In The Poetry

In one of the snowiest winters I ever remember my younger sister and I went out to play by the frozen lake.

Legend

The rooms were mirrors
For that luminous face,
the morning windows ferned
with cold. Outside
a level world of snow.

Voiceless birds in the trees
like notes in the books
in the piano stool.
She let us suck top-of-the milk
burst from the [...]

The next poem is about music and a teenage son practising a piano in the middle of the night.

The Piano

The last bus sighs through the stops of the sleeping suburb
and he’s home again with a click of keys, a step on the stairs.
I see him again, shut in the upstairs sitting-room
in that huge Oxfam overcoat, [...]

A woman who longs to buy an antique strand of amber beads imagines the woman who once wore them.

Amber

Coveted week after week on the market stall,
coiled, nonchalant, arrayed under the lid
of locked glass, they grew familiar.
She’d finger them, drop them over her head,
try them for size, spoilt for choice –
red-amber, yellow, cut Russian ruby,
or [...]

This one’s a memory – it really happened – but it’s also about the way that children mix up real things with things people tell them and fairy stories.

Cold Knap Lake

We once watched a crowd
pull a drowned child from the lake.
Blue-lipped and dressed in water’s long green silk
she lay for dead.

Then kneeling on the earth,
a [...]