Tonight you have set out all the keys on the oak table. They lie on the grained and pitted surface, each with its own design, finials of love-knots, triquetras, plain oval loops. You align them carefully, crosswise to the grain, you lay them out as you would lay out the cards for a reading, and you wait. But you find nothing to unlock.<\/p>\n
It is no longer autumn, so yesterday you burned the few dried leaves from the mantelpiece. Some blackened instantly, shrank into themselves, became scraps of ash and then became nothing. But others unfolded in the flames, their ribs and veins glowing like wires, and one, a fireleaf, gleamed like a phoenix and flew, rising out of sight and up towards the black night sky.<\/p>\n
Where is Louise? The pictures on the walls, they are not Louise, and the body in the long mirror, that is not Louise\u2019s body. You remember the time you saw her stand in the gap, the split in the beech\u2019s hollow trunk, and you remember your fear, that the tree would close over. You called to her to come away, and she laughed, of course, she was never afraid \u2013 <\/p>\n
\u2013 No. She is somewhere under a clear cold sky, in a country of endless unchanging light. She is pulling a sledge across miles of snow, skirting the pinewoods. There is no sound, only the steady crunch of her boots on the hard-packed snow, and the rasp of the sledge\u2019s metal runners, this sledge she pulls like a kind of companion. She doesn\u2019t speak, but as you watch her you see that there is a kind of speaking here, a syntax of endless unfolding, of no end-point and no desire, only this walking over snow, this pulling a sledge forever in half-light. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
You slip through the gap in the sandstone wall
\nand turn in among the trees,
\nthe stone-grey columns of beech.<\/p>\n
The sound of your steps is hollow, the path
\ndry and cracked after so little rain.
\nBramble and nettle and falls of ivy<\/p>\n
half screen the space of the field,
\nwhere a few people are walking their dogs,
\nsmall children are chasing a ball.<\/p>\n
You are, or might be, a boy in a hide
\nkeeping watch through the long afternoons,
\nheld tight as a closed fist<\/p>\n
inside the pleasure of not being seen
\n\u2013 but after a while the feeling comes
\nthat something does see you,<\/p>\n
some thin persistent tendril
\ninvolving itself in you, like the bindweed
\nthat twines itself along the hedgerows<\/p>\n
and with a quick convulsive shake of the mind
\nyou get going, telling yourself
\nit\u2019s time anyway you were heading back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Louise Tonight you have set out all the keys on the oak table. They lie on the grained and pitted surface, each with its own design, finials of love-knots, triquetras, plain oval loops. You align them carefully, crosswise to the grain, you lay them out as you would lay out the cards for a reading, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":78,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[379,380],"tags":[388],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\n