Talland House

“I could fill pages remembering one thing after another that

made the summer at St. Ives the best beginning to a life conceivable.”

-Virginia Woolf, Sketches of the Past

The house on the shore of St. Ives

shut itself up when a susurrus of sea mist

relayed the news of her death

whispered from the mouth of the river Ouse.

Now stones have piled up along

the edges of the garden.

The strawberry bed has long rotted,

and all the children have grown and perished.

Each alone.

Nothing is left but the footprints of stolen furniture

and the beams from the Godrevy Lighthouse

peeking through the brass-lined windows

for glimpses of their ghosts.

The waves sent to knock cracks into the front door

reminded the house that it was once filled

with tiny laughter from the cricket ground,

the sighing of books laid on a cleared kitchen table,

the blush on a woman’s cheek when asked for her hand

under the canopy of purple clematis,

and the arrow-like stillness of breezes

rushing through every door left open.

But the maids came

to close the doors and bolt the windows

so the crabs would pile their skeletons

under the shadow of the porch steps

and not within the empty bookcases in the living room.

For so long as Godrevy is searching for ghosts,

the house is reminded

that life cannot stand still there.