Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Saving
- Out of this World
- Observatory
- Zentralfriedhof
- How to Remember
- Europe
- What's Gone Blue
- Plain Tongues
- As the Crow Flies the Sun Rips Day Open
- Boy
- The Roof
- Eva Braun in Linz
- Yellow
- My Girl in California
- St Peter
- The Soldiers
- Palace
- Outside Vienna
- Neutral Air
- Woman
- How to Forget
- The Sound
- In Time
- The Lever
- Fourteen Mistakes
- The Fall
- The Hold I Have
- Centre Strange
- Born Breathing
- The Heads
- Home
- Epilogue
- Maker
- Acknowledgements
Home
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Saving
- Out of this World
- Observatory
- Zentralfriedhof
- How to Remember
- Europe
- What's Gone Blue
- Plain Tongues
- As the Crow Flies the Sun Rips Day Open
- Boy
- The Roof
- Eva Braun in Linz
- Yellow
- My Girl in California
- St Peter
- The Soldiers
- Palace
- Outside Vienna
- Neutral Air
- Woman
- How to Forget
- The Sound
- In Time
- The Lever
- Fourteen Mistakes
- The Fall
- The Hold I Have
- Centre Strange
- Born Breathing
- The Heads
- Home
- Epilogue
- Maker
- Acknowledgements
Summary
Hills gasped in bursts. Glass door
takes sun in its mouth, spits it back.
Swings open and slides my reflection
off its surface. While I'm leaving
again these dark hills, their light-string's threaded
through me; I see them
in every skyline. I hear them called
names, spoken in German. I smell
them damp and crushed in my hand.
I hold wrinkled rivers, ocean's fuss,
rumble, hills a string
of balding heads, and
sky's thin slice above – young sky!
It is always the year I leave.
And in 1947 my father is always traveling
with his father from their bombed-out London
life to a pinprick on the map called
Norfolk Island. They are driven from the airport
in the island's only taxi. They get out
and their new kind of England
is empty. My father,
a child, finds a trail of white buttons
like speech bubbles
leading down to shore.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Nowhere Nearer , pp. 47Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2018