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
Cycling the Island
- 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 day was a cold one, wind
whipping up curds in the bay,
choughs black dots blown
from the cliffs like a veil.
Anoraks ballooned, my husband
pregnant, a precarious seahorse
on the hired bicycle; our son
on the pedals, the orange bars
of his trainers flashing,
his green coat, I recall, the same
buff-olive as the sea. I had
laundry to do, lastnight's
washing up, a sweep through
the cottage for sand, fragments
of shell. Next year, I thought,
waving them off, a hotel.
Seems so selfish now, careless,
and careless the word I used
when my husband came back
alone in panic, the wind
behind him. So much care,
to bring a child through his first
nine years, to simply lose
sight of him around a bend in the road.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- A Perfect Mirror , pp. 4Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2018