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
A Perfect Mirror
- 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
i. grasmere
First night here – spring snow flurries
I sate a long time
hail then rain, the lake
slate-black, blown in cups and wavelets
walked among the stones of the shore
the line of the mountains merging
with the last branch of light from the north
– water-light, scarlet-lit, peachy-gold –
until my heart was easier
and later
over Silver How
a clouded moon.
*
I dream Coleridge's dream –
black-haired woman, wild-faced, waking me
into a moon-flooded room
a very fine moonlight night, the moon shone
is it you, Dorothy?
dream a boat tethered at the water's edge
wash away dirt
to the under-gleam
like herrings in the water
a fish's silver scales
*
next morning on the path to Rydal
a heron fishing, a red squirrel
on the path a blind man
a woman begging
a little girl
now as then the lake
an image of stillness, clear as glass
in the hill's dips and crevices snow like lost silver
pebbles on the road glittered like silver
frostings among the stones of the wall
*
at sunset red lights behind Langdales
these hard times
these hard times
a terrible kind of threatening brightness
ii. migraine
you try and out-walk it, walk all day pushing on, pushing on as if you can outstep the kamikaze men shimmying hand over hand down the fine internal rope ladder of your skull, the rain a percussive te-dum-te-dum on your neck, your scalp, and like a fisherman slowly reeling in his catch hooked in the sole of your foot, drawn through thigh, lumbar, the sparse cobbles of your spine where the cord tightens; you cannot stop it, you cannot; give in and allow the pain dominion of the vessels of your brain, blood swollen with blood, a leech fattening, the fat pulse in your crown where once the plates were soft and open; if only they would un-fuse now and let the creature out, the dirty brown water run
iii. loughrigg
I sit against the moss-legged hawthorn
and watch the vale unfold
a painted cloth
I lay upon the steep
sun on the lake a blanket
of crushed diamonds, the water
spotted with sparkles
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- Information
- A Perfect Mirror , pp. 32 - 40Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2018