Celia, the Sea Does Not Remember You Waves are not waves But the convulsions of a body That has forgotten the bones it conceals. The sea a wound that refuses to close. Celia goes there because the sea soothes her. She goes there because the air cools her. She observes gannet and curlew As one watches The slow collapse of a star. A big black sea bird stands in the surf Like an officiating priest. Its eyes are two shells Filled with the residue of night. Around it, strands of t

Uncommon One in the garden of statutes where rules multiply like weeds & stones lie about like scruples every step is a misstep in misadventure my ways are not steadfast nor my path clear fallen fruits ripen towards a crisis break a snail underfoot & the roses shiver disaster crush a flower with your heel & the frogs croak catastrophe offend the sun with a dismal glance & the heron broods at the water’s edge disturb a duck egg in the thick grass & the elms grow misty all

All the World Was Broken: An Ecopoem On weightless air, the cocksure ravens flew. Wild sheep chewed grass; deer And bison chewed too. On a slanted hillside white mountain goats Enjoyed a lofty view. In forests, eucalypti, fresh-minted, grew. And fire-green firs with purple cones, Did too. For the silver-studded starfish there were oceans Wet with green and blue – And oceans for the whale and dolphin too. On blackest soil, the man called Adam grew His

Melville and the White Whale Shut up Here in This Caved Trunk of a Room, On the Massachusetts Side of a Loose-Fish Land We Call America — and Feeling All at Sea In a World That Is Mad and Wet All Over I Write down This, My Heathen Language. Making waves. Much INK OIL WAX SPERM BLOOD Spilled to find the White Whale — Whose mighty tail-flukes billow the sea’s shroud; whose peck-slaps flap and flood six hundred pages of Great American Prosody; whose massive genitalia rem

Death of a House Sparrow Scraping his toes in the fine dirt, the handsome house sparrow lowered his whitish belly to the ground, deepening the depression of a crater arid from drought. Flapping dust under his wings, beak pressed to chest, he dry cleaned his colours in the earth, expressing in movement the joy and power of God’s nature. Perhaps it was a pain or a sorrow that made him stop still, every nerve in his body petrified to its tip. I stoo

Little Owl A minute before midnight, the owl of Minerva watches today grow fat behind time’s horizon. At twelve he blinks. One eye for the night of disappearing and the other for the day that is becoming.

The North Is Rain strikes terraces stacked in brown brick And wind blows through the underpass. Two fat-breasted pigeons Fly over York Minster; a single seagull Squats in Speke. I’m out there burying neolithic arrowheads On Kersal Moor & freshwater shrimping In the Irwell, or I’m cruising Upriver, crazy as a Lune & sauntering A Sunday Through Morecambe Bay, my bat-black cape Flapping all the way to Whitby Abbey. Of note is tonight’s Full fr

Death on the Pennines To live this hour beneath a cold Pennines sun requires the dead hills to flow behind us. To see the mighty crow and not look back means the death of something strange. We twist and turn. Shadows drape over us – ugly cloaks of lies that suit nobody. We are mired in bloody hearts. The crow comes, picks at the pieces. I am that crow, that symbol of death. I am the one that turns over corpses and flies away.

Sea Song My thoughts turn to the sea: there the convolutions of time deliquesce into wavelike ease, closer to the rhythms of myself. It is where the gannet, the curlew are my fondest companions. Look: a black sea bird perhaps a Phalacrocorax carbo in a seashell of eyes on a coast of floating souls. Her dark echoes fade, fade into the furious light. O my Calypso, I am stuck from view, concealed by a magic sea. The sea moves in ancient gestures calling on the land to give

The Irwell - a river poem Rock-solid ground loosens, shifts to liquid, slips fast away beneath my feet. The water dreams of boats, of willow banks, not a foul stream of refuse but a seam alive with freshwater shrimp, roach, and brown trout. A mallard halts — strums his feathers, beats the air into rhythm, poised to rise above this stretch, this blue-lined artery we call the River Irwell.

Beneath Beneath a red lightbulb innumerable doves swim as if in a cold, gold sun. Birth, creation, a ruinous origination. Decomposition settles in. Bibulous boozers scratch at beer, flick the air with brown fingers. Intemperate cuckolds. “Declare your bones,” they say in whispers thick as honey. Time is arrested as the production of long shadows hushes the brown room, but not the annelid which eats the dirt that falls from the shade like black snow.

A mallard stops, strums His feathers, beats his wings, Ready to fly over this stretch Of blue-lined water

A Marvellous Garden the garden is a luscious lover crushed wine on lips the dark-eyed junco's throat full of whistles and trills the walnut tree’s throbbing roots and flower-tipped branches spice beds the scent of jasmine on stone ‘it is the purest of humane pleasures’ the windchime’s tinkling brass the honeyed bees’ amaranthine drone amorous perfumes in a bloodhot sun venus fly waspish purring hum avian shrieks carnivorous triffids dart out as you pass, a lashing sting