an open field

sunset over the sea I remember when my mother ran faster than me Blithe Spirit Volume 20 No.3

moonlight the shadow of a tree masks the crack in the path It is 3am on Florida’s Atlantic coast. Already 9am in France. My body says it’s time to start the day yet the darkness outside says, ‘middle of the night, go back to bed’. Recently there has been too much impatience between us. Kinks and ruts in the road we cannot avoid or fill, that see us blaming each other. Even the smallest roads since we arrived: filling in our immigration forms, a luggage trolley, the small trunk in the rental car. Things in their right place at the right time. This is what I try to do too often. Like pinning butterflies to boards. The clock is too loud. It keeps time too stringently and that is what we need to be away from: days marked by so many jobs to be done, what must be completed in the hours between waking and falling asleep. Then I hear it. A background hum, a soft engine shifting gears. A sound present at the moment I was born: the sea. high tide in a dream you write the word ‘reef’ ...

18” by 16”, felt tip pen on coloured paper by Ffion, age 4 There is a red house with orange windows and a pink door. There is a black cat whose feet have slipped off the bottom of the page. There is a tree sprouting flowers, petals pushing against the paper’s edge, a lavender sky with a sun and a crescent moon. And floating above the roof of the house, two stick people, holding hands, unwilling to come down to earth and decide whether the sun is about to set, or if the moon will make way for dawn, or whether the cat is trying to escape or climb into the picture and run towards a door that could be closed, or might be on the point of opening. all the times I have been wrong fresh paint First published in Frogpond vol 33:3, Fall 2010