fog fills the valley, hiding everything beyond the churchyard wall, and curls around the tower where jackdaws huddle in the limestone tracery. before the morning’s out the sky is clear again — deep blue and cloudless. wood smoke scents the chill December air. outside the church the winter sunshine fails to warm the vicar in his cassock, cotta, and black mask. the wind tugs at his vestments as he greets parishioners six feet apart, their voices, raised but muffled, batted back and forth in short-lived clouds of warm, inconsequential breath. * from the void the bleak arises grey-eyed, sleepy, slow, it slinks into the unattended mind…

"[fog]" & "[from the void]" from "Trickling Grains of a Life: an Unauthorised Autobiography" - Section 4: "Churchill (2020- )"

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the morning windows sparkled, opalescent paisley pattern: silver ferns and arabesques — my first experience of fragile beauty. scraping fingernails could raise the frost in brittle curls, and just a breath turned tracery to puddles on the sill. * thick the snow around the massive roots; no sign of leaf or life, but there are pomegranates growing on the giant ash — a pair of ravens, puzzled, try to place the scent of honey and the sound of pipes, which fill the air. suddenly, as one, they flap aloft in panic, neither able to remember or to think. and as the snow melts, asphodel push up through warming earth, and far away but rapidly approaching is the bellow of a bull.

"[frost]" from "Trickling Grains of a Life: an Unauthorised Autobiography" - Section 1: "Boston (1956-1974)"

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strips of cardboard fixed to the forks flipping the spokes we pedalled in a pack clicking and clacking and sounding nothing like a motorcycle gang I'm sure (I think [I hope]) we knew it as we knew the reels of thin blue paper spotted brown that cracked and clicked in shiny six-guns sounded nothing like the flat reports of death

"[strips of cardboard...]" from "Trickling Grains of a Life: an Unauthorised Autobiography" - Section 1: "Boston (1956-1974)"

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shopping with mummy: bored, and as usual thinking of words. I'd recently heard one — though I was unsure of its meaning, its shape was a marvel: resonant, round. proudly I spoke it then clearly and loudly to hear how it sounded and yes, to show off. “bollocks” I said in the Home & Colonial. a moment’s stunned silence ... ...and suddenly I was swept up by a whirlwind to stand on the pavement outside the shop. mummy was mortified, red-faced and furious, I was perplexed and a little bit scared. So I learnt to make do then with bullocks and rowlocks and other near-misses — not as fulfilling, but safe.

"shopping with mummy" from "Trickling Grains of a Life: an Unauthorised Autobiography" - from "Boston (1956-1974)"

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the wearing of the green at the rising of the moon the pigeon on the gate in the ladies’ pantaloons the piping of the whistle and the scraping of the bow the tapping of the feet when fast the brimming eye when slow the pub was full and heaving people fighting, being sick — but everyone was silent when we played “Éamonn an Chnoıc” * Fixed by the Moon, the stars revolving and precessing, in obedience to time, and here and there a would-be wanderer, unwillingly detained, straining to move on, to break its unseen bonds, but holding back in surly acquiescence. The universe is mixed with wild imagination, fiction indistinguishable from the hard and permafrosted facts. Knowledge has become impossible — now justified belief is all that stands against chaotic faith.

"the wearing of the green" from "Trickling Grains of a Life" - from Oxford (1983-2001)

(each page contains an autobiographical poem followed by something more-or-less related)

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Night skies were much darker then (they had more stars, though), so the flashes whitening the empty wide horizon seemed more bright — both like and unlike lightning, followed by a rolling rumble longer, more subdued than thunder. We were used to it, of course, yet someone always said: “They’re bombing on the marsh, then” as if to reassure us that this wasn’t Armageddon on its way, but just a practice run. * Down there in the sleeping midnight families are curled up snug in bed, awareness fled until the coming of a dawn that they might never see. Will you use the sight – decide, albeit blindly – who will die tonight? or just release your load unaimed, a random scattering of chill cremations? Will you hold yourself absolved, a cog in an impersonal machine? And will you think (if you do think) of all those brittle, twisted charcoal forms as victims, not of murder, but of mere causality?

"Trickling Grains of a Life: an unauthorised autobiography" - from Boston, Lincs (1856–74)

(each page contains an autobiographical poem followed by something more-or-less related to it)

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