Esther Morgan

You've been living for this for weeks
without knowing it:

the moment the house empties like a city in August
...

I watched the sun moving round the kitchen,
an early spring sun that strengthened and weakened,
coming and going like an old mind.

I watched like one bedridden for a long time
on their first journey back into the world
who finds it enough to be going on with:

the way the sunlight brought each possession in turn
to its attention and made of it a small still life:

the iron frying pan gleaming on its hook like an ancient find,
the powdery green cheek of a bruised clementine.

Though more beautiful still was how the light moved on,
letting go each chair and coffee cup without regret

the way my grandmother, in her final year, received me:
neither surprised by my presence, nor distressed by my leaving,
content, though, while I was there.
...

Far above our heads their skeletal frames
are engaged in a serious enterprise
swinging their payloads of concrete and steel
...

Time out of mind this evening -
the hare crouched in her form,
the furrows' sockets of flint.

A last dog's whistled home
from ground that once
was called after someone;

an acre of average loss -
the common prayer of the wheat,
the rush hour as far away as the river

where that young girl went missing,
her night things tumbled over and over
in the treacherous weir.

That was before the war before last . . .
Boundaries of parish and family
dissolve in the hiss of this rain -

Lady's Smock, Meadowsweet, Wild Angelica -
the old lace of their names
edging the dark.
...

Just because I'm no longer visible
to the naked eye

doesn't mean
...