Susan Wicks

Each morning as I round the bend, the same shock – that flash of river light, the bridge, the cooling towers – always that first sight gasp as if they’ve been dropped there –

Yet the landscape knows them: a fragment of old stone moves sideways, and through a tangle of red the river glitters, the bridge spins out its turquoise cobweb and there they stand like a...

At first they come singly, outriders clinging to a thorn, a blade in my path, or hovering inches from my cheek, and then they’re faster, thicker, a dark whiplash, a moving cylinder of dark; the whole sky is black. There’s no way round. I hide my hands, tighten my small circle of hood, and go on walking, my eyes sealed shut – an effigy carved in green wood –...

A useless art, yet half the world has mastered it.

Small plants to occupy the foreground, a pine-needle fence.

Bracken uncurls to a thin tree; a salient overlooks the world.

She must resist the urge to place a stone like a ruin, big as her fist.

Seedheads, a line of sorrel poplars, where a lake of mirror shines

in its still place at the centre – the phoney water she can fill with her face.

They stand here in a shocked silence, these grouped bodies in cold dresses, their eyes downcast; the hands quietly gesture from this flaking grotto of wishes.

But something flares in a corner – gladioli, tongues spurting into darkness: someone has been here before us.

Is it food these people are asking or their freedom? We wrench the heavy door open on a flat world, an ordinary...

                   The open window admits her body. Soapy water still circles the shape of her rough finger, the steam from the runner beans displaces her only slightly. I fill my lungs with her, turn, expel her gently into sunlight. The grass under the apple-tree pushes up into her. A creeping wasp...