A window, and my mother gazing out
into my father’s distance.
Me beside her. We are very small.
That’s a gift of a kind: it is an upstairs window
offering a world beyond,
between the grey of slate, the grey of sea,
the kind of gift that if unwanted can’t be undelivered.
Leave it in the hall, it stands there
like an open door.
…tightens in the air around them,
round the little house, two up, two down
three breathings, father, mother, child,
never smaller than now, in the fist
of big weather, a darkening
in the air between them,
in the corner (don’t look) of the eye
(don’t turn). It’s a shudder of wings
that may pass over, may
pass. When the father, at the centre
of the silence, tries to take
this cup, himself, away from them, upstairs,
the isobars only steepen, like the years
they wish and fear, and wish,
the storm would break.
What came out of your distance (not
by moving, nothing moved on those days)
no one else could see.
You kept it that way. Now
as the material that makes you
loosens, leaving you confined,
defined by vagueness (speech
and hearing, eye and hand)
I almost see them, in between
and round us, as I guess you must
—ellipses haunting any sentence,
easing apart the graininess of mist
into shapes, the particular dis-
embodiments their absences reveal.
If I saw them, I might see you. If
one touched me, I might feel.