#imagery

#imagery

February 2026 issue.When I was a child I was terrifiedof the space between One and Zero vast as the ages before my birthstrait as my death-late at night I heard my parents arguinglovingly in their locked room, the angora cat coming homewith a sparrow in her mouth, and the raindrops on the shinglescounting themselves-how to sleep, how to cross the empty placebetween the name "sparrow" and that limp thing crying,adamant, creating me with its cry

Down on the canal on Christmas Day Down on the canal on Christmas Day a man walks towards me out of water-light, upright, Cratchit-wrapped, a smile to say: I know you. Hello Chris. Ghost in a time-ripped landscape where a low solstice sun spills whisked through a metallic staircase. With joy, the man's smile haunts me for miles a long blasted path, where a dead rat's belly festoons its purple crinoline Christmas hat.

The gannet I found stranded in a car-park, something all wrong with its wings and its head too heavy for the neck to bear, beautiful bird, beautiful ugly bird. * Not the street-parties day and night tomorrow, but the morning after that, and the bin-men redding up shredded pieces of palm-trees like the debris of enormous wings. * The gannet's eyes, the gannet's big clown-face.

Out on the moors in the late June light, I stood where the infinite hills halved the sky and saw where you first saw your horses.