Katherine Gallagher

Dog waits in and out of shadows.

Dog dives around chairs and feet.
...

There was only one war, and it was finishing
any day soon. Ears keyed to the wireless,
we waited. Then the news: Japan bombed,
gigantic clouds curling, skies burnt scarlet —
...

I search her face across a hemisphere,
embark on one more journey:

Will you come?
...

Let the eye investigate blue
and all the arrows focus gravity.

Across the spectrum — cerulean,
...

We have covered him with real flowers
and taken him from country to country.

It’s always the same journey —
...

He had a way of looking at the clock
when he arrived,

while undressing. She never
...

Black paint grits under my nails.
Always death, his death
leaping ahead. My son, eighteen,
how I begged him not to go.
...

Watch the animal eyes that whisk corners
faster than an angel breathing passwords
in a mesh of yellow. Cloud-sure, life flags itself on.
Circle after circle is mapped in the mystery
...

I take my countries as they come,
fall in beside other travellers
lifting their lives like lightweight
suitcases carried under the heart
...

The farm has changed, face-lifted
since we put away the lamps
or hung them up with lanterns, as antiques.
The house is new-veined, lush.
...

Haunting, the way they discovered them —
selves in spiralling night messages —
a web of promises broken, abandoned
under the eye’s disdain: cool words
...

That year you lost your husband
you wore one brave face after another.
Next thing, you kept changing countries.
Making a fresh start, you called it.
...

Already
you have taken the world
by your fingertips
small hands closing on
...

It’s that time, mid-autumn: an oil-base blue sky —
pebbles, rocks, a foothold for seagulls.
Clouds buckle, scoop grey on grey, mirror
...

Be especially polite,
don’t be alone with them, never kiss them,
my grandmother said. It was simple,
they were God’s chosen.
...

That day Uncle Tom was a hero.
Mostly he was unpopular just for
living with us in the old family home —
taking up space, thinking it was his.
...

The coastline
lies in its lace-edge

its rhythms of itself
...

I have swallowed a country,
it sits quietly inside me.
Days go by when I scarcely
realise it is there. . .
...

Polishing my square-toed brogues,
I think about journey, that measure
of breaking out of myself
which never leaves me.
...

Taking
my time to dance
in rhythm with your feet,
I notice that our toes at least
...