concerning the typo in line seven.

Yet this poem harbours

no delusions of anthologized grandeur,

waits not for recital,

cares not to be remembered

for more than thirty seconds

after being read.

This poem is just happy to be here,

to have filled these pages

which were all so much nothing before.

It feels good to be writing again. I’ve been careful to do this with the curtains drawn so I can’t see my shed and my shed can’t see me. The cat seems pleased by my return to the house and I’m finding Mrs McNulty’s daytime sawing nostalgically soothing.

Less comforting were the messages on my phone that had accumulated during my confinement. There was a series of five messages from Liz, each successive one showing a steady increase on the Umbrage scale. The tone of the final message, though, had moved from annoyance to resignation:

I guess that’s it then.

At first I couldn’t understand why she was so upset but then, in my outbox, I noticed my message to her from 10th June. It was marked as undelivered; I must have turned my phone off too soon.

I looked again at the words I’d written as they teetered in my outbox, suspended in a permanent state of nearliness, like a metaphor for something that never quite happened.

Friday June 29th

Newcastle Brown Ale

This is how I remember it. He appeared

on my fifth week here, asking for food.

He’d washed up on the beach to the south of me;

I’d seen his footprints in the sand,

several days before. I’d been troubled by these,

like an astronaut who discovers giant steps

upon a not-so-lonely moon.

He strung up his hammock next to mine

and slept fitfully.

Later, he told me his name was Gordon –

although he should like to be called Sting –

and I noticed his thighs, welted

and swollen from the tentacled attentions

of jellyfish. One night, he told me of his dreams

of blue turtles

but by then I had tired of him:

the constant wrapping and unwrapping

of the tide-carried twine around his finger,

his insistence, as we swung gently in our beds,

that we put on the red light

as a beacon to passing boats,

that habit he had of standing so close to me.

On his last night, I watched him

as he slipped the note inside the bottle,

and launched it over the surf,

and, when its brown glass disappeared

underneath the waves,

I smashed the oar down upon him

until he’d no more breath to take.

Six weeks on, when the helicopter came,

there was nothing of him,

picked dry as he was, bones shining

beneath an invisible sun.

Every year, I raise a bottle to my lips

and set him free. This is how I remember it.