I’m talking to you old man. Listen to me as you step inside this garden to fill a breakfast bowl with blueberries ripened on the bushes I’m planting now, twenty years back from where you’re standing. It’s strictly a long-term…

We were working out our redundancy notices. We talked on the phone all morning, looted the stationery, sat around in the canteen thinking of ways to get rich quick: maybe write a bestseller, maybe window, cleaning – all you needed…

It was the first mammal he ever gave me. He must have trapped it late last night when the moon disappeared inside a nightclub of clouds and stars giggling staggered behind. I found it in the morning, slung like an…

  And so it hangs there in the warmth and light Unvarnished (luthier call it “in the white”) Silent, aware, responsive, listening – For Wood, you tell us, is a living thing Receiving by some sense acute and true The…

  This one winds a string of plastic parsley around the rainbow trout, punnets of squat lobster and marinated anchovy, the dish of jellied eels in which a spoon stands erect. He’s young – eighteen perhaps with acne like the…

We sail to the Garvellachs with an autumn wind along the string of islands. Heading out over the waves, a honeybee lands on the guardrail of the yacht. Ginger-brown and banded, he is a lost forager   who travels with…

  So here you are, sir, in the shadow of the tilt, the tented dark, done with the stick and rag show: the dizzying plinky-plonk galloper tunes, the popcorn, piranhas & pin-heads, the Half-Woman – a bust on her pedestal…

  (For Grace Mera Molisa) In this season of vegetables, the year you left us behind The Second Melanesian Festival swells Vila Black Brothers sing to wantok women in the solid dark at Independence Park a fourteen man string band…

  I’m looking at the white bunched head of a chrysanthemum when you arrive. The way the sunlight lops off half its hair is less of a mystery than you, leaning against sandstone, bisected by the string under your shirt….

  I couldn’t hear myself think when the storm came over and the roof became a giant drum. Thunder rocked the house. Capricious lightning reached a finger into my computer, knocked out the modem and set the date back to…

Wednesday the Queen signed his death warrant. Malik in a cage. That Friday we were driving, warm leatherette/Austin Cambridge. In the midday passing between San Rafael and St Joseph. Wind and the radio and the radio was sayin’ how 8am…

Manners / Rwanda They took the womanand tied to one arm a childto the other arm a childto one leg a childto the other leg a child –you also read this in the paper –and threw them all in.No marks…

for Albert Joseph The day my father came back from the sea broke and handsome I saw him walking across the savannah and knew at once     it was him. His soulful stride, the grace of his hat, the serifs of…

  Bringing a gun into a house changes it. You lay it on the kitchen table, stretched out like something dead itself: the grainy polished wood stock jutting over the edge, the long metal barrel casting a grey shadow on…