Adam’s Descent Adam is a dry rib but sinews are stretched, tissue and flesh fashioned. Man of Spirit, embodied. Descending the mountain with Moses, he falls with the rain, is blown on the wind; regales the tall and the small with poems and legends of Jonah; comforts the bloodied lamb, the gulping netted fish; descends further, into engines, turbines, hot factories, occupies the rolling paper mills; goes down, down into data banks, the microchips; enters gates, integrates cir

From Creator to Creature After the birds and mammals lost their speech (the serpent's tongue having already turned to ash) and Heaven swayed and fell to within four miles of the earth, a disappointed God crept low into the sea’s womb, into Mary, our lady of the ocean, and transmuted his glory into the microscopic, a millimetre in size, living between grains of sand on the sea bed, eventually emerging in the form of a fish.

Contraction After the fusion of blood and tree, I descended, the voice of derision singing in my ears, past the wet-green eyes of my mother, down, past dry lips of statues, falling, through open doors, through graveyards, junkyards, a quarry of dry bones and fridges, past train-wrecks and dead horses, down, past falling towers and exploding engines, down, through smoky forests and palimpsests of mud, through florid rings of fire, past the crushed flowers on the hospital bed,

Under the World A frog descended eighty-six radical steps to the devil’s loch. There the heron brooded at the water’s edge and the reflection of shapely trees misted in the fly-specked underworld.