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“... Was it Leon, your cousin, or Leon, the tow-headed boy with the scar like a crescent moon beneath his ear you dated for almost a year in that backwater town where you lived when you lived with your father? Or was it someone else rigged up the boat to drag a skier through the sweet brown river, kids taking turns to stand tall in the wake and feel the cool of it, the unaccustomed thrill of seeing themselves from the outside, almost grown and elegant, like people who had luck and money? All afternoon they hurtled back and forth at breakneck speed till this boyfriend or cousin went down in a tangle of weed and, laughing, called out to the rest to go fetch help, he’d crashed into a mess of razorwire that someone must have dumped there – not unusual for that place, you said, you’d see the strangers driving away all the time in battered pick ups, headlights dusting the track with gold, in the swim of summer ...”

“... Idea of Steve Too bad I have this idea of him based on someone else, named Matt (another uncluttered name), whom I disliked for no reason other than having once thought he misprised me, which I didn’t really believe. (Whew!) This is getting complicated, like always. Let’s leave Steve at the wellhead of a dream, where he belongs, and belongs also to others who will make fun of him and gradually come to despise themselves for doing so ...”

“... For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.                                                                       Psalm 103 Alone at home, I’m working in the yard, sun-warmed, a breeze off the coast, the farmer from over the road laying waste to his fields, loam gone to dust in the heat; I can see it gusting away ...”

“... space. The sources are astonishingly various, but some authorities recur: Browning, Tennyson and John Updike would probably rank highest here on any cucurbit-count. I shall not question the charm or the exhaustiveness of Norrman and Haarberg’s research – though some at least of their quotations have been wrongly transcribed. What I do now turn to ...”

“... to sit on so that at least I could force a smile’), Prescott and his bulimia. Cherie Blair and John Prescott may not have been the most unpopular figures of Blair’s government but they were the two who had the hardest time in the press. Both spent long stretches in the contemporary equivalent of the stocks; a scarring experience, and both of them were ...”

“... Not You Again Thought I’d write you this poem. Yes, I know you don’t need it. No, you don’t have to thank me for it. Just want to kind of get it off my chest and drop it in the peanut dust. You came at me and that was something. I was more than a match for you, you were a match for me, we undid the clasps in our shirtings, it was a semblance of all right ...”

“... Whoso List to Hunt Small comfort to be had in mea culpa, damp afternoons, just shy of saccharin, a boyhood in the rain rescripted as a child’s compendium of minor sins. No subtlety of eyes around my bed; no whispered blame, no frost-fall in the blood, but later, when I lay me down to sleep and all the lamps burn out across the yards, I come home to the sadness of the creatures: our hunting fathers, drowned in no man’s land, love in the absence of Thou, the finer disciplines that winter recommends, such sanctuary I find, but cannot keep, since in a net I seek to hold the wind ...”

“... A cloud blew up and like that: OK fun’s fun but we’ve got issues, to wait until tomorrow. At least that’s what I heard, a kind of rushing as of water over steep slabs. More ants to fry. I was placed on administrative leave, you had to be there, nevertheless it sucked, went back years. No one could find the original copy, there were bats in the belfry ...”

“... A Frost Fair That old cliché: it seemed that time had stopped; and people we thought we knew came quietly out of the cold to meet us. Some of us thought it had something to do with the sun, and some, with how the planets were aligned, but later, when the river froze for miles, we took our first crazed steps into an air we’d never breathed till then, our strange companions smiling, as we pitched our tents and stalls, happy to see the flags and bunting, as if yellow was a thing they’d never seen before – and red, and green – as if, for them, the world was always white: snow on their lips and hands and a shine in their eyes that made us think of children like ourselves watching a magic lantern in the dark and falling, through slide after slide, into understanding ...”

“... A Breakfast Radish Whatever we’re dealing with catches us in mid-reconsideration. It’s beautiful, my lord, just not made to be repeated, that’s all. Counterterrorists have already invaded parts of England and Spain. Your action dollar at work. Deception figures in quite a few precious things, although, as I say, it’s a small remnant of what others have achieved to avoid being singed ...”

“... Descent Edinburgh Turnhouse, November 2009 I There’s something of the sky in everything or so it seems tonight, lights swimming up from hill-farms in the Pentlands, close to snow between the dairy-yards and presbyteries that straggle out, in spokes of white and gold to stars and clouds beneath the eye of heaven; II and always it’s there, that soft attentiveness, not looking down, or watchful, more a bandwidth in the squalls of microwave to which some wisp of distance in the heart could tune itself and find, beyond itself, a wavelength it could take for now or never ...”

“... Like a wind-up denture in a joke store fate approaches, leans quietly. Let’s see … There was moreover meaning in the last clause, meaning we couldn’t equate from what was happening to us down the block. We approached with some hesitancy: Let ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would.’ Wasn’t it April? Weren’t things more likely to last in this or any season? Rhymes we like ...”

“... I Asked Mr Dithers Whether It Was Time Yet He Said No to Wait Time, you old miscreant! Slain any brontosauruses lately? You – Sixty wondering days I watched him navigate the alkali lick, always a little power ebbing, streaming from high windowsills. Down here the tetched are lonely. There’s nothing they can do except spit. We felt better about answering the business letter once the resulting hubris had been grandfathered in, slowly, by a withered sage in clogs and a poncho vast as a delta, made of some rubbery satinlike material ...”

“... Last Sunday morning at six o’clock in the evening as I was sailing over the tops of the mountains in my little boat a crewcut stranger saluted me, so I asked him, could he tell me whether the little old woman was dead yet who was hanged last Saturday week for drowning herself in a shower of feathers? ‘Ask Monk Lewis what he thinks “been there done that” means in the so-called evening of life ...”

“... always turn parody into new reality and the Gothic into his own version of the electrically banal. John Jones may be right to write off The Idiot in his study and leave it out of discussion. Even its humour is disproportionate, and it is peculiarly difficult to separate in it the essential from the inessential, the blind alley (Myshkin) from the continuing ...”