The Woman Who Could Not Say Goodbye
He’ll come to hear it soon enough, by the door
where a woman can simply put herself out with the milk.
The air there is ivory, cool as a piano key worn
by notions of leaving that didn’t play out. It is not a sole
act, farewell, but a language slow as wood smoke
doving the wall over the hearth. He’ll come to learn
the so longs she laid all around the house. Carved
into couches, an embrace of absence, sags where he can sit
now and observe her slow bow, stowed in the snowdrops
she placed in a vase. So suddenly, the clothes lines
look like unwritten confessions in diaries. The horizon is
a closed ballroom where days of the week refuse to dance.
Angela Readman‘s poems have won the Mslexia Poetry Competition, and The Charles Causley. Her new collection The Book of Tides will be published by Nine Arches in November 2016. She also writes stories.