his arms fold over each other left palm firm against the lower right arm right fingers curve loosely across the biceps golden hairs glisten on tanned skin arms that have dug holes for trees posts fences muscles strengthened against soil wire wood fingers that have guided root tendrils, trickled soil over them, patted the earth […]

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We’ve done it once again, mon Dieu! Yet again we failed to see that we were still in France, alas, and cappuccino had one “p”. The girl who smiled her savoir faire as we enquired “Italiano?” then scorched the milk with quite a flourish would get no work beside the Arno. Ja Ja Si Si […]

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I took a faddish nonsense And wove a certain charm With words designed to scintillate, postulate, disarm. My lines were splendid nothings, Mere heady repartee: My ink pools weren’t for you, you see but formed to flatter me. Brianna Heseltine

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“The enemies of agriculture in Russia are precisely four,” our Prague friend’s saying with a smile as if it were a football score, “Summer, winter, autumn, spring.” He apes his hapless commissar. How much the old jokes have improved now that Moscow seems so far! Geoff Page

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Always the same dream, it pleases me: Narcissus in his favorite sport coat reading his favorite lyric poet, “it is fitting and just,” he says adding, “dignus et justum est” because he is a spiritual fellow, and laughs looking at me, because I am he and he is me and my own jokes are funny, […]

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The vestiges of Vladimir are growing harder to detect: bad PAs, appalling plumbing, boring buildings you suspect must once have housed the local Stasi, apartment blocks in slow decay. The Age of Dreariness is gone. The Age of Greed’s arrived to stay. Geoff Page

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Hand in hand we climb the stairs; our bellies full of wine and cheese, each sodden, drunken step disturbs the air. We are ships listing on heavy seas. We dock and crumple to the sheets where those amorous thoughts we harboured, flee to await resurrection in the hidden pleats of another night. And so, contentedly, […]

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A crow, vivid black— on the mirror of its back the sky flashes chicory-blue. * The trees exhale jewelled finches, colouring the wind. * That small ember in the tinder grass— a roseate robin. * Coal feathered cockatoos abrade the day—scraping, screeching, serrating. * The lake shimmers with sky and shoals of waterbirds, spoonbills sluicing […]

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One thing you learn from travel is to be more careful where you’re born. It helps to vet your parents and the class and race from which they’re drawn. Mistakes made here are serious and take a lifetime to correct. Even children, three or four, can find them easy to detect. Geoff Page

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On the afternoon I am to meet God, I cannot raise my eyes. Mediocrity wills everything to plastic in the room, even the music on plastic earphones coos insipid sentiment. A vase of fuchsias burns, drips— crystals fall in rivulets down, down the blood-blue blossoms. I know it is forbidden me to look more than […]

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