Each time I called for him he was perfectly ready,equipment checked and in smooth order,pared to essentials. And I, cluttered with gadgets,would clatter behind as he led the way downstairs. In the boat, as befits a sedulous angler,he was taciturn, though between essential wordshe would give that courteous, gentle smilethat was his signature, before his […]
Box work
Certain women. And some young boys.
/ Women with some uncertainties
/ but something they knew about
/ that made them need to say something.
/ Two of…
Except for Iain, who looks both found & lost, / already haunted by his own baffled ghost…
A lifetime of work to own a house / then you end up diminished by it.
Sassoon, the elder, Sunday golfer; / Owen, bookish, gangly, pale – mingling / with the queue for the refectory.
the light comes back
the light always comes back
Three thousand miles and nearly half a year
/ Away from a drab November afternoon, hysterics
/ Of friends forgotten, and also the plain…
Twenty year beddit, and nou
/ the mort-claith.
/ This suld gar ilk ane grue,
/ …
Remembering Tessa Ransford, 1938–2015
/
/
/ When Gavin circulated the news
/ I shed a tear or two that early autumn day.
/ What else…
No piece of art is perfect. / All it has to do is stay around / for two hundred, or…
Atween November’s end and noo
/ there’s really nithin else tae do
/ but climb inside a brindlet coo
/ …
