‘The miracle of loving what dies’ – Albert Camus The miracle of a girl who – at school in summer in the twenties, dawdling with her friends in a brine cavern, among the carved passages under the fields – after getting back late one afternoon, was ordered to talk to the class about rock-salt, and…

The man with whiskers of ponytail hair growing out of the back of his shaved skull, the woman with the Anna Ford face, catacombed under London with other strangers. Cornered, like prison visitors. Swaying with the machinery. Also a boy and girl – he’s black, she’s white. Beautiful black and white. He’s telling her about…

Early morning sun. The day is bracing. There`s some wind in the trees. The fog moves. You`re at the mail-box down on the dusty road. A letter from England? Yes, it is. Popped inside those bundles of glossy junk. Your name on the envelope in my handwriting – strange, since I`m asleep in the bed…

Animal cities crowded to deep time fointing and unsheeting out of the sea, flowers of the sea whose petals changed to mica where they fell. Nothing contracted from softness is alive but moves towards a region we can`t reach – That scarp, down from Sierra ice in setting light on Nevada. Our camp in the…

This clear day, at sixteen months she slips from my hands yards off the path to the lambs. Zipped up tight in her all-in-one suit which shines silver and grey in the morning rays she wobbles out to what`s there, a space walker making her first descent. Grass on hard ground, the earth inhaling a…