A PLACE FOR SIDEWAYS TRAINS OF THOUGHT
I don’t think I am the only person to have thought once or twice that it would be nice to have a name like the ones you hear in Westerns: Soaring Eagle, say, or Jumping Raccoon. In one film, of which I remember nothing else, one of the characters said that Native American children were... Continue Reading →
I have begun to add readings of poems to my YouTube channel (sidewaysstation). For the time being there are five, but I'll be adding more over time.
I've been recording poems for a while in a new section of the site entitled "Poems read aloud". Click on the link to go to the index (also on the second line of the main menu at the top of the page).
Siren song My city with its uphill loves, my Genoa all full of sea and steps and, rising from the harbour, whirlpools of living life all the way up to reach the ridges of the sheet-metal roofs, now with what forcefulness inside me, here where each word has turned to lead, does it quiver... Continue Reading →
Listen to the poem here Two moods of darkness Darkness has its swings of mood. It also has long arms and countless fingers. Those nights your worries start to make the floorboards creak; first one, then several, then all (and if you have no floorboards they bring their own) then darkness slowly tries to... Continue Reading →
(My translation of Cesare Pavese's poem "The Cats will know") The Cats will know (Cesare Pavese) Again the rain will fall on your sweet paving stones, a gentle rain just like a breath or like a footfall. Again the breeze, the dawn, will lightly bloom, as underneath your step when you return. Among... Continue Reading →
Evening The evening slowly dons the changing clothes a rim of ancient trees holds out for it; and as you watch, before you two lands separate, one travelling heavenwards and one which falls; and leave you fully part of neither one, not quite so darkly silent as the house, not quite so surely summoning eternity... Continue Reading →
Listen to the poem here Below, next to our feet, the present just about to turn into the past. The plastic bottles, and the beer cans from last night. The cigarette butts impacted in between the cobble stones And next to them the newly sprouted seedlings thrusting upwards like minute berserkers insanely charging our enormous... Continue Reading →
© Photo Copyright Walter Baxter Listen to the poem here In early winter every year the starlings in their hundred thousands come to Rome. They populate the branches of the trees from where their shit rains down in abundance and unceasingly. Umbrellas must be opened as you rush across the road, weathering their excremental storm. They... Continue Reading →
(Listen to the poem here) The bottle collectors, the metal detectors, the boarding pass checks, the ID inspection. Past the scanners, the guards, through the frisker-bush hedges The trackers, the scopers, the seven-armed gropers. Then the dumbstunner pistols which make all your electronics electroffics for the duration of your flight. The tattoo inferencer, the Rorschach... Continue Reading →