David Harsent

A man is fishing under the iron bridge.If I watch him watching the water, I see he is lostin thought. His morning dream came with him.His children are soft-voiced with pain; the dream

is a wheel where they turn to tell him sorrow is gain.The way he sets his spine to the ironworkis a drag-line of grief: loss or abandonment. The luresnags, bright metal, triple-hooked, a fish broken-backed;

he trawls...

Stone hides itself in itself and thinks itselfInvisible. Its breathing is the near-death rhythmOf hibernation. There is nothing of this in the word stone; and everything. The word of God is stone. Your lover’s last look back is stone. You take stone to your heart. You lift a stone from the beach and it fits your hand –

Fits just so, is sure to find its matchIn the way your fingers...

How this pale dawn light floods in from the skyline.How it seems almost at times to fail as if it mightfall back to midnight’s deep blue-black: as if it should.I am given over to dreams that say what’s mine is mine.

I dreamt I was at this window and here I am:not dreaming, or so I think, though something stays.Dream has its flow, pain its own song to sing.

Rain sets a long graze on...

This room now: papers and books: a long drift over tablesover chairs to the floor. She said: ‘You’ll find him hereup to his arse in the tar-pits of poetry: find him lostin some landscape of the mind: the mind’s perfect drearsalt-marsh-as-moonscape-as-snowscape-as-white-over-whitewhich is limitless from skyline to skyline.’ She said: ‘Thereare ghosts here that...

Her sudden, silent prayer was commonplace: to betray but do no harm, to admix guilt with love and that way get the best of it, to let each salty lie roll on her tongue, to gamble with heartbreak, to give an account of herself that would seem most like herself.

There’s a shadow in from under the door. Can you see it yet: shadow of slow-onset, contagion’s mission-creep....