Gaudete Read Online Free

agitates, richly, monotonously, around the cool drawn features of Mrs Westlake, the high china cheekbone, the dark mouth. A tentacle of her cigarette smoke touches his nostril, and hangs, in the lit woodland.
    He fastens himself to her, as if to a magnification, fading from himself, like a motionless lizard.
    One, two, three cigarettes. In the bird-ringing peace. 

Pauline Hagen
    Has turned back from the drive gate.
    A leaf-bordered blankness
    Like the suck of a precipice
    Draws her along the bleak sweep of drive
    Towards the white house.
    Her legs move, as if to remain still were even more futile.
    She looks upward
    Into the open hanging underbellies of the trees
    As if those puzzles held something from her.
    As she walks
    She feels too present, too tall, too vivid.
    The level sprawl of world
    Draws away tinily, in every direction.
    It separates itself from her exposure.
    She looks down
    At the chaotic gravel.
    Her eyes claw at the gravel.
    Something in her is preparing a scream, which she dare
                                                                          not utter.
    Her legs carry her towards the house.
    Twitchings jerk her eyelid, her cheek,
    A tugging tightens her brow, so she has to rub her face in
                                                                        her hands.
    Something overpowering
    Like an unmanageable horse, a sudden wild bulk
    Starts rearing and wheeling away, to one side then to the
                                                                               other
    As if it would break out of her.
    She halts, balancing giddily.
    She has closed her eyes
    Where Lumb is still with her
    His presence strays all over her body, like a flame on oil,
    His after-nearness, the after-caress of his voice
    As if she breathed inside the silk of his nearness.

    At the drive’s edge, she kneels among bluebells.
    She shuts her eyes more tightly.
    The bunching beast-cry inside her shudders to be let out.
    She folds her arms tightly
    Over this rending,
    She bends low, her face closes more tightly.
    Her moan barely reaches the nearest tree.
    She is gouging the leaf-mould,
    She is anointing her face with it.
    She wants to rub her whole body with it.
    She is wringing the bunched stems of squeaking spermy
                                                                            bluebells
    And anointing her face.
    Lumb’s glance keeps glimpsing through her body
    Churning tracks of soft phosphorescence
    Like the first sweaty wafts of a sickness.
    She wants to press her face into the soil, into the moist
                                                                             mould,
    And scream straight downward, into earth-stone darkness.
    She cannot get far enough down, or near enough.
    She hauls herself to her feet, towering
    And walks
    And enters the still house.
    Rooms retreat.
    A march of right angles. Barren perspectives
    Cluttered with artefacts, in a cold shine.
    Icebergs of taste, spacing and repose.
    The rooms circle her slowly, like a malevolence.
    She feels weirdly oppressed.
    She remembers
    A shadow-cleft redstone desert
    At evening.
    The carpet’s edge. The parquet.

    The door-knob’s cut glass.
    She observes these with new fear.
    The kitchen’s magenta tiles. The blue Aga.
    It is her fifteen years of marriage
    Watching her, strange-faced, like a jury.
    Coffee from silver, to disarm some minutes.
    Leaning against the bar of the stove
    She meditates blankly,
    Fixedly.
    She is like the eye of a spirit level
    Intent
    On earth’s poles, the sun’s pull, the moon’s imbalance.
    A charioteer, for these moments,
    On some rocking perimeter.
    Major Hagen