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 —

If the Rain in Warsaw Sounds Like This From a secret they shaped A room in London— A breath of space Lit by a single candle’s hush. Out there the war was cold, Close to freezing. But they were warm within. Stillness gathered. They listened to icy rain Softly striking stone— Each drop a touch, A covert word Only they understood. It was a fragile pact: Two selves from opposing worlds, Folded into one, Briefly, tenderly. Then a man fro

Deliquescent Bodies (Love Parade) I hope for night; it comes; it is here; it comes with rain & river, & the lights are electric. I am offered a drink & the mercury blue neon over the door catches my eye, tears open the retina, imbuing the optic nerve with cold cathode gas, ionising my nervous system to the limit. Breathing carbon dioxide, I metabolize my own body. I am a pillar of ether by the exit door. But I’m not alone. We all matter less than we did before,

Endless, the Downward Laminar Flow of Rain Endless, endless, the downward laminar flow of rain -- Atoms falling through the void

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

Lancaster bleached by rain – a wet wind blows through a line of washing. Fog frost, petrol odour, urban towertops vanish in the aerial grey

the air is raspberry sweet it swarms with wings

Aquarius So, the routes of the city, all its paths, arteries and overflows – the scummy run-offs from sewers and roads – end or start on the muddy banks of the sallow-tree river. Water does what it knows: It coils and uncoils like a gut over decades-old millstone grit, between the crumbling, rumbling jaws of Anglo-Saxon stone; Sneaks and snakes under willow trees; runs past hospitals, factories, back-to-back slums, picking up brand new stories and the gho