‘YOU’VE WEATHERED HOMESICKNESS, madness, pirates, scrimshaw, hellfire sermons. Time to drift placidly beside the pensioned leviathan.’ Incomparable mammals are losing themselves in the opacities of the blue-green llanos, the killing fields of contraptions not yet invented. A fascinated boy has nowhere to go, nowhere to start – unless he’s lucky enough to have a whaling […]

‘THE “WOODEN OX”, the “gliding horse” flourish as ancient roads disintegrate. The wheel takes all the load, the narrow felloe cleaving clayey soils.’ Oiling the hub are the three poisons: foolish pig, angry snake, uxorious dove. A potter shapes a dish, a monkey clutches at fruit, a swaddled corpse is left in the fetal posture […]

‘CATCH ME SOME radio words, elegant on the page. Lucent. Patina. Cerulean. Only a vibrissa from the indescribable essence.’ Your to-do list has two topics: the Chinese wheelbarrow, suggesting a form; and ‘Shenandoah’, shanty of lost love, a thousand miles, oddly, from the outlet mentioned. A ten-metre scroll of prosperous Suzhou shows not one wheel, […]

‘THE MOTHER NEEDS rest. From the nurses’ muster point you can see the stationery cupboard, door open. Baby lies asleep on a mattress of Jiffy bags.’ We seldom turn to look when hinges squeal. Discreetly accurate, they are mostly silent, even if lacking ball bearings. Complex things often outlive simple things – a panel of […]

‘BE FORTUNE’S HORSEMAN, not its horse. Ride gold to the end of time’s alley. Sunbathing in splendour makes a fossil of us all.’ Money elopes to gold like the clothes peg infanta to her prince annually enriched by meteor showers. Protected from poisons and revolution, nevertheless he frets about downstairs rumours of social reconditioning – […]

‘CREATIVELY LEVERAGE THE passion of your Tao self-branding. Run your followers delicately, as if cooking tiny fish.’ A kingfisher in the gloaming is the only signatory to a compromise hammered out on a duck punt. Back home there’s a kill list, encrypted; drones patrol his dreams. The native quotas are unattainable without patrician support. Loathing […]

‘LOOK, A WOMAN at the well in the noonday sun! The other villagers must hate her, no doubt for immorality.’ Big glacial stones underneath might prohibit driving a point in the yard. A driven point seeks its own course: it would either wallop into a boulder and stop dead or else bend till the drive […]