Quotes from Alice Oswald

no more than a flash of free-will until the clouds close their options and the whole melancholy air surrenders to pure fear and falls

and I who live in the basement one level down from the world

of the heart saying strange strange it's not as if such fastenings could ever contain the regular yearning wing-beat of my evenings

this is the the sound this is the very floor where Grief and his Wife are living looking up

severed by light from myself not knowing but almost

they lift their faces to the past

6 a.m. scrabbling at the earth

there is such a horrible trapped buzzing wherever we fly it's going to be impossible to think clearly now

breaking out of their mass grave

I heard a cough as if a thief was there outside my sleep a sharp intake of air

just so abrupt and odd the way she went hungrily asking in the heart's thick accent

I always wake like this being watched already forgetting who I am

and then (as if a lock had gone and the Spring had broken loose)

not looking up but lost in pause

what a nervous readiness attached to its lament

and working with the same bewitched slightly off-hand look as the sea

they say the herons used to hang like lamps here giving off gloom

Three people in the snow getting rid of themselves breath by breath

but it is glittering now in the gaps between things

and every six seconds a blackbird

and the hour is quickened by crows

three people in raincoats losing their tracks in the snow walking as far as the edge and back again with the trees exhausted tapping at the sky

and magpies coming straight from a meeting with misfortune

rewinding and grieving rewinding and grieving