Island Cottage, November
Those nights, our lantern oil reflected
the only star of our lantern light
as we lent shadows to the walls
of our rented house. Once, I walked
into our bedroom and found her
unpleating her hair. That night it snowed.
Now I retell the evenings, plain
and spare, as though a parable
of things come right. Reasoning
a moral in the soot-fall of snow,
our exhaustible form of light,
those borrowed rooms we’d made our own.
© 2011
Salt Publishing Limited