Lachlan Mackinnon

After the flood, among the bogs and swamps that were spread out to dry like linen, the animals appeared, some familiar, some entirely unknown; it was like the banks of the Nile when the river wastes away and the fellaheen who turn up clogs of mud find a world half-dead, half-alive with crawling things, offspring of the marriage of warmth and water. Birds wheeled and cried on wide,...

‘Kits’ are models the word for transfers is decals and six feet scale down to an inch.

All the pilots were six feet tall. I dotted their faces flesh, which is fifteen parts white to one each of red and yellow.

They must be modern, they must be military, they were largely American. My best were nothing like the real thing I implored to be taken to on open days.

Heyford and...

A sheep nibbling earth’s firstlings is my spirit that prays for the day Christ may stoop me as a cooper denies his timber’s nature – for two years in this windy eye of God I have wrestled and prayed against myself and you ask if I have the time for poems ... Your letter brought me tears, and I was grateful. Oppression, expression, these are words but lack the radish-bite of...

The disappearance of time, a life as orderly as the formal view with its row of poplars and the sleeping river, which at the mill was brilliance but now has found its level lower, less limber; these and these alone

are offered by this city with no echoes where leaves by the cathedral murmur obliquely their little snide exclusions and the tobacconists remember the dead. A woman here would be...