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i
Such crass economy,
an estuary thick
with birds—swan, tern, curlew—
refusing to concede
its prime redundancy:
the lack of mortgage value
in places too
diversified to be
accountable. You’ll pay
by claiming less and less,
and gulp the thinning air
con brio while you count
the steps from estuary
to ossuary, the bare
sufficiency of form
remaining, meaning more
than ever what it says.
ii
This silver tide is clinging
to one bare scalp of rock
while straining for another:
the lunar seas whose
collective face is
stricken, staring down
(O pareidolia!)
the world, watching us
commute, or change together,
along this edge to pay
our way and wages.
iii
Wage a bet on whether
debt’s exceptional or exponential
in giving currency to those
who feel they are
entitled to their larger
stake, who blandly take
an interest, while debtors
overturn their lives to live,
fleeing from hedge funds
—sanctuaries in which a flock
of bills, all safe in numbers,
explores risk without
the necessary ground—
and flowing to a range of basic
featureless accounts.
iv
Our song is in the hedge
against the rising water;
its call similar in kind
but not in quality
to dread, dredging the week
for sabbath days, temples
of broad hours erupting
precisely on schedule
or rather too late
and setting themselves apart
like values from their value,
joining in with what
is unaccounted for:
digressions or diversions
not strictly necessary,
loved.
v
Your courier is stuck
in traffic. They
will not be free
till after dark. Their zero
hours extend beyond the edge
of what they can afford
to spend on working.
Their only course is waiting
for the tidal surge to clear
the road, when all the drivers
will change their gear together.
Till then, counting the swans:
eleven, twelve, thirteen.
vi
What links a curlew
with the curlicue
that joins the letters
s and t like st?
Not a curlicue,
a ligature, a beak-
like swoop of ink. Its name
is shared with ligatures
which once told chanting monks
to sing their several notes
in slurred melismata,
the way the curlew calls
and runs the low and high
together, wading bird
that tastes the airs
of Africa and
European mud.
vii
Its name, of course,
comes from the French courir,
to run, related to
career, which leads
the working life into
a spreadsheet cell,
and currency, which
sees us all entirely
run ragged in pursuit,
and also corridor,
the place we run, the end
of which requires
contemplation.
viii
A self is not a cell,
nor a cell its self.
Each one may yet have
influence on others,
on what its organisation
or organism
is to be valued at. A bird
is cells all the way down,
its face a property
emergent, undulating
in the face of others
such as our own
emerging.
ix
Free delivery
cannot be fulfilled.
Please supply new credit
to refresh your contract.
This will be costlier
than you have bargained for.
We will require a signature.
ERRATA
For delivery, deliverance;
for credit, credibility;
for signature, a sign.
x
Swan and tern
are linked like st,
like shore and tide, space
and time, salary and tithe,
the ligature a law
by which we’re bound not
only to our cells
but to the values
in or in between them.
xi
If you default on debt
your property may be
at risk of repossession.
Default position: to fix
what is quite properly
one’s own.
xii
These cells, of course, distinct
from fleur de sel which is
the salt in salary, the flower
bringing flavour to
your bread. Each day
brings savour if not
satiation, merely
a way-station.
xiii
Economy’s the art
of naming things
around the home.
A true economist
has learned to call things
by the names they call
themselves, wearing down
a melody to fragment
of keel bone, eggshell,
a call neither heard
one year nor yet the next.
And nonetheless it seems
quite undisturbed, bone
china, when a tablecloth
is snatched from underneath it,
a full moon’s face
—waxen, pocked, resigned—
reflecting on the surface
of a turning tide.
Michael Grieve lives and works in Fife. He was shortlisted for the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award, his pamphlet Luck was published by HappenStance Press, and his poems have appeared in various magazines, including Irish Pages, Bad Lilies, Magma, Gutter, and Perverse.
Copyright © 2026 by Michael Grieve, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
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