New mornings These are the mornings that are wasted on the living: when a new moon is slowly dying, still vaguely above ground but sinking surly into this pale start of day. These are the moments that the armies of the dead wake to the trembling stops and starts of bird song drowning in the [...]
Three years ago the car had come round the corner. Three years ago it had been a Wednesday afternoon. All the children had gone to the park; most of them with their parents, or in the company of friends. She had been at work though and her daughter, who was six years’ old at the [...]
(Hebrews; 13.2: “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers. For thereby some have entertained angels unawares.”) My stubborn coat and almost rainproof shoes and hair have always made a welcome mat for miracles and strangers, Gods and drunkenness, the dying screams of buttercups, the slow and sensual moving in and out of kittens’ claws – and [...]
Moist on fingers, scent on tongue; your muscles tightening, all of me undone: I could die now, love, slowly dissolving in song.
No reason to be faithful to the veins that do not know you; stupid to acknowledge time that is not spent with you. My whole life – if counted in those units – stops and starts within, without your warmth. I count my days in moments spent against your skin – my breath, your hair; [...]
Today I thought of dying more than I had thoughts of her but all in all things weren’t all that bad: she didn’t come but then again I am still here to mourn the fact.
Thoughts of morning landings on some distant beach: armed to tears and wearing some forbidding castle for a skin, expecting noise and bullets, time to slow, and stop, and grow and then the death of strangers and a strangeness closing down your breath – and then discovering the fear that ruled your childhood and this [...]
The trees around the lake rise and drop their branches (spilling snow) listening and waiting for the footsteps of blind giants and the cobweb cracking mirror noises of the ice that groans, recovers – a bit greyer now perhaps, a bit more ominous. I tell you this; I tell this story of clumsy yet gigantic [...]