Flashing by the railway gardens, each family with its little plot, one thinks about them ten flights up and how a cactus in a pot is not enough for those who’ve left the smells of an ancestral farm. Nostalgia likes to put down roots— and memory sings its little psalm. Geoff Page

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The blood in my veins is the blood of kings. If we all had our rights I’d be Duke of Earl With a cut-glass voice and a bat of wings So why did I marry a working girl? If we all had our rights I’d be Duke of Earl. I’d live on a yacht with […]

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It was pleasant to return home at night after a dance or a dinner your head swimming and the eyes on the streetlamps swaddled by midges thick in the mist and the lights of the houses all turned off and the silence then. Paolo Bertolani translated by Massimo Bacigalupo and Jennifer Compton

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Two years later … no, not quite … everything’s still going well— our friends in Stockholm. still together, find that age can’t break the spell. With magnifying glass at breakfast he starts her sweet, embarrassed smile by reading us a love lyric he’s written in the “modern style”. Geoff Page

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Quine is the American philosopher Willard Van Quine. It is all explained on the internet. I want a sloop. A flush-decked, ten-gun sloop, One mast, rigged fore-and-aft, is what I most Desire. But slooplessness is now my brother. I am notorious along the coast. In Montserrat they talk of nothing other (In Maracaibo too, and […]

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It is now winter wherever I look but it’s fine up here, we are in my mother’s small field and it’s dusk. For hours the springtime that you are has been moving around me —all that one can say of a love. You speak to me from the tree you have climbed to gather for […]

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Surfacing again each Sunday, whether breakfast’s rice or cheese, their parents speak a mother tongue but children use teenagerese, a simple grammar made of grunts, a vocab that contrives to never say exactly what it means except perhaps “as if”, “whatever”. Geoff Page

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The Treekeeper’s Tale I have set up house in the hollow trunk of a giant redwood. My bed is a mat of pine needles. Cones drop their spirals on my face as I sleep. I have the usual flying dreams. But all I know when I wake is that this bark is my vessel as […]

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The final cliché When th’endangered species are no more and the seas are no longer around, and the multicultural masses are expiring under the ground; When every darned thing has been side-lined; and the last line in the sand has been drawn, and nothing is fit for purpose, and nobody else can be born; When […]

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Hungry for you I wish you were an ice-cream on a stick So I could thaw your coldness, lick by lick, With maybe a chocolate coating I could bite And break away to reach your sweet delight, Undressing you, removing nip by nip, Your shiny shell—it melts upon my lips. I wish you were an […]

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