Sanjeev Sethi: ‘I run from myself, winded I return, debunking the illusion:
escape is an easy way out. On their own my errors seem
to go away. The breeze whittles cues of camaraderie.
The stoplight blushes in shades of sienna.’

From ‘Silent Highway': For ancient Britons, if they could be found,
For bird-watchers, for birds, for water-violets…
He liked to talk to herons, being tall,
And waded here, and further up, at Brentford
Composing poems as he strode or strove…

JK Huysmans: ‘Like many country girls, the Bièvre fell prey, upon her arrival in Paris, to the industrial snares of touts; despoiled of her dresses of grass and adornments of trees, she had to set to work immediately and wear herself out with the terrible chores demanded of her. Surrounded by rough merchants who pass her daily, but, by common agreement, imprison her in turn the length of her banks, she has become a tannery worker, and, day and night, she washes the filth from stripped skins, soaks the spare fleeces and raw leather, suffers the grip of alum, the bite of lime and caustic.’

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)…’