By Heart Because we’re running out of time for you to talk and me to listen, I want to get things straight – to know which brood of Holly Blue feeds on ivy, spring or summer, and what distinguishes the Gatekeeper from the Meadow Brown, at twenty feet. To hear you talk of flight [...]
Waking In A Strange RoomIt’s as if a dome of glass were perched above the city, and high up there the swifts were searching for an exit, their cries defining the fixity of space –the way that slab of morning sunlight on the floor defines the heat outdoors, while through the window red geraniums [...]
Metamorphosis First came a taste for meat and odd bursts of irritation like an itch along her spine. Then she lost the urge to speak. She’d curl up in the back room, whole days at a time, and at night she’d sleep-walk through the house, nudging at the windows and the doors, lifting her [...]
Blade Some vegetables resist more vigorously than others. To vary things, she plays at cutting herringbones and ovals, teasing the skin with her point before penetrating the heart, pictures a fingertip nestling among peelings on the spattered board, and, for the luxury of granting him a reprieve perhaps, imagines stepping to where her husband [...]
Scarlet Tiger We’d have killed it if we’d had the courage – to crush a body this bloated or stamp on wings like shrivelled walnuts. Was it a mutant? Too slow to break free and make for the open? It scuttled out of the leaves and frass, climbed our stick and hung there. Like [...]
The White Garden I’m going to rip out the iceberg roses, the rocket whose sweetness, after dark, attracts the moths, the Madonna lilies and myrtle and pale bleeding hearts; inject the heat of marigolds and blowsy orange poppies and plant that rose as black as a woman’s blood before it flows. I’ll call a [...]
Phugtal Imagine waking to so much sky, the river reduced to a thread of light. Couldn’t wind just knock this monastery off the mountain, send it tumbling like a wasp’s nest through a thousand feet of air? Khushal says it’s prayer that keeps it clinging to the rock face despite the pull of gravity. [...]
Blues Most of us can simply say that it’s a butterfly, and that it’s small and blue but you see a border, a certain arrangement of dots, the faintest shift towards silver or turquoise … and, even on the wing, can tell the Chalk-Hill from the Holly or the Common Blue. You’d like to [...]
The Studio Chair (after a painting by Sara Lee Roberts) Take away the chair and we’re left with abstraction, an empty universe stripped like Dawkins’ of the possibility of transcendence; the chair reassures us: in a downstairs room, it says, someone is playing the piano or laying a table, writing a note, and it’s [...]
