The Colour of Money
Sheaved millions wallow in the vaults, as unreal as the half-brained dreams of humpback whales, in bands of silver, dappled…
By the Rim of an Ancient Well
(after Georg Trakl) The meaning of water is dark; the night has a broken brow. Footsteps fall in the ancient…
The Estuary
A water where the ebb-wave, flood-born is flood-broken yet the wave wavers and transports me through the river’s dam…
The Moment Before Touch
The air grows still. As in an illustrated weekly I leaf through your eyes. To hear silence as it…
What If
If he truly believed in angels they would appear, I said in a dream (of whom I spoke I…
Helen Thomas visits Ivor Gurney in the City of London Mental Asylum 1932
i Dear Ivor, no wonder you are elsewhere Than here, the park outside a parody Of your rolling Cotswold…
Der Philosophenweg
‘Über unsere Gedanken hinaus nach den Objecten giebt es keine Brücke.’* G. Ch. Lichtenberg Love’s padlocks locked on die…
Midnight London
Music sounds in the clubs now – Too loud for you and me, It’s music for the kids, Love,…
Blessed are the Sick
to be hunched in a chair the shawl of man’s shoulders draped always a little lower and rounded –…
Time on Calton Hill
I’m Gran holding a long receipt, her got-the-shopping gaze on hoodies in the Forth, clinker and birch, my dirt…
Initiation (at Paphos)
The sea rang Round my seven white years. I listened to the horizon Careful To catch Aphrodite’s song. Perhaps…
It All Goes On
As grey dawn trickles round the sick-room blind couples on cliff tops watch the sun go down, a spear…
Goose Girls
They call from a childhood I never owned – two barefoot girls on the river island. Stumbling over rocks…
And These Too
Whatever glum comment escaped my lips in the pub may have stemmed from the fact I’d been reading how…
Madonna and Child
Don’t believe the lies: Joseph was a randy little sod. That’s why we had to leave, go back to…
Woman on an Island
‘Mes pensées les plus chères sont étrangères au monde, …’ – Francis Ponge: Drame de l’expression Envy the woman…
The Fridges of Ghosts
are tall and slim. They do not smell of anything – no bacteria grow in yoghurt pots nor chicken…