How often have I carried our family word For the hot water bottle To a strange bed As my father would juggle a red-hot half-brick In an old sock To his childhood settle. I have taken it into so many lovely heads or laid it between us like a sword.

An hotel room in New York City with a girl who spoke hardly any English my hand on her breast like the smouldering one-off spoor of the yeti or some other shy beast that has yet to enter the language.

When Uncle Seamus speaks, connecting haiku poets to those Irish, we should all listen. To quote:

"Another quality which the Old Irish poet shares with his Japanese counterpart is a quality we might call "this worldness" - both are as alert as hunters to their physical surroundings - and yet there is also a strong sense of another world within this "this worldness", one to which poetic expression promises access. In each case, it's as if the poet is caught between the delights of the contingent and the invitations of the transcendent, yet by registering as precisely and poignantly as possible his consciousness of this middle state he manages to effect what Matthew Arnold would have called "a criticism of life".

In this talk, he also brings to my attention Paul Muldoon's wickedly sharp "Hopewell Haiku"; it is well worth a close reading. I will be posting Muldoon's "Quoof" (a damn subtle sonnet!) separately in a bit.

That the heart is an unknowable city in rain, or that it is an organ of fire has already been spoken by others.

I call it a breathing stone, black with blood, striated with memory, a kind of lapsed coin, the only fortune I have to give and be given back.

Here. Hold it now, in your warm palm. Give it time, give it your gaze, and if you can, company of your own.

It will open, if you can believe that cities reveal their labyrinths to sunlight, fires eventually cast themselves into skylights, and stones also blossom.