Before the Clocks Struck Three (Mr. Eliot Had an Apparition in Salford and It Was Very Foggy)   Salford is the rainiest place, getting   Inside my shoes, wetting   Tired feet in undarned socks.     Yesterday, before the clocks   Struck three, three old horses   Munched wet grass   Among the relics   Of Clifton’s Wet Earth Colliery:   Which on reflection,   Were beautiful objects   Of rust, time and toil.     Fog swirls, curls   Around the clock tower,   The quays, the trees —

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.

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   H

Death of a House Sparrow       Scraping his toes in the fine dirt,   the handsome house sparrow   lowered his whitish belly   to the...

God turns -- and the fishes dance blue gold silver beneath a yellow sky. Another turn, the boughs of thick trees become as air: invisibly...

Relics Yesterday, before the snow, three old horses munched wet grass as I walked through the relics of an abandoned colliery, which on reflection, were beautiful objects of time and rust.

A Skein of Black Water The moon appeared to float on a skein of black water and a wind sang a high pitch B, 246.94 Hertz. And something else – a distant police car? Or a muffled bell tolling the lost river Dene?

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.

So, descend the steep hill   Slowly, go on   Go past the lunch cart   — Scolding tea, coffee   Hotdogs, burgers   Fried onions, ketchup —   — Succulent dark odours —   Smells so foody    — Mingling   With exhaust of traffic —   That they foment in your gut   A hunger you didn’t know you had.     Go ahead, under   The railway bridge, turn right,   Allotments to your left   — Carrots, beans, raspberries   Basil, rosemary, parsley   Marigolds, sunflowers —   Big b

Not the growing stem or the leaf blowing in the wind; not the opening bud or the emerging radicle; not the fourfold root yearning for water.

In the Beginning Was Strange to think I am the universe and everything in it too. I call out. No voice returns other than my echo. So evidently, I am my own cause and, worse, horribly alone. Bored, I fall into a deep sleep and dream of many things: wave-like particles in plasma; diverse organisms, vertebrates and invertebrates; metals and gases; all kinds of finite bodies with perishable qualities, competing for succession and place and rank. Time passed and, with time, entro

We see the visible world as somehow inevitable, with all its ratios of movement & rest, its manifold shapes & ecstatic forms, not realising that nature is always busy, acting unseen in all its power, without external cause, producing within itself its own effects, differentiating this idea from that idea, bypassing one potential in favour of another, & making actual a particular mode of being (a mutation, a thing, a body, a colour), while keeping other potentials, other singu

It was at this point I stopped dreaming and looked at the sky and saw what seemed to me a mirage reflecting upon itself what it mirrored distinctly (the lake and the veiled mountain peaks) and descending, slowly, teasingly, as if desirous of making contact with the world it so perfectly expressed.

Shaddai A plant grows from the Nile, the שׁ, primordial cause, rooted in the water, breathing in the air, the commencement of births,...

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

A twisted tree from sapling green to creek-brown god, nature's will has bent its back, perversed its proper shape: Roots that will not hold, leaves that cannot bud, encircled by the serpent snake -- a canker in the lifemilk's sap, and in the viper's blood.

God's Entropy (short version)

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.

Sailing to Bermuda (with Andrew Marvell) Selected images stand as themselves: not in a living but in an enamelled world -- Raymond Williams A godly remnant in an English boat on a mazy sea row to the new world with the old one in their laps. They sing songs of Eden replanted, of prelapsarian nights and greener days, of a milk and honeyed land where eternal spring enamels everything and the shores are slick with amber. Where lacquered melons fall at our feet, a

And again: the thud of executions echoes in the green ear of Maboula, Cameroon. The tremendous squeak of the assassin's blow and the axe...