WHERE I LIVE

I live now in a haunted place-without remembered

ghosts—no bitter weeds, no webs of light, no single hair

curled sweetly on the mirror's glass, but one dark room

where books ignore their neighbours in the aluminium

trunk and an evening smelling of wet leaves and complex,

treacherous sewers.

I think I've lost the beauty that filled my throat with its

difficult sadness, its harrowing indifference. Gone bright

doors, gone shafts of never-changing, happy light, gone

freshly-minted dawns, gone February, gone July, gone

cotton carders with their flaming eyes, gone that whole

rich yearning life.

I live now among fight-faced houses coloured like

matchsticks, 21-inch t.v. screens in badly-lit rooms, people

endlessly polishing their bikes, road maps full of rightangled

streets and little squares of jaded green, the

engineering student's alarm clock at five, after which I lie

awake wondering who meagerly measures

out days like these.

But none of this kills the habit of awareness I have that

melts the world into a nectar for the senses more readily

than love devours a face, or grief breathes in and out the

air of absence. I am without a place. I want three seasons

keeping time in the sky and valleys which the evening fills

with its dark blue waters.

I always wanted to be alone. But now

I'll never be the good witch

I was at home: burrowing into diaries

full of love secrets and spite,

always raging but always quiet, bred

in novels, raised on memories

and silence. This is not silence.

Even when the world is still,

even when just dogs and street-lights live,

this is not the silence of the night.