Summer Evening

A spear of zinc light wounds stone and water, stripping the scarlet fuchsia bells and yellow buttercups of any discretion, so they confess their end in this luminous declaration that they are no more than shortlived absolutes in living colour, bright eyes open against the dark. A light in which everything is exact-edged, flat, no bulk or heft to it, yet decisively itself in outline: islands, the matte grey sea, and miles away the fine glowing line of the horizon that like desire will be the last to go. The mountain's immense green and brown triangle reflects on itself in lakewater, doubling its shape and colour there, its stillness something drastic, an aspect of dread—as if a lover tried to remember that loved other body by looking in the mirror. Almost at random, shadows fall across the small roads—which can never follow their own bent, but always take the grain of the hill, turning to its every tilt and inclination—and evening starts to seep into hedges and hung washing: it is the brown colour of a bat's wing, and silent as a bat is. Even your own family now would have to be streaked with it, their faces by degrees bleeding away in the gather-dark, whole patches of them blackening like zones of a map thrown on smouldering embers.