For the times aheadwhen we will be as if at either endof the long bench where distance keptis love’s measure and death dancesthe space between when words aloneare not enough and queued memories reach out to touch let longing be a storeof nut and seed that grows each day in strange hibernation readying for its […]
At night I am visited by fish, their tiny bodies
pulled from a book.
Dismay is waiting behind the door,where across the floor, footprints like hieroglyphschronicle the history of past defeats.Dead clothes, the skin of our former selves,still tumble from broken cases, cratessplit their sides with the books, a three-legged chair,bewildered, leans in the corner where a viper’s nestof jerseys entwines a broken lamp –all the high spume and […]
an early Beatles’ lyric on a Sunday afternoon
that’s yellow as an egg-yolk
bright as a blackbird’s eye
Handbound volume
I say her phrases to myself
in my head
or under the shallows of my breath,
restful shapes moving.
The day and ever. The day and ever.
Base Camp. Horizontal sleet. Two small boys
have raised the steel flag of the 20 terminus:
me and Ross Mudie are going up the Hilltown
for the first time ever on our own.
First the welcoming. Smiles all round. A space
For handshakes.
No one
Looks forward to being old and alone,
The carer with a spoon,
Visitor gone
Two days before your death, you wrote / There is not much to report from here.
The ghosts are easy. I can switch them on
/ like a tv soap. Here’s Pa going up the stairs,
/ flip flap,…
I
/
/ Glasgow, late September and the city I spoke of
/ in another country …
