Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
I don’t get off the mountain much, but when I do, I tend to blog it.
I’m currently camping in Scotland, whence the lack of new blog posts. In the meantime, here’s a photo of some sea kale on a pebbly beach on the south coast of England, which I visited briefly eight days ago. The new leaves were surprisingly mild and tasty raw. Continue reading “Sea Kale”
You can learn a lot about a country by the signs people put up. Here are a few signs and other public messages that struck me for one reason or another. Continue reading “Signs of Britain”
i.
A crane in a scrap metal yard
unclenches a great, magnetic claw.
Breast-shaped mounds of soil
sit two fields away from the pit,
a future fish pond.
Gulls glean in the plow’s dark wake.
A large, white dog follows
two boys along a dry creek
while we in our fast train
hurtle backwards over the sleepers
in their gravel beds.
ii.
A signal goes out
& we creep slowly through the night
so the driver can inspect the track.
Three stops ahead, another train catches fire
& we wait for more than an hour
on some siding between stations.
The darkness is busy with our reflections.
We move about looking for outlets
to recharge our mobile phones.
Here & there an anonymous light
glimmers orange or blue.
The wolves have finally come to me for advice. Avoid making eye contact with saints & ranchers, I say. Stick to the suburbs where no one else goes to hunt. The wolves are tired; their tongues glisten like red silk ties. In the window of the building opposite, a white cat levitates on a sudden carpet of arms. The Daily Mail headline reads, IS YOUR CHILD A PSYCHOPATH? IT’S MORE COMMON THAN YOU THINK. My love has taken five sharp sticks & begun to knit me a sock. What big toenails you have, she says.
At the end of our four-day weekend in Yorkshire, we found ourselves peering through telephoto and zoom lenses at the gargoyles high on the walls of York Minster.
Continue reading “Wild Yorkshire”
In London, every day is a red letter day, and the sky is rarely anything but white.
Continue reading “In London”
Under lowering skies, the lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea in the village commons at Brill, Buckinghamshire. We were there to attend a big garden party with extended family, friends and assorted villagers, preparations for which gave us just enough time to wander around this extremely picturesque English village. Continue reading “In darkest England”
Kensal Green Cemetery is, as previously discussed, a tad overgrown in parts. But it turns out that’s all part of the plan. The wooded parts feature some truly magnificent trees, including the most thickly ivied tree I’ve ever seen (a sweet gum, I think). Continue reading “Kensal Green Cemetery: returning to nature”
This is not a review, just as a pipe fallen to the stage is not a pipe. The performer’s open mouth resembles a small asteroid covered in hair. Eventually, everything is thrown into question, such as why we don’t live in flowerpots or buy religion all shrink-wrapped out of vending machines. Have the sun and the moon really been played by the same poorly informed celebrity all this time? Do you remember where you were when you heard about the death of humor? Why don’t owls ever unbutton their vests? Who told your elbows to sing? Words approach as quickly as starved sheep and lower in pitch after they pass, thanks to the Doppler effect. Short films of moss growing on a butler or tractors that won’t start are triggered by a wrong note on a tuba or the audience’s failure to clap. It turns out that people dress up like armies solely in order to march, becoming lost in the middle of a vast square. It turns out that you need a long stick to poke someone who is far away. The lighting crew keep a purple spotlight on the audience, so I take advantage of the extra illumination to write down a one-word recipe for porridge (“porridge”). An avuncular Jah chortles about the beetles he squirreled away in Guatemala. All the Jamaicans from Downton Abbey begin to pray.
Just down the road from where I’m staying in north London, the Kensal Green Cemetery houses the mortal remains of many eminent Victorians. Like Highgate Cemetery, which I visited in 2011, it’s one of the “magnificent seven” garden-style cemeteries in London. And just as at Highgate, the groundskeepers’ gardening style is permissive in the extreme, favoring unpruned trees and shrubs and rampant ivy. Continue reading “Kensal Green Cemetery: being dead in style”