MacCaig

• Quotes for Basking Shark (7)

  That room sized monster with a matchbox brain

  He displaced more than water

  So who’s the monster?

  That thought made me grow pale

  Swish up the dirt and, when it settles a spring is all the clearer

  That once I met on a  sea tin tacked with rain

  He shoogled me centuries back- this decadent townee shook on the wrong branch of his family tree.
• Quotes for Visiting hour (11)

  What seems a corpse is trundled into a lift and vanishes heavenward

  I will not feel, I will not feel, until i have to

  Their slender waists miraculously carrying their burden of so much pain.

  So much pain, so many deaths

  Their eyes still clear after so many farewells

  Nurses walk lightly, swiftly, here and up and down and there

  She lies in a white cave of forgetfulness

  A withered hand trembles on its stalk

  Black figure in her white cave

  Books that will not be read and fruitless fruits

  Eyes move behind eyelids too heavy to raise
• Quotes for Assisi (11)

  Rush of tourists, clucking contentedly

  Slumped like a half filled sack

  Tiny twisted legs

  From which sawdust might run

  Dwarf with his hands on backwards

  He had the advantage of not being dead yet

  It was they who had passed the ruined temple outside

  Whose eyes wept pus, whose back was higher than his head, whose lopsided mouth

  Outside the three tiers of churches built

  Fluttered after him as he scattered the grain of the word

  Said grazie in a voice as sweet as a child’s when she speaks to her mother
• Aunt Julia (9)

  Aunt julia spoke gaelic very loud and very fast

  I could not answer her- I could not understand her

  She wore mens boots when she wore any

  She was buckets and water flouncing into them

  I can see her strong foot stained with peat

  Her right hand drew yarn marvellously out of the air

  She lay silenced in the absolute black of a sandy grave at luskentyre

  Getting angry, getting angry with so many questions unanswered

  Hers was the only house where I've lain at night in the absolute darkness

  But I hear her still welcoming me with a seagull’s voice
• Quotes for Brooklyn Cop (10)

  Build like a gorilla but less timid

  Two hieroglyphs in his face that mean trouble

  He walks the sidewalk and the thin tissue over violence

  When he said ‘see you babe’ to his wife, he hoped it he truly hoped it

  Should the tissue tear, should he plunge through into violence

  And who would be who have to be his victims?

  To whom ‘Hiya honey’ is no cliche

  Who would be him gorilla with a nightstick.

  Whose home is a place he might this time never get back to?

  What clubbings what gunshots
• Quotes for Hotel Room 12th Floor (10)

  This morning I watched from here

  I lie in bed between a radio and television set.

  A helicopter skirting like a damaged insect

  Empire state building, that jumbo sized dentist drill

  Its uncivilised darkness is shot at by a million lit windows

  Wildest warwoops continuously ululating through the glittering canyons and gulches

  Police cars and ambulances racing to broken bones

  Harsh screaming from coldwater flats.

  Blood glazed on the sidewalks

  No stockades can keep the midnight out