Hoyt Rogers; Day can’t die, eyes / never close. But isn’t that the courage of language? To blind / by seeing, to deafen by saying, to divorce the world for words.

Alan Wall: ‘Charlemagne at forty taught himself to read
but never mastered writing:
all that fiddle and faff.
Carolingian script for his eye not his fingers.’

Peter Dent: ‘ my favourite side-

slip was the one about Thrace – whose music
not to mention its early poetry was the first port
of call for heavies supposing you needed same
(in those days you’d be considered odd if you
didn’t subsidiary clauses being brought in

overnight)…’

Kelvin Corcoran: So what are we doing now Potnia?
Do you see them at the foot of the hill
surrounding us, a flood, do you see them
through our transparent walls?

Anthony Costello (from ‘The Antique Hunter’): cabinets of Glost earthenware
and fine bone china,
recognizing a Stradivarius or 1st
of Ulysses when I see one

Becka Mara McKay: ‘I was living in a cliff-side hollow. I had no real friends. The local swallows tried to teach me to use mud to seal off the chinks and leaks in my dwelling. But they were creatures who could only eat on the wing, and I am a creature who can barely drink a glass of wine in a seated position without spilling it on my shirt, and so we could hardly find a common tongue, much less a way to understand each other’s tools and trademarks.’

Alain-Fournier: ‘…aux petits gars qui ne s’en vont avec personne
dans le cortège qui s’en va, fier et traîné
vers l’allégresse sans raison, là-bas, qui sonne.’