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
Speak into my good ear. The house is bubble-wrapped with rain. It’s late. To better hear your voice through this worn out device I lean in closer to the page. To better hear the sleep talk tangled in its sheets I lean in closer to your lips. Speak into my good ear. The crackle of
When Alfredo lets the film fly on its beam of light, I Pompieri di Viggiù comes to roost on a tenement block, rippling the hard lines of masonry. Isn’t love sleight of hand after all? You and I, in rainy Islington, among discrete coughs and rustles, spoon Sicily’s raw energy into our souls. Giant faces
This morning I took the Coasthopper from Burnham Overy Staithe to Sheringham, boarded breathless, had to run. The driver said next time put out your hand. The ‘George Vancouver’ stops for everyone! Our buses start from Lynn. They’ve all got names, one’s called ‘Black Shuck’ after the dog who spooks the coast. ‘Fanny Billingham’ was
I am standing in a whitewashed cell. I am wearing a sheet with a hole cut in the middle. I piss in a pail that is skinned with ice. The bed is a nightmare installation, twists of rusted iron and wood. A grubby blindfold keeps me warm. Pain is chucking smashed bits of stars at
It’s all right, the rain is falling. It’s all right, no need to worry. When was there ever a need? But you do, you do. It eats away at you – fear about infestation, damp, job, taxes, the household chores, and don’t even get onto personal relations, the vultures of failure bouncing with glee –
‘…he could not get rid of the tendency to reconstruct the “Ange” who was daily broken into fragments…’ — Italo Svevo, Senility As I wrap your photograph with its expensive frame back into the crêpe and then the paper deciding that I cannot go through this again the stupid vertigo at the merest sign of
After the painting by Theodore Robinson Two priests, on the narrow path to heaven, pass a balcony brimming with clementine. Like crows, they glance up, and see a woman with red hair, sipping a glass of Gragnano. She smiles and tells them there is more than one way to the top of the mountain. Ahead,
This one I’ll leave till last,postponing the problems – how the wallpaper will come round the corner and the principal fern in the pattern continues to meet the ceiling,the length staying true to the plumb.Then the trick of guiding it down into darkness so as not to snag and easing it out without tearing,fretting the
Because we talk we talk about the weather, its predictable mood-swings, good days, off days, days that come at any time of year as if from nowhere – stormy, or so sweet we have to go outside to feel, together, their July-in-April, March-in-May, nostalgic for a world whose atmosphere adapted us as we adapted wheat,
how Peleus won Thetis of the grey mistby clasping her to the couch, and holding onthrough her every changing shape, even the tigress. You gods on Olympus, grant me that peaceonce her shape-shifting is over, and promise meby the Styx, it be over once and for all.
Hard to believe the mirror:those sags you thought were cheekbones. Your size is no longer your size and the next one up buries you. Flimsy panels and the clothes hook swivels on a single screw. The curtain that won’t draw to: who might burst in, who’ll step out.
Listen, here they come, the easy rhyme wordsof the English language, flying into settle on the branches of the treeoutside my window, families of sound that perch together, calling their own absurdsuggestions through the comprehensive dinof common use and plain vocabulary,far-fetched, serendipitous, profound, and why not, we all want to be remembereddon’t we? There’s no
His habit is watching sceneryChanging at the bend,The view lying back encirclingIts dishevelment with an arm. Or watching a waterfallSilently on film, jumped shotsLeaving him unsplashed.It is visiting a Sussex castle Where he pictures the skirmishingOf frightened soldiery.It is any crowd he seesIn profile, fathers and sons anonymous As collectors’ coins. He observesThe cheerful blindness
in a racy world of competitive types, because, you know, two brains are generally better than one. Like the puttering hybrid – who’s the engine and who the battery? Like the panting pantomime horse, who has which end? Tirelessly, observers try to subvert the scheme, an affront to their own marital dynamic. Some days they
On 9 June 1865, Charles Dickens was involved in a railway accident on a viaduct at Staplehurst, Kent, while returning from France with his mistress Ellen Ternan. Ten people died and forty were injured. Dickens himself died five years to the day after the crash. I stopped mid-sentence – a broken train of thought. On
It’s been a while. Let me get used to it.I knew about the widows, of course, but hadn’t quite expected the crutches, the walking-frames, or that poor agitated soul endlessly pacing at the front. On the other hand, the baby chirruping during the one minute’s silence could hardly have given any offence. It’s been a
Two houses up, old Eddie died last week and a man I’ve never seen before is throwing things into the garden from the back door: a cardboard box, black plastic bags, a broken kitchen chair. The garden isn’t much, but Eddie had laid a path, hollowed a goldfish pond, sown a rockery with alpine