A Sad Tale’s Best…. We’re revising ‘The Winter’s Tale.’ The English teacher me is only allowed to meddle near exams and I’m away for June so we have to catch it now. Bohemia: fresh fields, new birth and summer. Sicilia: crabbed landscapes, winter, age. Bitterness, jealous rages, where you’ll accuse a friend, send your gracious…

Whatever comes to hand Coming back from another country, leaving it a night for things to settle I notice how this one, too, is in colour, rinsed: leaves, sky, bricks, light. Knowing where I have to go, it’s shades of Blake and the prison- door, the fluttering mind, clipped and folded, stapled even; copied. There’s…

Memorial (2) The spider was in a different position in the morning. She had left it there expecting no change. All preconceptions shattered she turned to her army of fetishes and of the one made up of sticky red triangles asked if there had ever been a moment of doubt in all that and if…

Memorial (1) Everyone can see them, her old clothes on the branches of the bronze metal tree her champagne-coloured blouse her oyster silk chemise the black-beaded evening sheath with the low back the spider underneath the tree is concerned that there will be no room for the stockings, the pink satin brassiere and the coat…

Makeshift     Yesterday: Foundation Degree Policing. 15:30hrs. Maria, with her light touch, explaining to her students   some of the problems involved in conducting the contemporaneous notes interview   which, importantly, was not the same as taking a statement. Rubberneckers, for instance,   after an accident; when the interviewee changes tack and asks you…

    White Nights Burning     No foreign sky protected me, no stranger’s wing shielded my face. I stand as witness to the common lot, survivor of that time, that place.                                 From ‘Requiem’ by Anna Ahkmatova       No-one I love has been taken away at dawn   I have never…

Cold Spring (2) Tonight, as I do when I want truth, heart, solace, I return to Elizabeth Bishop. She tells me about that cold spring when the violet was flawed on the lawn and in just a few words has told me everything and I could go on stealing her words, making a much better…

The Fly-Whisk She is holding off her beloved with a fly whisk this beautiful Indian woman who wears fine armlets and in her ear a sprig from the tree of heaven: a delicate action, whisk like a flame or an orange cloud. Her half-smile of determination, we suspect, might turn readily into a wide smile…

  King of the Swans     He has given up on housing- departments, won’t stand in queues, fill in forms. No thanks.   Come back tomorrow. He won’t bother.   Now he’s regal near water, dispenses crusts, calls down swans, seagulls also.   They gust like litter, unruly, landing on benches; on the skin…

The Green Violinist   Tap-dances on our roofs sounding unlike rain and minds his own in his variegated purple umbrella coat, and his un-matching shoes.   He is one of the dispossessed but as we go about our daily tasks, flying and sweeping, fetching the lambs in, we are not mindful of that.   We…