Forgetfulness
i. through the eye of this coffee shop, schoolchildren crossing a bridge glint off the glass, chattering. thoughts caught up in little more than the mundane, little less than the ninth birthday party we forget when we’re twenty. fragments of pink cream candles and faces of yesterday.
Temporalities
i. The Louvre, Paris and we are gilded spires opaque pearlescent rounds smooth skimmed surfaces you could hold under your tongue set into a crown and call jewels. a feeling of falling mid-breath, a hazy periphery and a spotlight. we are tilting, scintillating in light slowed in mind’s
The Angler
The angler, taken in isolation, waits in preparatory study, his rod cast out and off the edge of the tall tide, which nearly banks the sky. The brown of the grass seems to climb station and cloaks his closed frame in an ascending glow of rust. The scene is not new. The […
Last Meal
Walking home from dinner last night, A party thrown by our friend, Five courses to celebrate the end Of a five-month divorce, I asked you what your favourite dish was. Me, I said, I’m stuck between the starter – Frisée leaves supporting The meat of a blue king crab Razor thin chives and strips
Lysanias
Setting: Between two columns. In a public square, at the temple steps. Between two dopaminergic neurons. In a cave somewhere lies some sort of plant, some coarse but reassuring bloom of green and – maybe red, some orange. A deep dark avernus feeds it, waters it in lolling, rolling laps up
Eucharist
The profound blue of Mary’s shawl sweeps under the horizon just as the glass joins start looking like ant trails. Candles pretend to die, momentarily, as I stumble into the Psalm’s first verse. Then the songs are folded. The pastor reads “release them” from a book that says relieve th
God Pities the Nursery Children
A Translation of Yehudah Amichai’s ‘God Pities the Nursery Children’ [אלוהים מרחם על ילדי הגן ] from Hebrew. God pities the nursery children, He pities school children even less As for the גדולים [big ones], He will pity no more – He’ll let them fend for the
Complaints from the Chinese Boudoir
“At daybreak, I pace idly in the courtyard with a silk fan. Cold autumn is at hand, and I know the fan will soon be discarded. A crow flits by and secures its position on the palace roof. The croaking bird is no match for my complexion, smooth as jade. Yet why is it able […]
Dandy
Mr Guillaume brought Paris to London His fingers anchored him to earth with their varicoloured jewels – He told me he once found a pearl shucking oysters And had it mounted on his littlest finger. When asked “how do you like your eggs?” he replied Fabergé. And his fizzing champagne chuckle ho