Clinging For three days I’ve carried you on my back even though you keep falling off. Unhurt, I help you atop my shoulders once more praying that you’ll cling to me so tightly my hair will...

      In Syracuse Yesterday evening Archimedes came round for a bath. He was ages about it and afterwards he said he’d been thinking about the relationship of mass to volume the...

    With a torch He could have signalled out to sea An SOS, a wrecker’s trick A flattened hand against the lamp, He might have seen inside himself As children do He would have...

    Good Luck It was his great good luck not to have had an expensive education nor pull nor place nor privilege at all, but that he, living alone, in ’98, should be working for Murphy’s,...

      The Land & The Sea In the mornings the fishing boats collect. In the grey-blue mist of the nearly-light they arrive at the harbour mouth, their decks heaped (or not) with...

     Sign There is a dull grey shimmer on the surface of the water in the harbour and the same sort of restlessness you get as it starts to simmer in a pan. Although it is not hot, it...

    Listening to Arlo play his railroad stories   why is  the 60's, 70's American country music so often on the road, forever talking light rides hitchhiking across the land? they...

  from Voices after a Tsunami The Tohoku Pacific Earthquake (scale 9) and Tsunami hit Japan on 11 March 2011. Coastal A handshake’s worth of stress caused an earthquake, and triggered a...

      Claire, the flat-packed cat Your crumbs have been under the highchair a fortnight now. You were still so new to me. You used to practice each and every burgeoning word, clumsily...

      Swifts You were there, I was over here, the swifts were everywhere between being transcendental and complicated and always trapped in their velocities. Their stitchwork fell...