Vicki Feaver

We are waking early now – filled with the urgency small animals must feel as they prepare for winter.

I had forgotten how cold it would be – like coming back after a summer of wandering lusts to an old lover.

And how beautiful – the corners of roofs floating in a white mist like pieces of wreckage;

afternoons when the sun burns through – dries the wings of dying wasps;...

We’ve abandoned the garden – all those wasted hours! Only the poppies flourish. They make a virtue of scant soil, find nourishment in stones; on stems you’d think could scarcely bear the weight their green buds fatten.

A good drying day: strong wind and sun. The trees are pruning themselves – twigs and broken branches lying at their feet. We turn to go back...

First there are the jokes about how it’s going on the ‘South Col’, or the ‘Big C’; but half serious,

as if you really had returned from inching your way up a vertical rockface, or sailing single-handed across his painted ocean.

Then I ask about them – those friends of yours I never meet, but you are now so intimate with you know the day-to-day state

of...

cut right through the house: a black wiggly line you could poke a finger into, a deep gash seeping fine black dust.

It didn’t appear overnight. For a long time it was such a fine line we went up and down stairs oblivious to the stresses

that were splitting our walls and ceilings apart. And even when it thickened and darkened, we went on not seeing, or seeing

but believing the crack...

Ever since, in an act of reckless middle age, I broke my wrist learning to skate, my right hand

refuses to sleep with me. It performs the day’s tasks stiffly, stoically; but at night

slides out from the duvet to hollow a nest in the pillow like an animal gone to ground

in a hole in the hedge whose instinct says have nothing to do with heart, lungs, legs,

the dangerous head. I dreamed of...