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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Redwood Canopy Explorer I hang in the spaces between canopies and when I pause for breath it hits me— the total silence. Even my mental chatter vanishes. Just me and these ancient beings and the rain they filter from the fog dripping on my glistening skin. I glide in a wordless mist. All that holds […]

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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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The Line like a tune in your head that cannot be heard that fades away when you listen like spider silk glimpsed as it drifts unanchored and aimlessly glistening like a bright curl of metallic thread after the fabric has shredded and it is freed from the pattern like the arc of light when a […]

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Humdinger (Getting louder) See I saw the feller humming, he was coming, he was coming, through the wood, like a bandit in a hood and it wasn’t looking good, no way, so I started in to pray but my wits had gone astray (wouldn’t yours?), big paws full of claws and enormous jaws, full of […]

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The Difference The difference between men and women is like that between animals and plants. —G.W.F. Hegel Free men are Kings of men and women are their Queens, It’s like poetry and daffodils, like sausages and beans, But, when two ride out together, then there’s one must ride behind, So, though Justice is a woman, […]

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