Listen to the world’s best poetry read out loud.

He spools gravity like silk
through the loom he works
with his hands and feet.
Warehouses shudder and shrink
disappear in the sleight
of distance
so smoothly
this could be a balance beam
and someone at the other end
piling feathers.
We drill through nacre –
the bubble of the windscreen
projecting us beyond
crammed instruments.
The noise is like silence
and though he’s beside me
those fine adjustments
of hand and wrist
that somehow I admire
more than art
absorb him completely
so that I am surprised
to hear his voice
telling me the ship
is over there –
nine thousand tonnes
of bright orange steel
in a matchhead!
that expands
then dwindles as I realise
we have to fit on that pea!
that tiny green deck!
chopping through antennae and railings
subsiding
??into open arms
I step into my own weight
but he remains
contoured in his craft
where he told me
he dreamed
even as a child that he was flying
outside his plane.