Poems

Phugtal Imagine waking to so much sky, the river reduced to a thread of light. Couldn’t wind just knock this monastery off the mountain, send it tumbling like a wasp’s nest through a thousand feet of air? Khushal says it’s prayer that keeps it clinging to the rock face despite the pull of gravity. [...]

Blues Most of us can simply say that it’s a butterfly, and that it’s small and blue but you see a border, a certain arrangement of dots, the faintest shift towards silver or turquoise … and, even on the wing, can tell the Chalk-Hill from the Holly or the Common Blue. You’d like to [...]

The Studio Chair (after a painting by Sara Lee Roberts) Take away the chair and we’re left with abstraction, an empty universe stripped like Dawkins’ of the possibility of transcendence; the chair reassures us: in a downstairs room, it says, someone is playing the piano or laying a table, writing a note, and it’s [...]