Jamie McKendrick

Alexander Cornelius mentions a tree called the lion-tree, the timber of which he says was used to build the Argo . . . which cannot be rotted by water or destroyed by fire . . . This tree is, so far as I am aware, unknown to anyone else.

Pliny the Elder

May well be extinct, and our one authority

is terse, but that surely speaks in his favour.No wonder its timber was used on the Argo– the...

After fifty years to revisit the Alhambra and witness the same water spewing from the lion’s maw: I remember wearing a silver short-sleeved shirt adorned with dragons, and for the first time,

on the airport runway, hearing the night alive with the cicadas’ tiny anvils. This time, the metal plate screwed to my femur vibrates to their call, my heart to the...

Others look down on me. As well they might. I look down on myself from a great height: see the tramp’s straggly hair turned white

– the off-white of effluent-polluted sea-foam – the bony shoulders, the incipient bald dome and black wings sprouting that will fly me home.

for Rachel Owen

1.

I keep forgetting if this is Lucerne or Geneva, Geneva...

Milton lost his sight in libertyes defence and I my hearing in oyles pursuit employed by factors who failed to plug our ears with down I was the fuse-and-dynamite boy who blew up bits of Derbyshire with blasts that lunged through the earth’s crust barrelling out below to stun the blind mole in its burrow and bend the funicles of beetles antennae so now alone or in a crowd I hear the...

We that have been hunting all the day are mighty tired, our hair is dank with sweat and by our hunting helmets plastered flat.

As days of hunting go, this must be counted a good day: the horns blew loud and the dogs barked hard as though they knew it was more for them

than us we went out hunting the wild beast all day – so they could teach him just how tame they were, and how wrong to...