Waiting Places

The Nature of Things

Blessed Art Thou

I want to go back to The Angel

News

Enola Gay

Shifting

Five Easy Pieces

The China-mender’s Daughter

Muntjac

To My Godmother

The Edge of Something

The Long Holidays

As I Walked Out

Who She Is

Long Exposure

The Glass House

What Happens While We Are Sleeping

Summer Storm

Moonflower

Hide Nor Hair

Harvest

Garbo Among Us

The Promise of Snow

Things Left Out All Night

Homing

Short-hold

Wayfarer

Still Life with Purple Sage

At the Falls Café

After Life

Spare Room in Summer

Detail

This Morning

Last Summer

Woman in Blue Reading a Letter

Guest Room

Morandi: Still Lives

The Dew Artist

The Messengers

Mrs Meakin Opens Her Window to the Larks

Early One Morning

To Manor Farm Only

Verses

The Gardener

Ridgeway

Risen

NOTES

About the Author

Copyright

Grace

You’ve been living for this for weeks

without knowing it:

the moment the house empties like a city in August

so completely

it forgets you exist.

Light withdraws slowly

is almost gone before you notice.

In the stillness, everything becomes itself:

the circle of white plates on the kitchen table

the serious chairs that attend them

even the roses on the papered walls

seem to open a little wider.

It looks simple: the glass vase holding

whatever is offered –

cut flowers, or the thought of them –

simple, though not easy

this waiting without hunger in the near dark

for what you may be about to receive.

*  *  *

Among Women

One evening I came back home

and everything was just as I’d left it –

except the bowls gleamed with a new knowledge,

the cat wore his yellow gaze like a mask,

and I sensed the house had been visited –

wings unfurling like ferns in the quiet air.

I was blessed with children anyway,

I shook my life out like a cloth,

and perhaps there is a purpose after all

in not being chosen:

the minute my clock has never regained,

sunlight in the guest room climbing its ladder of dust.

This Year, Next Year, Sometime, Never

Stepping in from the brightness,

the room was shady and cool as a larder,

the table clothed like an altar

and laid as if for a different life.

Finding the tongue still lithe

and moving in my head,

I sat and ate my fill –

the day old bread thinly sliced and buttered

the late-summer plums in their staining juice

answering a hunger I’d never known until then.

I hardly need to tell you this –

the sharpness following the sweetness,

the bruise-coloured flesh,

then the clock of stones.

But for a moment

I felt my work here was completed –

galaxies of light blazing

in the mirror’s bevelled edge,

the children in their grubby white shirts

gravitating slowly towards home.

Epiphany

I’ve been doing this ever since I was a girl –

stepping into a moment

like an empty platform

or a summer garden

just before the dew has lifted –