Raymond Friel

I must begin with these stones as the world began. Hugh MacDiarmid

From the car park, the duckboard angles up like a runway to the overcast distance – but soon you’re back on solid earth, or rather shingle which yields and crunches underfoot. Behind you, the canter of the downs has come to an abrupt and nervous halt – as if it knows its own limitations. The rolling landscape...

Out on the back nine, beyond the banter, we’d be stopped on the elevated tees by a sunset of epic proportions, or, down in the firth, the fin of a sub – its black body packed with catastrophe – heading for its ‘home’ in the Holy Loch.

He was working shifts in Hunterston and after the long silence of the coast road came home to the early morning bedlam of...

in memoriam D.H.C. Hughes 1924-1979

Your mother rattled in whisky sodas. Above the fire a print of the Beagle on Pacific swell, 1835;

a mantel of peaked caps and wedding veils, your father on a beach in jacket and tie (in the hand on your shoulder an unlit smoke ...)

We lounged in the white bungalow he built, weighing our words in the tumblers as fire performed its one trick over...

Evening station: two bucket seats, glasses on a handy sill.

The bristly sea half-fills the big basin of the headlands;

on lower slopes crocosmia smoulders in the coarse grass;

hydrangeas spill over the stone wall of Treneglos

(hortensia – like a blousy barmaid at the pumps).

The roofs of shops (towers of beach clutter locked in the dark)

draw the lazy eye to the sun’s minted...

October.

Windfall is thin on the ground, quickly rotten. Perhaps it’s the sick summer, or a sick tree ...

My mind takes the same turns, overweight, ridiculous in trunks, arms in the air down the flume, on and on and down.

     *

Now the borders are pruned back

(the crippled peony pleading to the blue October sky)

the lost toys of summer are found, the handguns...