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Anne-Marie Fyfe

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Landing

Nighthawks witness his tread on the dead step
seeking her warmth, his body cold as stone
off the night-boat. He’ll raise the latch,
call her quietly down cobwebs,
an octave lower, feel the house’s longing
in the heavy hang of the gate,
in the weed-shot paving,
in the front-alcove piano, sheeted from years
of missing Sundays.
                         And still in a scrapbook,
ordered decades of Telegraph clippings
of the lost-at-sea. Lives printed in water.
Comfort in numbers, she’d thought. He catches -
silence;
the fragility of cinders cooling in the grate;
a foghorn off the point;
a lightship’s occasional glare.
                                      A stone’s-throw away
in a hardening plot she misses the accent
of a coming foot* on the bare landing.

 

*from Emily Dickinson’s “Elysium is as far to” (number 1760)

Anne-Marie Fyfe runs Coffee-House Poetry at The Troubadour in Earls Court and teaches in London. Her second collection, Tickets from a Blank Window, is due from Rockingham Press at the end of the year.

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