Diu al ghe. S’al gh’e la figa al ghé. (There is a God. If there’s the cunt there is God.) —Cesare Zavattini Against a pile of logs, at La Frediana, you would say, touch me, this body must also die— your legs open, and between them I could see a sort of pink and black […]

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Horse-floats here in Sweden prompt an overdue analysis. You trail behind them slowly, wondering how it could have come to this. Once, between the shafts, they dragged us cheerily with no great fuss. Now, it seems, we’re towing them when they should still be towing us. Geoff Page

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Blossoms are out on the trees, on the trees at the Medway Maritime Hospital With their elegant shapes and their heady perfumes, they colour the morning air. Springtime has come to the alleys and lanes criss-crossed at the back of the hospital, Flowering cherry and crab apple sleeving the branches so lately bare. Doctors from […]

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Glass Slipper My beautiful, blue-eyed boy grown so tall and strong and strange, able to make a living not a life, beloved but ill-equipped to love your lovely, laughing girl who barely hesitates as he draws her into the slow, somnambulant dance of the unrequited, taking up the 3:4 rhythm like a heart born to […]

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Chandelier-Tree I find myself staring at the spaces between fronds, where pure blue plumes appear, the air painting itself on my eye. And I see how the trunk doesn’t end where a person can climb, but continues to the redwood’s true crown, sky-feathers piercing the stratosphere, blue forest on blue, some white with lace frills […]

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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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