What the House Taught Us by Anne Bailey
There is a place in a wood,
in the bottom of a drawer,
at the back of a mind.
A disused quarry in which
men cut stone from a hillside,
ground it into slabs, carted it away
leaving a precipice hidden
in the undergrowth:
a sheer drop of eighty feet,
a chasm filled with water
deep as the pit in your stomach,
cold as a last breath,
still as a sightless eye.
Cousin Brenda’s mother,
Arthur’s second wife, was found
bloated and floating there
in nineteen eighty two.
It’s not the sort of thing
you often think about,
not somewhere you would
ever want to go.’
– ‘Mind’s eye’, in What the House Taught Us
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