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“... I have a dream I wake from, now and then, mostly in summer, the swallows etching my walls with shadow, eider drowsing on the firth, the gold light in the street trees thick with gnats: surprised, as I slip from my bed, to see my neighbours’ cars, their bedroom windows curtained, someone moving on the street – a paper boy, the milkman on his rounds – when, only a moment before, I’d walked through town on just such a morning as this, the swallows hatching the walls in my head, the street trees clouded with sunlight and gnats, but nothing else: no paper boy, no curtains drawn on lives that I had always thought too much like theatre; no one moving in the world but me, so I could pass through any door and wander easily from room to room, unhindered and unobtrusive, nobody home to be offended when I opened drawers and cupboards for the drama of a world left unpossessed, the objects in themselves, that no one else had ever touched or seen, props for a play that no one was there to perform, their reason for being unknown, till the angel descended to set things in motion, with one final link in the puzzle: a bread knife, a needle, a hairbrush, an unwound clock, a fairytale apple, dusted with shadows and venom ...”

“... for Will Maclean I House If the house in a dream is how I imagine myself: room after room of furniture no one could use; stairs leading upwards to nothing; an empty hall filling with snow where a door has been left ajar; then whatever I make of the one room high in the roof where something alive and frantic is hopelessly trapped, whatever I make of the sweetness it leaves behind on waking, what I know and cannot tell is awkward and dark in my hands while I stop to remember the snare of a heart; the approximate weight of possession ...”

“... Taxonomy Carolus Linnaeus (1707-78) Weeks out of school: in rainstorms and grandmothers’ cupboards, bear-dark in the corners, filigrees of lacewing and silt; the birds we saw in books: merganser, stork; trees from botanic gardens printed on air; the words in our minds like games that would never be finished: names for moments at sea; or how a skin is altered by a history of shade: the smallest shift enough to fix a thing or make it new: soft or more evenly mottled; bearing scars and hairless; or defined for centuries by how it seemed emerging from the earth: fragile dicotyledon smudged with ash, not sixty feet of constituted rain ...”

“... Aubade(In memoriam J.P.)Morning in lockdown. Shadows in the yard,Quink-blue and graduallyshifting, like those eels we used to seeabove the weir, thickwhipcords of lustand instinct, surgingheadlong through the mystery of grass.Forty years on, but all I have to dois close my eyes to see youcycling to Cherry Hinton in that dust-greyskirt you used to wear, the dawn lightfollowing the river back to town– and every summerproximate, since then,though you were gonebefore the mist set inand anyway, it wasn’t what we thought:the true romancewas place, the faintcontinuum of rainon Byron’s Pool, the passingmoment, when an owl skimmed overheadand left me here, yearslater, half a mileof buddleia and birdsong to the nearesttraffic, threadsof damp along the walls,but warmer than the house I thoughtwould shield me: first sunstreaming through the trees,no I, no us, but just beyond the fence,a skylark in the near field, flush with song ...”

“... Die Musik bei einem Hochzeitszug erinnert mich immeran die Musik von Soldaten, die in den Krieg ziehen. Heine June will continue white, with outbreaks of rice; though, given the numbers, it’s difficult not to assume that one of these persons now present will soon take the cure in a series of high-ceilinged rooms that was once The Merchant’s House, at the heart of an Alpine town near Zermatt, a resort so exclusive it even had two names ...”

“... When I was twenty years old, on days that were darker and brighter than now, I got up at six and swam fifty lengths every morning, steady and even, though not as precise, or as sure as the one other swimmer I passed, flowing back and forth, in the lit pool on Parker’s Piece: an old man, I thought at the time, with a gold to his skin that is only acquired over decades, his slicked hair silver, his bachelor’s eyes halfway from grey to blue, when we met in the changing rooms, silent and male, but never so much that it bothered him not to conceal a fleeting, and half-amused gleam of fellow feeling ...”

“... The body as the sum of all nostalgias. Empire of footfalls; Mother as Script and Ideal – and love no chance event, no accidental stir of wings, or blueprint spiked with hospice. What hymn tunes come to mind at Candlemas, the fence wires rimmed with ice, our plum trees medieval in the first blue gloaming? What carol for the kill-site, sodden plumage scattered in the grass, and beautiful? Always, the meadow is now: the chill after dusk, hunter and hunted pausing in the fog to listen, summer barbering the skin ...”

“... Down by the River El muro cano Va a imponerme su ley, no su accidente.          Jorge Guillén She dies in a local flurry of dismay as kittens do, held steady in a pail of icy water, never what I intended, more a case of inattentiveness than grief or rage, I held her in the current, fingers wound with shift and slither. It wasn’t personal ...”

“... The linguist Ole Stig Andersen was keen to seek out the remaining traces of a West Caucasian language called Ubykh. Having heard that there was one remaining speaker he set out to find the man and arrived in his village on 8 October 1992. The man had died a few hours earlier. At times, in those last few months, he would think of a word and he had to remember the tree, or the species of frog, the sound denoted: the tree itself, or the frog, or the state of mind and not the equivalent word in another language, the speech that had taken his sons and the mountain light; the graves he swept and raked; the wedding songs ...”

“... St Hubert and the Deer He has come to a halt in the woods: snow on the path                and everything gone to ground in its silken lair; gone to ground              or folded in a death so quiet, he can almost taste the fade of hair and vein, the flesh gone into light and water          part-song                   lost in all this glister ...”

“... Beholding As dawn moves in from the firth I’m sitting up awake, a mug of tea fogging the window, the bones of my hands and face shot with insomnia’s delicate, lukewarm needles. You’re still asleep. Your hair is the colour of whey and your hand on the pillow is clenched, like a baby’s fist on a figment of heat, or whatever you’ve clutched in a dream, and I suddenly want to ask your forgiveness for something deliberately cruel in the way I see, in the way all seeing could become: too hard, too clear, refusing to find something more than the cool light of morning ...”

“... Orange The heaven of childhood had something to do with citrus: back in the coal towns, deep in a season of rain, or out on the farm roads, away from the dangerous world, where children came down from their attics, with sleep in their mouths, light on the kitchen walls on a Christmas morning and, under the tree, in their scarlet and matt-black wrappers, the newborn clementines that flaked and scaled like moths’ or angels’ wings between our fingers, then melted to pulp and a liquor that darkened our palms with the colour and scent of Jesus, raised from the dead and walking alone in the garden, untouched by the future, the light of the world returned, as he raises his hand to gather a fruit from the darkness and taste, once again, the blood-orange sap, the sweet at the heart of the bitter ...”

“... On the Fairytale Ending Begin with the fend-for-yourself of all the loves you learned about in story books; fish-scale and fox-print graven on the hand forever   and a tiny hook-and-eye unfastened in the sweetmeat of a heart you thought would never grieve or come undone. May; and already it’s autumn: broken gold and crimson in the medieval beechwoods, where our shadows come and go, no darker than the figures in a book of changes, till they’re hexed and singled out for something chill and slender in this world, more sleight-of-hand than sorrow or safekeeping ...”

“... My son is learning insects – woodlouse bee a line of ants a lone fritillary. He finds them on a flagstone or a leaf and quizzes them the start of dialogue and so commencement of the soul’s unfolding self-invention in a world that shifts and turns but really has no end and surely what we mean by soul is something no anatomist could find: a total sum of movement and exchange how winter starts along an empty street the first snow flaring dark into the light a parents’ conversation overheard between the gold of wireless and the green of solstice or the lamp I used to see across the valley thirty years ago defined by darkness and defining night ...”

“... Learning to Talk This is our game for now, rehearsing words to make the world seem permanent, and ours; before it disappears, I will have named all we can see, from here to the snow on Kvannfjellet, the yarrow in the grass, a passing swan, eider and black-backed gull at the rim of the sound. I gloss uncertainties – this lime green weed that fetches up a yard above the tide; those seabirds in the channel, too far out to call for sure; these unspecific moths; a chequered wagtail, similar enough, though different, to those we know at home ...”