This morning I fumbled to find my voice a line I caught on the wind falling flat as I woke slowly to the radio with the volume turned down too low for me to hear the voice of the news presenter or the erstwhile poet in my head or so it seemed to me then both were speaking in tongues disguising their meanings and covering their tracks like mimes in leotards and slippers and hats with fascinators performing with the strength of Baryshnikov and the footwork of Fontaine parading grace like a circus wheel in some latter day Babel watching a music video madier it easier as my feet kept time better than my head and soon I felt the rhythm even as I heard the beat the rhyme came upon me quickly and I tried to catch it with my lips I wonder how dogs find it so easy to pick a throw when at last I could give the words mouth I forgot them again and only the rhythm returned the rhyme to the tip of my tongue I wonder if Homer ever stuttered or stumbled when ...

On the bus today I heard two suits getting into it on physics one guy was talking about string theory and how we and every part of us down to the atom and subatomic particle might as well be connected and pulled like wires by some master puppeteer only the guy didn't like the idea of a puppeteer sounded too much like natural theology he said the holy rollers liken God to a potter shaping woman out of Adam's rib and the moderates see the hand of a watchmaker in all of life either way what happens and how it all works is down to some higher power he liked random and was happy to be intrigued by how much like order it all looks when you are not looking through a microscope the other guy didn't seem to know much physics and his thinking was more Greek than Christian he said string theory sounded an awful lot like Zeus or Apollo having all of us and everything on a golden chain which he is free to let out fo...

In the past couple of weeks, a few philosophical daredevils have shaken off the shivers of Winter and defied the more timid maples to awake from their ever so slightly Humean sceptical slumbers. When maple and birch are still showing broom like stiffness against the iodine sky, the magnolia is secretly planning its morning advance. And barely has it shed the skin of its buds when other early arrivals take a chance on the weather, actively self-forgetting like Nietzschean aphorists, the treasure they found gleefully in the morning that they had hid the night before. I am referring to the daffy dills, of course, the fried eggs of a Dionysian breakfast. Not forgetting the tulips, which Dutch Princess Juliana keeps giving our city, long after she was Queen, proving that a rested bulb can last forever, especially when chastened by a bouffant. Some dos never get old, as we see from the more traditional bouffant, before and after, then and now. A surprising number of years...