What is it I have seen beyond our lust?A sealed sarcophagus of torpid stone.The future has no rain to cleanse the dust,Nor air to stir the linin from the bone.How heat, and all his pestilential court -Exhaustion, Thirst, mute Apathy that numbs,Will caper to the music Hunger brought,The steady beat of filling oil drums.What I…
Post cards
Two days I have been clearing junkAnd now I find a memory,A cardboard-gilded reliquary.How should one feel before the bonesOf saints? Ecstatic aweFrom admiration of their deeds,Or mourning for their early deaths?I - both. Two brittle sealsOf rubber guard the holy writ(One snaps and slaps across my wrist).Now lift the lid in stately hands,And crown…
Three eulogies
I The pyramids, of limestone skin Were flayed to feed man's living need. So mountains bear the half-healed scabs Of quarries cast in ages past. These tombs of rock, of king and sea, Each a fleshless ossuary, Are mortal too. Build bone from bone, Consume the dead and call it home. II Now is come…
Locking and Unlocking
A snowless drift to Winter's desert heart, Which withers hands to dormant elm. Dangers Congeal under milky ice. Their start Find fear in the open mouths of strangers. Cold fever breaks; regain the Sun's warm white, A light that shades the memories of dark, A lotus fed that sets the past aright, And heals the…
The B493
A turn soon, right, off the dual carriageway. One the same as any other, once you’ve done a few tens of thousands. Release clutch. Change gears. Reengage. Rotate wheel, hands sliding after each other over faux leather. Fine motor control to control my fine motor. All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William…
A very beary life
A full bookshelf, to some people, is like a genteel version of a stuffed bear, or an enormous mounted pike. A record of beasts overcome, semi-public and concrete. Of course, the process of obtaining a stuffed bear, of waiting by a salmon-rich river for just the right moment and then having the body stuffed in…
The critical twin
The year of coronavirus has not, to put it mildly, been a great year for creativity. Human experience has collapsed into a very narrow circle, bounded by the walls of the home and the Zoom window. Instead, we have generally been consuming the outputs of vintage years. Among the piles that qualify as my own…
Leaves on the line
The delay was not unexpected. Trains are not reliable on this, their nursery island. They have found themselves constrained by choices made in their proud and peacock-strutting youth, mistakes which their slower-growing contemporaries managed to avoid. Once the energy of youth ran out, they found themselves disappointingly slow, cramped and uncomfortable, and quite incapable of…
Sky Shores
We're planet sorts, I'm sure, All molten cores and dynamismEncased in stony skinsAnd coldness, blackness, barenessTo describe the in-between. Astronomy's a safer jobThan spacewalking, by far.It doesn't make your tongue freeze over,Or your eyes pop out your headWhen you go and mess it up. But who wants to be stuck behindSome old chipped-brass telescopeWhen there's…
The engineer’s future
At its end, we find that the arc of history is that of a sub-orbital rocket. Once we climbed, further and further from the Earth and soil that birthed us, ever closer to the world of abstracted physics, of photons gleaming on ice-rimed steel, endless orbits and the eternal vacuum.