Helen Kitson
A house in the hills
Her voice spools out the details of death by cancer.
"A dirty way to die," she says, struggling to breathe.
I picture Kate as she used to be,
shuffling around the room in carpet slippers.
I'm in her house.
It sits whitely among the heather,
the gorse, the black-faced sheep.
I could kill for that house, I told her, once.
She smiled a sisterly smile.
I hear muffled kicking at the white door
under a black Welsh sky.
My resolve hardens.
A slapped face stares at me and I tell it to get back.
In the air I smell the sweetness of decay.
Her illness - Kate - what happened
to those romantic deaths we read about?
Catherine Earnshaw; the bright eyes of the tubercular.
Keep away, with your rattle, with your claws -
let me take clean air into my sturdy lungs -
let me go; I have to reach the clean, white door.
Page(s) 23
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