Arriving late at the opera one night I ran into Dr. Gradus ad Parnassum hastening down the marble stair, swan-like. “I wouldn’t bother if I was you,” he confided. “It’s a Verdi work written before he was born. True,…

And then there was St Kevin and the blackbird. The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside His cell, but the cell is narrow, so One turned-up palm is out the window, stiff As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands…

You bury me in concrete.  Bury me in lead.  Rather I was buried with a bullet in the head. You seal me in powder.  Cut the hair last.  Then take the trimmings and seal them in glass. You wrap me…

  There is that moment when the young human child stares at the young monkey child who stares back – Innocence facing innocence in a space where the young monkey child is not in captivity. There is purity clarity there…

  for Harold Pinter Tell of the sad derangement of the mind. The wheat is being harvested. The sun Shines on the bales, unclouded, unconfined. Work as brisk as hard is being done. Cider’s drunk at night. Documents are signed….

  Empty-armed, like a soldier, waiting for the deposition still to happen, watching as the rough skin is stretched across the squat square ribs and stapled, scraped with a palette-knife, before the morbid undertaking of the gesso and the paint….

Gold survives the fire that’s hot enough to make you ashes in a standard urn An envelope of coarse official buff contains your wedding ring which wouldn’t burn. Dad told me I’d to tell them at St James’s that the…

  And another thing I didn’t say: that the upward mass of a cresting wave will always momentarily equate to the average human being’s weight; so that if your timing is exact, your footfall strict, and you’ve cracked the basic…

If someone had said you passed away this evening at 8, when my watch was still an hour behind, on a few minutes to seven, I’d be round for rituals with your loved ones. We’d sip the last of your…

1. If that someone who’s me yet not me yet who judges me is always with me, as he is, shouldn’t he have been there when I said so long ago that thing I said? If he who rakes me…

  Kathleen Eileen Already I am no longer looked at with lechery or love. My daughters and sons have put me away with marbles and dolls, Are gone from the house. My husband and lovers are pleasant or somewhat polite…

  Green first thing each day sees waves – the chair, armoire, overhead fixtures, you name it, waves – which, you might say, things really are, but Green just lies there awhile breathing long slow breaths, in and out, through…

He sits on a sofa, smoking a joint. The phone starts to ring. It’s for you, says his flatmate, just out of the bath. He strays to the window and talks with his back turned. Got a part for me?…

I have gone out, a possessed witch, haunting the black air, braver at night; dreaming evil, I have done my hitch over the plain houses, light by light: lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind. A woman like that is not…

  Tread the cottage grapes to wine, ascend the cellar stair, Sit down with me tonight and dine, there is a purpose here. I knew you in the days before we had our stab at being wise. The rain falls…

Everything in my body has been processed through at least one star (except for the hydrogen). I want to speak to you about it; I want you to know how much I understand – and more and more reveals itself…

First, the old smell, salt on the air, brings back the river, mud-banks, shingle thatched with weed and straw. Crabshells. Tarred feathers. A black-headed gull – one is enough to transport you over the river onto a gravel hard, a…

  Above me the sparrow and above the sparrow the shape of the hawk, the sparrowhawk itself. But how soon the sky is emptied of both the sparrow and its terrorised song. Yet one drop of blood has fallen onto…