Eyewear is glad to feature a poem from Sue Guiney's new collection of poems, Her Life Collected. It will be reviewed here in the near future.
Born and raised in New York, Guiney has lived in London for twenty years where she writes and teaches fiction, poetry and plays. Her work has appeared in literary journals on both sides of the Atlantic.
Her first novel, Tangled Roots, was published in May ‘08. Her second, A Clash of Innocents, was chosen to be the first publication of the new imprint Ward Wood Publishing and was published in September, 2010.
Guiney is Artistic Director of the theatre arts charity which she founded in 2005 called CurvingRoad.
Vanishing Point
Like an old Hitchcock movie,
like an exercise in art history,
the line of long floorboards draws her eye.
At the end of the dining room, a window
is filled with trees. The restaurant is empty
and she is alone –
old enough not to be afraid,
old enough to know what to fear.
She’s already on dessert, a bottle of wine half drunk,
when two couples arrive. The women are pregnant;
they order sparkling water.
Their husbands are confident. They drink whiskey.
Looking at them makes her sad.
Their laughter is magnetic.
There was a time when she knew so much,
before the trickle of years drained out confidence
and she learned things she never wished to learn:
what you can count on, all that you can’t.
She stares as she asks for the bill.
Echoes of memories –
how to breathe, how to push –
carry her past their table to her home:
one graying woman walking
down a country road beyond
the trees, into the night,
vanishing.
poem reprinted with permission of the author
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