In The Poetry

I once fell to contemplating, at Brook Cottage, our fine old plank door. It suddenly seemed significant, related to life and death. The cromlech in this poem is a prehistoric structure, stone uprights and a block of stone on top, looking rather like a doorway in, say, the open landscape of Wales. [...]

Back home, it’s sure to be raining. Let’s look into the garden.

During Rain

Between
slats of the garden
bench, and strung
to their undersides
ride clinging
raindrops, white
with transmitted
light as the bench
with paint: ranged
irregularly
seven staves of them
shine out
against the space
behind: untroubled
by the least breeze they
seem not to move
but one
by one as if
suddenly ripening
tug themselves free
and splash
down to be
replaced by an [...]

I once fell to contemplating, at Brook Cottage, our fine old plank door. It suddenly seemed significant, related to life and death. The cromlech in this poem is a prehistoric structure, stone uprights and a block of stone on top, looking rather like a doorway in, say, the open landscape of Wales. [...]

Jessica Learned To Kiss

Jessica learned to kiss,
Yet never would
Kiss me. This

Witholding of a kiss
Seemed to be
Part of her glee
At parting.

Or was she
Wise enough to see
That to defer
Made time doubt
Its hold on her
And me?

At all events
Only this week,
Perhaps disenchanted
With philosophic teasing,
A kiss she planted
On my cheek.

In an essay on education, the French writer Simone Weil talks about the way an act of attention is at the very heart of real education. She says, rather severely, each time we truly attend we destroy some of the evil within. Here’s a poem about the act of attention involved in just [...]

But look, the moon has risen!

Drawing down the Moon

I place on the sill a saucer
that I fill with water:
it rocks with a tidal motion,
as if that porcelain round
contained a small sea:
this threshold ocean
throws into confusion
the image that it seizes
out of the sky – the moon
just risen, and now in pieces
beneath the window: the [...]

One day, the secretary of our English department at the University of Bristol told me she was going to have a child. “When your baby arrives,” I said to her, “I will give you a rose”. I don’t know where this fanciful idea came from. Well, the baby arrived. When the secretary [...]