Traps at every turn

Outside in the snow, the For Sale sign looks fresh as the day it was hammered home. No one knows what the house is worth now. No one will buy it, so that's how much it is worth. Nothing. Despite which, we will owe tax based on that 'two and a bit'. For a house that is currently worth whistling for. I can't figure out the fake money from the real. I walk around this magic box, this trap, with its frost-flowered windows, weeping condensation as the morning proceeds. I gather my briefcase from the console table in the hall. I open the same door I have opened since I could reach the latch. And I head out to earn some money.

Anne Enright, The Forgotten Waltz (London: Jonathan Cape, 2011), 148.

The extra mile

There is no other place from which empathy
can begin but in negative space.
And perhaps that's what it means
to go the extra mile,
to get the right amount of distance

between how you started out
and where you arrive. Driving back
from the airport, she started thinking aloud,
wondering if the reason Blake gave Behemoth
such a remarkably human ear was to say:

only we know creation is a brilliant atrocity.
Yes, Job replies, glancing in the wing mirror,
the point being, when we remember this, something'll give -
time, most likely - a torn veil which uneclipses
the heavenly bodies, cures the navel gaze.


From 'The Extra Mile'.

Rachael Boast, Sidereal (London: Picador, 2011), 31.

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