Town Pigeons

Don’t they know that

they’re intelligent, because

like humans they can

reproduce in any month

of the year?

The interlocking

space

that defines their closeness

can be anthropomorphised

into the word ‘huddle’

They are pecking amongst

bicycle wheels. Filth; food.

An open window does not

attract them

They are like clouds

but also incandescent;

evening clouds with sun

levering them into

the world.  They wheel

and circulate like air

They applaud pavements here

and trees elsewhere.

Their claps are polite

A black streak shows

where a chimney was.

They gather above,

but not to feel a phantom warmth

Indelicate charms.  Vomit-

eaters.  A pigeon

is lucky for a traveller.  One

imagines they dream

of travelling: not restless

like dogs, but nodding

in their sleep 

The Okinawa Rail

The Okinawa rail is a rare, flightless bird and not

a Japanese train company.  It was discovered

in 1981 and is endemic to Okinawa-Hontou

and apart from its name and its pink gristly legs

affords little scope for the humour that is

the potential of every sad poem.  It was discovered

in 1981 but not until yesterday by me, and only

in A Photographic Guide to the Birds of Japan

And North-East Asia by Tadao Shimba.  It’s got

a funny beak, I suppose, and it can climb trees

which is a good thing, given the promise of more

giant waves.  Not because trees stand much chance

when whole tuna-fishing fleets perch half-way

up small mountains of broken everything, but

a bird that climbs trees but can’t fly is an indication

that evolution works both ways, or is a multi-

functional penknife, one with a blade and a screw-

driver.  It opens up the possibility that man

can again lose and find himself in a subtropical

island forest, be petrified not by moving earth

and water but by a retarded thirty centimetre

bird and what Shimba describes as ‘loud and rapidly

repeated kek-kek-kek-kek calls at night.’     

3598xtreesxinxgeorgia

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Tarot Reading for a Red Kite

1. The Nine of Wands Reversed

Palisade can be a verb

too.  It’s what you make

of the wind, you who have

forgotten how to retreat,

how to forget, you who can

hang upside down without

the money falling out

of your boots.

2. Temperance

does not mean sitting

still.  Movement in the way

that water is movement.

Frugality is a constant

fight with oneself – a hundred

years war.

3. The Lovers

and the whole history

of economic theory

comes down to the same

thing that you have achieved – I

like to see it as victory, but victory

is an accumulation, like the notion

of infinite growth of capital

but somehow backwards:

two parachutists holding hands,

spiralling, fighting

the wind.

7 nests, 7 cuckoos

1. luscinia megarhynchos

                                           orchestra
                                  plush              rouge
                                 tragedy     
                                                   pendulum
                                           lyre


2. turdus philomelos

                                     an    larch
                                  sepal   level   lea
                                groom               a lee
                                          tree


3. troglodytes troglodytes

                                                             midwife cobalt
                                                 bustle
                                                              labial     pedal


4. phylloscopus trochilus


                  piano  soon     spiral
                        aspirin   trapeze
                                     descend


5. prunella modularis


                                                         dapple     sepal     implore    church  heel    kettle


6. acrocephalus scirpaceus


b  l
s  a  y       l   e  p  e  r     
i   c  s  m  r  e  p  e  l
k  l   e  k  p
               e  h
                   t


7. anthus pratensis


                        ural hook bale
                      sentinel devil income

A Translation

Poem on a Bird's Beak








                        cere
          sin









Gedicht auf einem Vogelschnabel









                        richtig
          auf

Natural History

The sign as an instruction, and not just in a physical sense: go up to the next floor, and you will see the insects: this commonish mayfly, ephemera danica: notice the constant: the vacuum: the airless fly, and danceless.

In the next case: moths, melanised against the city: see how they disappear into the illness and health of a city: the dust of a city stacked in their pigments: dormant cancer.

Think of the museum as a failed hospital where patients are left pinned in death’s-head mask: toys in a macabre toyshop.

Open a row of identical drawers, one by one: a bee-eater, a brown rat, and, coffin-shaped, a barn owl on its back, preparing for dignity, eyes out.

Stoat in summer, stoat in winter: side-by-side: russet and white.

The shrew-box holds little slips of fur and skin aligned parallel, not topping-and-tailing: notice how small they look, and real: realer that when alive, and warm, and wild.

Step out of the lift: remember, for some reason, your grandfather having TB: remember that the last time you came hear you had a cold: spat bloody brownish phlegm into the sink: ask yourself if people can even get TB these days: notice how someone has taken a red marker and drawn a deathly trickle on the off-white fur below the stuffed badger’s angry mouth.

The same person, maybe, who took a tooth from the crocodile: for luck.