David Harsent

Out by the woodpile at 3 a.m., knock-kneed and shitfaced, lost in your own backyard, you pour a libation that comes straight from the dregs and she drinks it.

Or you stand at a sinkful of broken this and that wide-eyed and with nary a hint of what’s next, as she goes by with her Tesco bags and a fifth of gin in her pocket.

She keeps unholy hours. There’s a chance you’ll see...

Dawn darkness is a bare blue light and there’s a sound coming at you, most likely brought on the wind from a hillside forest or nicked off the skim of the sea . . .

So you’re humming that long, slow note as you broach the day, and the dogs of dawn are all one voice as you step down from your home sweet home, your tour de folie,

and before you get to the other side of the...

After Yannis Ritsos

Small squares on the move, merging, pulling apart, building bricks unbuilding, a city of windows inside a city of windows, everything hanging on two right-angles, free-standing, out of whack but somehow holding, somehow safe you decide at the very moment they crack and start to collapse (in utter silence) all of a heap where three fleabitten dogs set off at an...

But arrive like this: a sudden shadow on the washed-out fleur-de-lis that paper the breakfast room; a form half-hidden

by some other form, the angle of a door, perhaps, unless I think to make it a shutter, half-open, by which I leave you a single

arm, single eye, single breast, a single link of the scallop- and-anchor motif on your sun-top, except that I can’t quite get it at this...

After a painting by Jeremy LeGrice

… in London, of course you are, landlocked in your kitchen, but just a step, after all, from the door into the hall, and then just a step from the door into the street where the cabbie is more than happy to wait by the slip-road that takes you out through the wrecked hulks of tower blocks, happy to stop- start-stop in the backed- up traffic, its...