Poetry

The Watcher

By Wendy Mooney

Ill-prepared for winter, there is a howl in me.
The kind of howl heard on a frosty night when
foxes with coats the colour of fallen leaves
roam the streets:

for the light fading rapidly on the horizon;
the curtained windows; the terrible endlessness
of the sky.

And behind it lies a door I did not open but yet
came through: ghost of former self crossed over –
all walled in now between the walls of silence,
of god knows what keeps me here,
in this dark space where I’m letting it all tick away:
this time, it’s too much.

And yet something sees again in me as
I mend the rent in that old cotton dress of mine
and in the tasselled pillow – the one on which
I perched in summer. The position
I found myself in:

cross-legged, breathing deeply, and sense of
light flowing in at navel, and being raised up,
essentially, to unimaginable coloured fields –
blue and yellow – and all the impossible
that could ever be: dandelion clocks blurring out
a view of  lakeside houses; drone of bees.

A howl, but the residue of colour.
And all the impossible that could ever be.
Something sees in me: how much
further if what sees in me keeps watching?

Where is my horizon?