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Show SARAH COLERIDGE AT GRETA HALL The children have been down for hours, the fire dead, and I cannot sleep, A cold wind has been sucking at the edges of the house for weeks now, and I'm as unaccustomed to this smell of wood-rot and mulch, the darkening thickets and rank gullies, as I am to the streak that petrified down my side this morning when I came across, outside the butchers's, a huge sow, freshly gutted in the open air. It may take years. This is our middle ground. The moonlight nods to me through the taffeta curtains. Beyond the hills, night-fishing boats push off the shoals onto Blue Anchor Bay, row, and then draw in their oars, like geese, and wait. We live in these gradual spans of time, pointless hours, the dark sky filling up and emptying out again, and the days accumulate like leaves off the shaking trees. The down quilt serves me its pool of blue light -I am motionless beneath it, like the underside of a buoy, moored to some dull conviction, some interim. What loads me down discourages my brown-eyed children. They rarely play. So much drifting of my thoughts these days, I catch myself standing stiff from them, and a chill creeps over me like the green-mold crabbing up the bedroom wall. I am not young any longer. Is it my own will kept me here since the day he left? I'm beginning to think in different terms. In my prayers I no longer even ask for happiness... We get so little we deserve. The minister cautions me I'm losing patience, There is something to be gained from this, Glorious |