"Rain cracks its whip
Against the windows. The wielder: autumn.
From the cottage in the cleft of the foothills
You can see a flickering light, just out of sight
And it stains the blackest night."
"A worm has beaten me to the hole I’m digging;
when I pull apart the soil, I find
a slender punctuation mark in the mud.
Its pink body threads through the dark clay."
"Then there is a sudden pull – my loose thoughts spill over the pebbly surface of the page. Images crashing and breaking against sobering stillness, propelling seafoam into the air, rumpling the Edenic crispness of the page."
"The photographs on the walls show people years ago in the same spot.
Did they feel the same, love the same, breathe the same.
It seems impossible that they did, even more so that they did not."
"And I sat with my back to the skies
as I mouthed out a prayer to the winds
and imagined them ghosts; for where I sat, half-anaesthetised,
four children had used to sit"