Ruth Fainlight

In Palazzo Mocenigo where he lived alone Lord Byron used every grand room To watch solitude mirror by mirror And the beauty of doors no one passed through

He heard the marine murmurs of silence The lost echoes of steps in far corridors He loved the smooth shine on polished floors Shadows unrolling under high ceilings And though he sat in just one chair Was glad to see the other chairs were...

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Trying to describe a colour by comparison and metaphor is as futile as the attempt to hum the tune I hear in my head. But I thought everyone knew what was meant by sugar-paper blue.

Sugar-paper – that thickish, stiffish somewhat-grainy-surfaced, mottled faded-navy paper glued or folded into bags for sugar: the next image is my aunt and mother sticky-fingered in the family grocery...

From the roof of her under-reef den a giant Pacific octopus – whose suckered legs are metres long, who changes tone when curious from glowing white to glorious red – hangs a hundred thousand eggs clumped into strands, like clusters of grapes painted on the ceiling of Sennefer’s tomb at Luxor.

‘The rough surface of rock makes the vine-tendrils and fruit more realistic....

There’s a place on the road coming down from the hills where rows of oyster frames unfurl on an indigo sea like a pattern of bamboo fans or blocks of pale embroidery on a geisha’s kimono, whose knees and shoulders press against the border of the wood engraving tight as Alice’s when she started growing.

The high-piled mass of the dead volcano cone is her oiled and twisted...

This jar of rosy-purple jam is labelled Early Rivers, August ’82 – the date I made it, the name the farmer gave those plums, smooth as onyx eggs, but warmer.

The dimpled groove, bloom-dusted, down each fuit pouted at the touch of my knife, yielding the stone I put inside a cotton sock (relict of a worn-out pair – every boiling dyed it darker crimson – from one...