← v9n1, Spring 2010
Poetry · Volume 9, Number 1

A Distance

A window, and my mother gazing out

into my father’s distance.

Me beside her.

We are very small.

That’s a gift of a kind: it is

an upstairs window

offering a world beyond—

between the grey of slate, the grey of sea

—the kind of gift that if

unwanted can’t be undelivered.

Leave it in the hall, it stands there

like an open door.