David Harsent

It is deep night, the curtain thrown back, the full moon held 
dead still on the dark side of the mirror.
There are no words for what is happening in the silence. 

It might be that you are sleeping.
Let’s say you are, and in your sleep the dead go through 
hand-in-hand, walking in time 

to a half-remembered heartbeat; they bring a tremor to the air
as if there were birds in the house 
flocking in a room beyond this room. Each of the dead will leave 

a dab of breath on the mirror: dimness
of a passing thought, which might be that your back-to-back sorrows
will carry into midnights such as this.
 

Not because I ask you to, but hold this stone in your mouth:
blue blush, a teardrop-cut… 
It’s late in the day and you are lost to me, standing beneath

a sky empty of any light in a place I will never see. A north
wind comes in, a sudden shift 
under your skin, as it might be a burrowing worm, as it might be a moth

settling on bark to grow invisible. Tongue it against your teeth:
that taste will come back to you
when your mouth is given over, when there’s unrepentant truth

in what you have to hear – must hear – when, in one stopped breath, 
comes the certainty of loss,
being an ache in your finger-bones, being sorrow first and last, a path

that will take you from where you are to the ends of the earth
under a rising moon, wyrt moon.
That blue will soak you then; that blue is a disguise for death. 

(Folklore has it that a moonstone held in the mouth will predict love’s 
outcome.)
 

In the hall of mirrors she is pregnant, wasp-waisted, gone
to a knife-edge profile, come 
to stand beside herself, disfigured, a woman in pain or in love.

A line of light from the door
patterns the glass: kerbstones to draw her on and draw her down
but she steps sideways 

to an eyeline warp and her face folds in a guern, shocked
to silence, the burden of words 
too great to carry in this windowless house, her name 

changing with each new self, 
her shrivelled lipstick-smile drawn out from side to side
when a thing comes in

at the upper edge, gathering in fragments, and you see her reach
for it as she goes to the mirror
her disarticulation piece-by-piece glass-borne and glorious. 
 

Find her in dream, unnatural, feather and fin, eyes the colour 
of sea, colour of sky, her gift to you your own name 
spoken as if you could own it, tide-drift, wind-drift
bringing you to a soundless, sightless vacancy, freefall,
deep-dive, air and water forcing one another as you strike
the edge of night, blind and deaf and lost but still alive.

Stepping out of the shower, water to air, pearled, soft-
-eyed, she is numbed by memory: how her fear
of falling is also a fear of drowning… Your face by hers
in the mirror, too near, too soon—she hasn’t yet
found the full depth of her fall which might
never come if you lay hands on her like that.
 

In the world’s turning there comes a moment of stall,
earth’s apnoea, when the unborn and the new-dead
gather a silence: it is all she knows of Heaven. 

Silence as the knife is taken up, as water 
grows still, as hope turns back, as thought 
shuts down, as a door closes never to be opened.

The perfect lie in its cage of silence, the dropped
heartbeat that marks the wedding-vow, the bird
as it catches rising air (O she is at your shoulder:

half turn, her breasts graze your arm, you see how well
she carries her scar) an echo – your name – emptied
into itself, that nerveless silence which is the silence 

of the mad, a dream narrative broken, a word 
in the mouth of the unearthed skull, a man
in the soundless acres of his leap from the parapet.

‘Find me out in that last moment’ (your whispered prayer)
‘You will never find me penitent, but find me out 
in the deep white silence of my death where I come to nothing…’

At the still centre, her vision holds: of fire 
on the sea, fire at the core, at the end of the ending day, 
silence of a dying star as it folds to whiteness, she waits on this.

Go to the half-open door. Open it.
Nothing. Half-close it. Something returns to the far side, shadow side:
scuttle-scuttle-flop. Silence.

It might be deaf-blind you think, survive on one held breath, live
on whatever is dropped and take
its liquid from the mist on mirrors. Little homunculus escapee. 

It likes half-light and corners, it likes
the butt-end of hallways where sweepings get left, it likes the soft
knock water makes in pipes at night.

Is it there when you sleep? You don’t know. Is it there now? You don’t know. 
There are rooms in the house 
where darkness takes shape. It shares a dreamlife with the unborn.