and what about Jane Draycott?

looks like a seriously cool Carcanet cookie. She fessed up to a teenage infatuation with Hopkins - here ar a couple showing current (hot) form:


What matters

is the way we lived: you tying the laces
on each school day, gripping the shoulders
of your bike lest it move off alone and leave you
on your hunkers by the kitchen fire
performing surgery on the hoover
difficult and slack heavy as a teenager
your notebook copper-plated with the whole
Our Father, suppliers of discontinued kitchen parts
and impossibly distant addresses
then the last of the picnics, Travels with a Donkey,
the sweet yhears turning over and over
and you falling asleep as I read.




It begins with razors

It begins with razors or lighters,
its sharpness or fire akin to a ship
that is passing, a fragment or sample
of something much bigger and further away
such as fathomless caverns of silver,

whole acres of indigo, saffron or hemp
or hillside on hillside of spices or tea
laid out like a rug to lie down on or sleep.
But capping the bowl like the door
to a furnace some made it last longer,
run cooler for breathing in deeper
its skyfuls of clouds, so that burdens
grown lighter could rise in the water l
ike palaces turning to smoke,
for a pipe once alight is a dream
which is now or is never and ends
like a pipe of disposable bones
washed up on the foreshore
where in the same place the body
of a river ran just before.