Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- The Commute
- Warming
- Walking Home
- Cycling the Island
- The Garden
- Swallow Hole
- Sylvia Plath's House
- Sixteen Acres
- The Trap
- Praise Song
- View of a Badger on the Heights Road
- The Meaning of Birds
- The Ghost of a Flea
- Nest
- Twinned Sonnets
- Counting the Pennies
- Swan Upping
- The Frozen River
- Marsh Lily
- Praise Song
- To a Dandelion
- Moths
- Sestina for Rain
- A Perfect Mirror
- The Unicorn
- Praise Song
- Relics
- Getting Lost
- Woods in Snow
- Moon Walk
- Halfway Back
- New Moon
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
Moths
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- The Commute
- Warming
- Walking Home
- Cycling the Island
- The Garden
- Swallow Hole
- Sylvia Plath's House
- Sixteen Acres
- The Trap
- Praise Song
- View of a Badger on the Heights Road
- The Meaning of Birds
- The Ghost of a Flea
- Nest
- Twinned Sonnets
- Counting the Pennies
- Swan Upping
- The Frozen River
- Marsh Lily
- Praise Song
- To a Dandelion
- Moths
- Sestina for Rain
- A Perfect Mirror
- The Unicorn
- Praise Song
- Relics
- Getting Lost
- Woods in Snow
- Moon Walk
- Halfway Back
- New Moon
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
Summary
The trolley rolls under strip-lights
blazing into one unfolded wing. The nurse
holds my hand;I've asked her to see me through.
I give way to anesthetic on the second count.
I've made my pact. Wake to blinds caustic at the window.
Somehow it is morning, around me
at the foot of the bed, white coats and clipboards.
I have a whole new blood.
I feel it, flushing the old water of my bones.
No one asks what I saw.
The long black rectangle of nothing –
less than, more than that. If you filled a room with tar
and let it set then set it wheeling into space
until it comes to rest,
a solid mass hanging in the emptiness
you'd have it. You cannot fear it.
The hospital faces know: this is life; this is death.
Now the scar is a line pulled tight above my pubis.
It is past midnight, the temperature below zero
when frost makes stones of air,
craquelure of grass. I lean from the window
as owls sing cages for my breath.
More and more these days time folds around me
like a moth settling on glass.
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- Information
- A Perfect Mirror , pp. 29Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2018