Alistair Elliot

More and more often, knowing that you’re dying, I think of the letter-writers at the post office in that hot square, with their low desks and dip-pens waiting in the shade of their municipal trees for the illiterate victims of time and distance – the dealers in words, renewing or untying.

Whenever I passed them I would think of paying to have my raw wish wrapped in the empty nets...

for Martin and Diana

I

HWAET! This is what we   wanted to hear:

The floating one swings   still among rocks, hovering on hemp,   the embracing boat fast at anchor.   The coastguard on horseback guides them to Heorot   the shining hall – the loom of it lightens   the...

You switch it on, pour out a cup of tea, drink it, and finally sounds of outer space clearing its throat blow from the vizored face; pause; then the swelling voice of history refills our kitchen from the BBC.

I daren’t retune it: set before the war on Home, it doesn’t know it’s Radio Four. It never knew the Third, or Radio Three. It had the Light, but mostly what has stained the...

Late afternoon on the prairie. We were looking for birds. My old friend Michael was amazed at what we said we saw: such far-off dots, how could we pick them out? still less remark, ‘eastern and western kingbirds.’ We all three wore specs. ‘You must have great peripheral vision,’ he finally pronounced – as if we scanned the field like radar with a...

There are some small shops left. The name over the door was half a physics textbook. A little bell announced me. I began by showing that my watch, or time itself, had worn away its strap, the animal skin that holds the disc of Chronos where I see it.

The man was older than me, and grey where I am reddish, the pommettes not ripened by glances of the sun: a prisoner of commerce in his twilit...