The moths came with a soft flutter one night and burrowed intothe deepest recesses of cloth. Their offspring had their fill, gnawedthe wool and cashmere mix of a coatframed by a hanger, shaped like you. They punched out holes, some like starswhich didn’t shine, coalesced into craters.Silver dust littered the wardrobe carpet. They were driven […]
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Handbound volume
Handbound volume
The Old Year’s gone away
To nothingness and night:
We cannot find him all the day
Nor hear him in the night
August 1934 There’s a thin rain of music comes across the poppied corn, Across the poppied corn and the sun-splashed sea,Crying, ‘Who’s a-going venturing, a-venturing, a-venturing, Who’s a-going venturing with all a man can be?’O, listen, listen, listen, for it’s far, far away, The dim remembered country where the ghostly pipers blow,Across […]
Things seen and done add to memory,
are shuffled like cards in a pack,
come to the top in ways we can’t determine.
Remember this then: that here we stand,
together, once and fifty times, and this remains.
Daytime an’ nicht,
/ Sun, wind an’ rain;
/ …
Never written a poem for yourself
/ have you, you daft old bugger? Well
/ here goes.
/
/ …
On that sinuous passage from infancy
/ and youth’s buoyancy through middle
/ life to advanced years, the one certainty
/ is a…
It wakes when I wake, walks
/ when I walk, turns back when I
/ turn back, beating me to the door.
/
/ It spoils my…
sitting in The Scotia
/ after John McGarrigle who-
/ was-killed-in-The Clutha’s funeral,
/ wolfing
/ triangular tuna sandwiches
/ and listening to someone singing
/ We Shall Overcome
/ into a feedback microphone,…
