Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Saving
- Out of this World
- Observatory
- Zentralfriedhof
- How to Remember
- Europe
- What's Gone Blue
- Plain Tongues
- As the Crow Flies the Sun Rips Day Open
- Boy
- The Roof
- Eva Braun in Linz
- Yellow
- My Girl in California
- St Peter
- The Soldiers
- Palace
- Outside Vienna
- Neutral Air
- Woman
- How to Forget
- The Sound
- In Time
- The Lever
- Fourteen Mistakes
- The Fall
- The Hold I Have
- Centre Strange
- Born Breathing
- The Heads
- Home
- Epilogue
- Maker
- Acknowledgements
Woman
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Saving
- Out of this World
- Observatory
- Zentralfriedhof
- How to Remember
- Europe
- What's Gone Blue
- Plain Tongues
- As the Crow Flies the Sun Rips Day Open
- Boy
- The Roof
- Eva Braun in Linz
- Yellow
- My Girl in California
- St Peter
- The Soldiers
- Palace
- Outside Vienna
- Neutral Air
- Woman
- How to Forget
- The Sound
- In Time
- The Lever
- Fourteen Mistakes
- The Fall
- The Hold I Have
- Centre Strange
- Born Breathing
- The Heads
- Home
- Epilogue
- Maker
- Acknowledgements
Summary
The burned moss is tight on the ground.
Too tight to own its own
shadow. Too long
since the morning's hallway leading down
to the locked room, where green
afternoons stay unseen. I am
what exactly, the woman says.
She won't go back to the room.
*
A moment earlier
with the man's knee bent, the honey
ring's glint,
she looked up, not at him, but at the stone's façade
behind, where rock scrunched, crumbled
under her live gaze. She knew she should speak
but was thinking
robbers came here, marauding
and raping, taking what
they fancied. They fled and she'd like
to flee too, to take what she liked and begone. She wished
she weren't greedy but she also thinks
who's not greedy with time's a fool.
She has seen a creature in the burned moss
and it resembles her,
far more than a kneeling man ever could.
She crouches as the other women walk in slippers,
she waits to watch them
stroll, their hair fall
and shine the outer layer of
a lemon rose. I am so determined
she said to make a
shadow even when
I'm dirt. The man nodded
although he understood nothing.
*
An ant's legs rattle under the leaf 's edge,
onto the moss burned yellow – it's been a hard
summer, though easy for him, who does not
have to bother about fields. She will keep
bothering, liking the fresh breeze
of decision. The window creaks,
open-shadowed trees make cameos
in the reflecting glass.
The burned moss pushes back at the feet and knees
of the woman as she crawls, it pulls water from her
soles, her skin. It drinks. Soon
the man will return with his armed guards
but none of them will find her.
The moss slices itself open
and the woman crawls inside.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Nowhere Nearer , pp. 27 - 28Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2018