For The Sake Of Comparison

All weathers have this mist down off the moors, the heights coming to us with their thin ghosts and long-dead poets, but still the summer comes through it. Late June and again we wake up to rain on the window and threads of cold air under the door. Outside, the wind is throwing the trees about, dragging their branches like desperate survivors of grass-bound shipwreck until the edge of the moor is strewn with the black and brittle twigs and braches shed in a seemingly intelligent effort to avoid the battle. There is the wall she posed on in a most impractical manner, balancing her typewriter in an uncharacteristic bout of pretension, a desire to be like the other women writers who lived round here, possibly in living memory, but probably not. Like one of their ghosts she sometimes comes back to tap on the windows, and whisper strange, surreal questions in at us. Suffer profound bonds of love, the drawing of disparate and repelling things together and you will live forever, mad and bad but honest in everyone’s eyes.

And now the rain has gone, pushed away by weather from the sea, cold, clear air from abroad or from another planet, currents of air from Grand Central, where she once wept for two poor creatures, dead at the hands of men but not in revenge for any killing. Who’s bombs did they steal?