“The Time Around Scars:A girl whom I've not spoken toor shared coffee with for several yearswrites of an old scar.On her wrist it sleeps, smooth and white,the size of a leech.I gave it to herbrandishing a new Italian penknife.Look, I said turning,and blood spat onto her shirt.My wife has scars like spread raindropson knees and ankles,she talks of broken greenhouse panesand yet, apart from imagining red feet,(a nymph out of Chagall)I bring little to that scene.We remember the time around scars,they freeze irrelevant emotionsand divide us from present friends.I remember this girl's face,the widening rise of surprise.And would shemoving with lover or husbandconceal or flaunt it,or keep it at her wrista mysterious watch.And this scar I then rememberis a medallion of no emotion.I would meet you nowand I would wish this scarto have been given withall the lovethat never occurred between us. ”

“Her hand touched me at the wrist. "If I gave you my life, you would drop it. Wouldn't you?"I didn't say anything.”

“Nowadays he doesn't think of his wife, though he knows he can turn around and evoke every move of her, describe any aspect of her, the weigh of her wrist on his heart during the night.”

“She lights a match in the dark hall and moves it onto the wick of the candle. Light lifts itself onto her shoulders. She is on her knees. She puts her hands on her thighs and breathes in the smell of the sulphur. She imagines she slap breathes in light.”

“Women want everything of a lover. And too often I would sink below the surface. So armies disappear under sand. And there was her fear of her husband, her belief in her honour, my old desire for self-sufficiency, my disappearances, her suspicions of me, my disbelief that she loved me. The paranoia and claustrophobia of hidden love.”

“If she were a writer she would collect her pencils and notebooks and favourite cat and write in bed. Strangers and lovers would never get past the locked door.”

“She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams.”