Читать книгу Match - Helen Guri - Страница 5

Light gallops in, signalling the start of the apocalypse.

Soon it’s beard to beard with itself like white bison,

as thick on the floorboards as the train of a woollen dress.

For one spooled second everything glows,

then the world starts tipping from its crate.

My mother, who knew in her wicker-backed certainty

that the wedding would be a disaster,

now stands balanced on one ear in the impossible gravity

and is vindicated, backwards: the disaster is a wedding –

the foundation cleaves, cat’s cradle, to an aisle

as the ground unravels.

There I go down the centre to the white

and everyone else after.

In times like these, which cannot even be called dark,

Uncle Charlie makes the best of things.

He serves up saints roasted with onions

from his backyard convection oven,

whose helicoid heat plays songbirds on loop.

The bridesmaids have all watched too many zombie movies,

shriek in chorus, hike their dresses to wade

across the newly liquid river of the atmosphere.

Even the silver lining is blinding.