“At breakfast, we heard the barely hoped-for words,/‘don’t bother going in, it might reach thirty…’/From then the day stretched out like low tide,/so low you thought you could stroll to France.”

“So it is that we end here, instead,/In autumn, when youth relents,/In the face of lasting death,/And birthing begins”

“I’ve only inherited a few mementos:/a Brownie camera, poetry and an OS Map/which unfolds to cover my carpet/like a time-lapse film/of a bud bursting into leaf.”

“These are the timekeeping regulars for this stretch of road, grains in the hourglass, springs in the watch.”

“The summer had ebbed away into autumn and there were no warning signs, although if there were, I failed to see them, and the fact of it was what remained.”

“Maybe clapping is the remnant of a desperate act/of early humans, drought-worn and itching/for a salve-a storm- inviting it by calling its name”

“No, the new heat death from textbooks,/
rather than that intangible entropy,/
arrives – literal, not paradoxical;/
on trees, not paper; cold-blooded, not cold”

“Discovered letters she once wrote/in that unsteady girlish hand;/unsheathe each from its envelope,/ignore the cracking of his throat/for he would not be thought unmanned.” 

“I listen to music and I watch sports and I read books and/I’m a bystander in this world.” 

“Looking from the pavement into a star starved sky I slither./
The car which from distance seemed blanketed kitschly in leaves/
I soon see bashed with slate and bricks felled by night winds.”

“forgetting/pushes before it, like a wave, like a broom,/the premonition of loss.”

“You could call this chemistry./
But I prefer geography,/rivers that flow together,/form this cozy delta.”

“The opening of the future coffin
led almost instantly to a tug
of war over tender meat”