will come to earth in line with gradient

and force. As far as it goes, the problem

isn’t stumbling on the proper emblems

but being quick enough to dodge them –

and the boiler suits were dyed bright red

so you’d hardly notice the splatters of blood.

(Wicket Gate)

That lunchtime Fergus ate my sandwiches

and left my Mid-Ulster Mail torn up in

little printed petals on the wood-grain

of the melamine table. The canteen

fell silent when I came in and sat down

and looked up and did nothing.

(Gaius’s Inn)

David, it’s 3 a.m. and I am done.

I’ve turned all the bottles outwards

in the fridge below the till and you are

crossing the deserted parquet dance floor,

boot heels tapping, carrying a dustpan,

in the other hand a stacking chair –

(The Arbour)

I should say there is this density to objects,

and that they gather weight in time and spin

on without effort in their orbits gaining

traction, gravity and drag, a fullness in the

sense of things, and always drawing other

objects closer with a pull that lifts the whole

of you and sees you in safe and sound at home to

die a good death with family round you.

Fallacious, that, and what powers live on through us,

ordering their preferments and our lies,

do not give two fucks for us. We do as we are told.

The stars are hard and deaf and cold;

the river unconcerned about our presence

or its absence, and to paraphrase the meaning

is depletion of that meaning: even a one-to-one

map would lack both depth and texture: nicknames,

the favourite chocolate in the box of Roses,

how someone dries herself or dresses

after the shower, slowly, piece by piece,

wandering the flat on the phone to her sister,

all life’s boring secret lovely histories,

minutiae of the dying who simply go on

dying now forever, the fixed blur of a spun

thing which spins so fast the focus of the eye

(Mr Honest)

cannot alight on it, can’t print an image

on the retina but is repeatedly flung

off and forced by motion into motion.

Imagine how he sets the spared artillery ball

at the centre of the wheel to grind the lens,

how he pedals and then delicately leans

sheet glass into the metal surface so it shrieks

and sparks glitter out and he waits and then leans

the changed sheet of glass away . . .

(House Beautiful)

What if you felt nothing more walking down

the streets of Cookstown than you ever felt

walking in New York or Rome or London,

that you knew no one and the plenitude

of faces meant an openness and soft regard

for all the local gods, some dulling into love

by constant movement, children, music, dogs,

by the caramel or black or light pink

skin the people move and keep on moving

the miraculous flesh of their bodies in.

Nick Laird was born in County Tyrone in 1975 and educated at Cambridge University. For many years he worked as a lawyer before leaving to write poetry and fiction full-time. He writes and reviews for many newspapers and journals and teaches at Princeton University. He has published three poetry collections: To a Fault (2005), On Purpose (2007), and Go Giants (2013), and two novels: Utterly Monkey (2005) and Glover’s Mistake (2009). His awards include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Betty Trask Prize, and a Somerset Maugham Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.