The rooks that rise above the serried ranksof homes augur unease as thoughsoil itself has not settled, knows notwhat memory knows (or what the bodyrecalls and expects) except come spring:when a nudge of weed and wild flowershow through, a ghosted version from below. At each roundabout cars swing outin pre-dawn dark, a moving arcof light […]
Category: Poetry
Shanganagh Cliffs
The last great melt is scored through eachlayer of these cliffs – these shelly driftsbelow our home, cut clean by the knifeof the sea. I scan for sun bleached stone,delivered from a desert long gone, finda speckled piece of the Firth of Clydebut my palm hungers for fossil in smoothlimestone, cave art from the sea […]
Printers’ Type
Somewhere still a machinedraws red margins on a page like this one.Strung up and dipped in ink, it is a loom for lines.An apprentice scrubs its colour from his handsslicks hair back with pomade is ready for the dance.Hours later his girl leaves – heat drew out the ink – his palm imprints her rear.The […]
Gifted
It’s the movement of rock in the molten core and the hair’s breadth shift of the moon that has foxed the atomic pulse of caesium (that element, accurate to some number further than the furthest planet, its root the Latin for sky blue; I can see it in December’s clear roof as we undertake our […]
Iowa City Sestina
This town is stitched by river – that finds and winds its way through trees whose leaves curl yellow and every poem is found to contain it, them and cicada call – perhaps they too stand for longing forded by an imagined Atlantic bridge. Outside my window the bridge of green, wrought iron spans the […]