Let it be known: no man is entirely alone No man is a man all through. I’ve seen you. Shivering. Fleeting weakness. Cold rain scuffing its feet on the beaches. Young human. You. All feeling, flesh. Brine eyes. Man, but…

The hearse has stalled in the lane overlooking the river Where willows are plunging their heads in the bottle-green water And bills of green baize drakes kazoo. The hearse has stalled and what shall we do? The old don comes on,…

  When I came back from Europe late last year a new tune kept running through my head. It still recurs at odd times of the day, haunting like a perfume or a face. Its clean string of notes obsesses…

  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…

  When I grow up I want to have a bad leg. I want to limp down the street I live in without knowing where I am. I want the disease where you put your hand on your hip and…

Circumstances analogous to life and death, house cleaning or clutter. Dante or an old shirt. It’s there to cut, but not to chop. Between the knuckle-bones it’s soft as butter. Or you picked a leaf off the road. What is…

The beetle runs into the future. He takes to his heels in an action so frantic its flicker seems to possess the slowness of deep water. He has been green. He will be so yet. His memory ripples emeralds. The…

I ran away from home. I said, I’m going on the Aldermaston March to ban the bomb. They said that this was out of the question, the boy’s mad. Crazy. My mother said, Where will you stay? You’d have nothing…

  Concerning your letter in which you ask me to call a priest and in which you ask me to wear The Cross that you enclose; your own cross, your dog-bitten cross, no larger than a thumb, small and wooden,…

  All right, I was Welsh. Does it matter? I spoke a tongue that was passed on To me in the place I happened to be, A place huddled between grey walls Of cloud for at least half the year….

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…

Is this the nature of all truth, The blazing cock, the bride aloof, The E-string cutting like a tooth, The night that crows? The cock has seen the standing grain, The bride is shrouded by her train, The violin is…

  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…

  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…

  The language game “I am afraid” already contains the object There was a milk tooth, with the string that pulled it. There was a letter in your father’s hand. Welcome to the real world. There was a chocolate heart…

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…

  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…