I stare at the wall
without focusing
until it doubles.
From the neighbors’ unseen backyard,
snatches of an English
I can’t quite follow.
A snail comes out of
its banded shell, eye-stalks stretching
in two directions.
Canal haiku
It’s sandal season—
you bring back a blister
from the canal.
*
Light from the water
plays on the steel girders.
A train’s screeching wheels.
*
Leading a crew
of gnomes and potted plants,
the jolly roger.
*
After the canal boat passes,
the huge floating leaf
reverses course.
*
Lowering their heads in threat
again and again: geese
with a single gosling.
*
Where the high-speed
train will run,
the drillers’ four-storey screw.
*
Behind the supermarket,
the pigeons line up
for crumbs of bread.
*
You can find her by the ding
of bicyclists’ bells:
the deaf dog.
*
Leaning out over
the green water,
he paints the boat green.
*
“End-of-life
destination for cars”—
and next door, stacks of tires.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/89056025@N00/14232632634/
London from Above
Its head is too large, out of proportion to the other members; its face and hands have also grown monstrous, irregular and ‘out of all Shape’. … A body racked with fever, and choked by ashes, it proceeds from plague to fire. —Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography
Ten thousand red-brown
mouths of chimney pots
gape at us as we descend,
jet engines howling, into the haze—
a mutual amazement.
Here is the yellow air
of our to-and-froing.
Here are the housing estates
and the scrapyards,
groomed swards of a park
and chaotic allotments,
the circling traffic.
There’s the river and
its slick sheen of a carcass.
Plane trees all in a line
make faint, green gestures
with the stumps of their limbs.
2013 in photos: British Isles
On an island, I looked for other islands:
smaller, emptier, round as up-turned
coracles barnacled to the shore.
I watched yachts catch the only sunlight Continue reading “2013 in photos: British Isles”
2013 in photos: The Isle of Arran
In earlier travel posts about the Isle of Arran, I’ve shared photos of Neolithic remains and fairy glens, as well as the petroglyphs at King’s Cave. But that doesn’t begin to exhaust all that we found worth seeing (and photographing) there. Continue reading “2013 in photos: The Isle of Arran”
2013 in photos: A week in the Caledonian forest
Less than 1 percent of the ancient Caledonian forest remains, much of it in the Abernethy region, where Rachel and I camped for a week in mid July. She wanted to prove to me that real forests still existed in the British Isles. Our first evening there, I went for a walk and discovered this dead sheep. Continue reading “2013 in photos: A week in the Caledonian forest”
2013 in photos: A visit to Meri Wells’ studio
In yesterday’s post, I mentioned our visit to the studio of the Welsh artist Meri Wells. That was last July, in the course of a weekend with Clive Hicks-Jenkins (pictured above with Meri) and his partner Peter Wakelin. Continue reading “2013 in photos: A visit to Meri Wells’ studio”
2013 in photos: Touched by a Rachel
I took a lot of photos this year, most of them during the two months I spent in the UK. I never did get around to sharing them all, so let me try to make up for lost time with a few gargantuan posts. One benefit of taking a look back is seeing patterns that one might not notice otherwise.
Here’s Rachel laying her hand on beech trees in Hebden Bridge, Continue reading “2013 in photos: Touched by a Rachel”
King’s Cave, Arran
On the west coast of Arran, quite near Machrie Moor, are a series of sandstone sea caves, formed by wave action when the sea level was higher than it is today. One of them is full of petroglyphs, some of which date back to the Iron Age if not before. It’s called King’s Cave — one of many caves around Scotland alleged to be the one where the fugitive Robert the Bruce famously observed a spider persisting in trying to attach its web to the slippery walls, and so resolved to be similarly persistent in fighting for Scottish independence. Continue reading “King’s Cave, Arran”
Encounters with the Neolithic (5)
(Read Part 4.)
After a week in the highlands of Scotland, we took a combination of buses and trains down to Glasgow and out to the west coast, where we caught the ferry to Arran, an island about which it is often said that it resembles Scotland in miniature: very mountainous in the north, with more rolling, agricultural land in the south. Continue reading “Encounters with the Neolithic (5)”