Verse

In the supermarket upturned octopuses lie on stones of ice as on a cold beach or an operating...

If the poem is an enigma. If the poem does not offer a solution. If the solution does...

'She besieges her apartment from within / Aiming at a window with a view / Living among the potted plants on the veranda'

'Lean is the dull steel flashed white in the sun / Like a sudden lifting of the white-leaved abele, / Flushed from the raw thongs of the birch-tree / The white wood flies through the mists of morning.'

'My mordant friend told me the story of / the woman he loved in youth in Oxford /who had, he said, "a hospitable cunt".'

'One hundred years ago young Ezra writes / from Kensington to Miss Alice Kenny'

'Tucked among books, look, a long-ago letter, / long ago lost, thanks me for poems – for one / especially in which she’s named.'

'The bus-boys at the Aqua Grill are whistling / Sweet Susie ... Oh Susie Q ... Oh I love you / and I wonder, how do they know my name?'

'When the schoolgirl / in the Domino Tea Room / suddenly started sobbing, / an old woman, / none of whose business it was, / said not to take things so much to heart.'

'wayward, thin-walled, aloof: / I began to appear, bitterly / striving for the impossible body / a huge hole in the hollow of the bus stop, an interior / stadium'