I have joined the Shipwrecked Mariners’ Society, fee 1 shilling.No boat needed and no history of a boat. I am cast ashore, Emile, in Crail.Crail – en Ecosse – my friend, a name like the scraping of stoneswhere the wind pushes me forward and the streets lean up to me.Salt and seaweed, Emile, dampness and sand. In the Society’s museum (a shed) I sawan ancient oboe encrusted with snails.What are we doing, my true friend, who Paris leans its ear to for something new?
From a photograph of Himmler taken by an unknown German soldier in Ukraine, summer 1941 In a meadow heavy with the scentof everything that bloomswithout anticipation of death,two Ukrainian peasant girls encounter the Reichsführer SS.Freed from their labours they smileand greet the slight bespectacled manwho appears benign, as he gently windsa thick grass stem around his finger.What a beautiful land, he opinesgranted you by the fortune of birth.But they don’t understand, just smile.Yes, one could settle here, keep pigs,and raise a strong German family...One nods hopefully, the other laughs and the adjutant holding his silver gloves praises their colourful headscarves.On iron crosses the July sun dances,blizzards of insects over high grasses.Farewell then, good luck!
Let’s take a knifeand our differencesdown to the hazel wood. Two strokes eachconverts to fourstakes in the ground. Let’s run these roundwith rope to makea ring, then step in. Let’s box. Or let’skneel before a sacredcourt. Either way we’ll agree that justiceshould be outsourced,or the fight fenced off, so our grievanceswon’t grow intofeuds, battles, wars.
Late winter elbows past in wind and rainwhile teenage waiters bearing lemonadeand shandy take away my mother’s pecked-atYorkshire pudding. Back behind the bar Michael Jackson blames it on the boogiein the beer-and-whiskey half-dark as weescort her to the car, one at each elbow,each sparrow elbow, as if making an arrest. My sister will drive her home to kitchen kettle,phone and new commode, her days behindthe wheel, she’s finally admitted, over. I ask about the doctor. My usual plea.God has moved his armchair over Tewkesbury.
take this moment beside the rapids, where sunlight clips the old weir wall, knowing itself to be only a faint replica of sunlight, not the sort found in other places, like Pisa or Nairobi, but without undue dismay at its shortcomings andinvisibly corpsing, here and there, as only the old style comics knew how, with little, hiccupy giggles incorporated seamlessly into their acts, which is what this bit of sun does out of glee, perhaps or relief to find itself; watery— yes, ravaged — sure, but hitting the black waters soundly and giddy with it. Going nowhere fast.
The art is on the floorso technically my feetare art. Watch your — says thecurator, too late. I’mrearranging atoms,I’m making something movehere, can’t you see? More verve,more discombobulation– more lifelike, don’t you think?The curator doesn’tthink. I disentangle.She announces a roundof applause for Tim, who’sgone home but who put outthe chairs and set up theaudio though the micboomed then bust and the chairs’configuration hastricked me into paddlingin the artist’s orna-mental pond. THANKS TIM! Iholler. The others clapneatly. I clap like Imean it, above my head.
All it takes is an Alice moment ducking my head to go down the passageinto house number seven and my huswif’s eye takes overapproves the stone dresser(not much dusting), the handy storage cells,the fit and bulk of the front door’s slab,the mattress of bracken, the sheepskin rugs.And outside a neighbourly village of six tidy middens, some barley fieldsand the Bay of Skaill spread in blue welcome. I’ll take it. Move in yesterday.
They do not walk the world, our fragile dead:They do not stalk our streets or pace our floors; They do not stand behind unopened doors, Rehearsing all the words that went unsaid.They cannot walk our world as we would walk:They cannot choose to see a much-missed place, They cannot choose to see a much-loved face; They cannot seek a quiet spot to talk.And so we have to walk the world for them:We have to seek the sacred places out,To pace the lonely ways of loss and doubt, And stumble clumsily to Bethlehem.But sometimes on that road, they’ll take our hand,And squeeze our palm to say, ‘I understand’.
The statues have been getting wetter and wetter.Always standing (they have no beds), they darkenIn the downpour. Even if we scrape the moss and lichenFrom their features as it comes, they won’t get better,But will grow more nimbus-like until the dayIt is impossible to be quite sure Who everybody is. The only cureFor being them is the persistent wayThey stay just as they are and let that leave them.Faces, drapery and fingers, allThat once looked liked ourselves, erodes or breaks,And none of this, we say, will ever grieve them.And yet they look so sad! Their bodies can recallSunshine on the stoneyard. The damp stone aches.
He was from the north and always right.Bet you come from some market town in Surrey, he muttered darkly over our first year Poor Law essays.I was dangerously short on street cred. Gift-wrapping hardbacks in a mock-Tudor bookshopdeep in the privet-lands of suburbia, I ruminated tactics, just as Lenin must have donewhilst posing as a Finnish farmer. As braziers burned up north, and people rioted, I suffered the nit-picking gaze of the manageress,whose laser eyes and bouffant blonde hair rang bells. Her fingers led baton-charges in and out of the till, punishing my frequent errors. She called money, takings, taught us to divide and rule every copper, silver, noteinto its separate tray. I learnt to notice the agonizing drip, drip of profit seeping from unsold stock.
(i.m. Marie Colvin, 1956-2012) All autumn, the chafe and jarof nuclear war — Robert Lowell, ‘Fall 1961’ My father, who’d had‘about as much as he could take’by ’44, and still wokeswearing at flies and soaked in sweat, read the Telegraphin dread and disbeliefover his first cigarette,narrowing his eyes against the scroll of smoke... Only half-awake,dreaming a bitter,penitential cupof coffee, we squintat a screen instead of print, swipe throughand see plump child-men jerked by the strings of Twitter,their sad posturings that could turn us to smokebefore we can even laugh. A father’s no shieldfor his child – nor a husband for his wife...
Our honeymoon weavedfrom Hampton Court to the pavementlabyrinth of Chartres, then on tothe high hedged puzzle of the Villa Pisani,where he delighted in my wrong-footedconfusion. All the while his notebookoverflowing with looped alleys, abruptdead ends, sly, coiling traps. Back homeI soon came to feel the practiceof his art, no day complete withouta fresh pattern of deception, cursed myselfeach time he led me up the garden path,for not seeing the straight and narrowwould never be enough.
Muscle patterns that show satisfaction or delightas opposed to a disingenuous smirkhave been identified by the Laboratory of Human Interactionto provide more information about suicidal patientswho want to check themselves out of hospitalin order to take their own lives. The best test for a genuine smileis to look at the eyebrow and watch for skin droop.The skin under the eyebrow is lowered only in genuine smiles.Unhappy feelings show through false smilesfor about one third of a secondin what we term ‘leakage’.
The heatwaves that would have filledmy tubs and cones never came.‘O sole mio’ falling flat as I drovethrough my hard fought for patchon the outskirts of Aldershot.The Whitby Morrison will have to go,it won’t fetch much, mouths to feed,another on the way and barely enoughto stretch to a penny lick. The collapseddream of a gelato empire with parloursof chrome and glass, has brought an arcticcoldness to my other half, nothing I door say will thaw her now, it would takean ice pick to reach her heart.
From The Years (Arc Publications, £8) I came to tend – I lie – to visit the grave of a friendand found an ugly shrub with waxy leaveshad made the plot its home. Since my last attendance ten years had passed – doing I can’t think what,except translate a dead man’s words – and nowthe whole granite headstone was obscured by brambles and weeds and this excrescence.All overgrown. My friend had somehow ended upin a thicket of Cyrillic, the White Russian sector who have cared a lot better for their lost ones.Or so you’d think if love were judged like that.Now that I’m older than he ever was, in far worse nick than he would have been,I dimly sense how we’re the wrong way round.